A year ago Congress had to be talked out of doubling the amount of wealth required for individuals to invest in start-up companies. Now the lawmakers are considering the idea of removing basically all qualifications so that crowds of small investors might provide capital for entrepreneurial ventures.

What has stirred support among lawmakers and others for using the Internet and social media for crowd-fund investing is the challenge faced by many start-up companies to find funding in this struggling economy and the promise of the jobs such companies could create.

It was angel-investor groups who convinced Congress of the potential disaster for start-up companies in a provision that, for a time, was included in the so-called Dodd-Frank bill passed last year. The provision would have doubled the assets required for an investor to be "qualified."

It wasn't that difficult to make the obvious case to lawmakers to kill that section before a vote on the Dodd-Frank bill, since most lawmakers hadn't even been aware it was in the bill.

Now angel-group leaders are raising an alarm about the implications of the crowd-funding idea. But they may face a greater challenge because of the arguments of supporters, which include not just key lawmakers but the Obama Administration as well.

The proposal, which has already had a hearing in the House, is to allow exemption from SEC registration requirements for those trying to raise up to $5 million. As with a similar effort to tone down requirements for small public companies, the goal is to find new job-creation engines.

A high-visibility proponent of crowd-fund investing is an evangelical entrepreneur named Sherwood Neise of Miami, who told a Congressional subcommittee a couple of weeks ago that crowd funding could bring in as much as $500 million and lead to creation of 1.5 million new jobs over the next five years.

"What we are proposing is a jobs initiative that everyone should like since small businesses and entrepreneurs are the long-term engines of our economy," Neise said. "However, they need capital to grow and that has dried up since the 2008 financial meltdown."

Comments like that resonate with many, including the Obama Administration.

But not everyone likes his plan, specifically leaders of angel-investor groups, a number of whom I traded e-mails with to seek their thoughts. Angels have traditionally been the sources of capital for entrepreneur and start-up companies that need funding beyond what's called the "friends and family" initial source of money.

Bill Payne, viewed by many as the dean of angel investors, says "I find Neise's claims laughable," offering statistics that could cause pause if they reach the same ears as those who heard Neise's pitch.

Payne noted that Kauffman Foundation statistics suggest that about $100 billion from all sources, angels and VCs and friends and family, flows into start-up companies and they create 3 million new jobs a year.

"That computes to $33,333 per job," Payne said. "Now along comes Mr. Neise claiming that his idea would create jobs for $333 each. Are you kidding me?"

Payne, who has been an angel investor in a number of startups in the Northwest and elsewhere, added: "It's very simple from where I sit: I am not in favor of any investment vehicle that allows unaccredited investors to fund startup companies.  It is very high risk and the invested dollars are totally illiquid." 

Tom Simpson, who guided one of the Northwest's most successful venture-capital firms and now oversees a couple of angel-investor groups in Spokane, said it's important for "faster, cheaper and easier processes to attract investors to both young private and public companies."

But he said "any new regulations or processes to reduce the time and cost of raising money still need to provide prospective investors with sufficient product, market and management information, comprehensive financial data and specific risk factors to make an educated, informed investment decision."

Villette Nolon, chair of the Seattle-based women-angel group Seraphs and founder of the internet-based business Homesavvi.com, says that "while the intent of this idea is good, the outcomes would be disastrous."

"Legitimate businesses who would try this route would be extremely disappointed in the result, as truly sophisticated investors are highly unlikely to fund companies sight unseen, even at low amounts," she said. "That leaves only speculators who would be attracted by the idea of making a quick buck, and who could get very, very burned."

Gary Ritner, founder and heads the Seattle-based Puget Sound Venture Club, says the $10,000 proposed as maximum investment by a crowd-source investor "is too small" and the $5 million proposed maximum for the entrepreneurial startup "is too large, and not necessary."

But he added "we have to get capital flowing and, in concept, I like the idea of crowd funding."

Perhaps the major concern shared by angel investors and others is that a backlash could occur down the road if Congress hears of abuses and horror stories and decides crowd funding was a bad idea and things need to be made tighter to protect investors.

The concern is summed up by one who noted that "when the pendulum swings back, lawmakers always have it swing too far."

The 80-acre vineyard and winery in the Yakima Valley where Patrick J. (Pat) Dineen focuses an increasing amount of his attention isn't an entrepreneurial encore for the retired bank executive so much as it's a return to his roots on the farm.

Dineen, who hasn't totally stepped aside from his 40-year banking career since he chairs the board of Bellevue-based Puget Sound Bank and is one of its original investors, grew up on a dairy farm in the Midwest. "I knew that when I retired I wanted to get back into farming," he says, admitting that the dirt called to him from time to time over the years.

This is harvest time in Wine Country and thus Dineen is spending many of his days this month at Dineen Vineyards, which sits on a hillside north of  Zillah, amid a cluster of Washington State's well-known wineries, with an impressive view looking west toward the mountains.

It's there that Dineen Vineyard's grapes, primarily cabernet, cabernet franc and sirah, are being harvested and winemakers from many of the 23 wineries that are his customers arrive to load up their grapes.

Dineen only produces about 300 cases a year for his own use, either under the Dineen Vineyards label or the Kamiakin label, a second label featuring a red blend, that came into being about five years ago. Most of the 190 tons of grapes are bought  by the other wineries.

One of those wineries buying his grapes is Sheridan Vineyards, in which Dineen invested in 2000 after being introduced to Sheridan's founder, Scott Greer. He soon ran across a rundown apple orchard nearby that he bought in 2002 and turned into Dineen Vineyards. TheSheridan winery is built on part of Dineen's acreage and is leased back to Greer.

The vineyards primarily produce the three major varietals, but a total of eight different varietals are grown, though Dineen is quick to make it clear that "the viticulture is my interest in growing the grapes rather than making the wine."

His ongoing process of learning about the grapes includes traveling to Europe each year to visit different grape-growing regions and says with satisfaction that "I get into prestigious wineries that I wouldn't be able to if I didn't have the winery."

Like a number of those involved with vineyards or wineries in Washington State, Dineen first looked for land in the Napa Valley in California, but found "it was more pricey than I wanted to get into."

Dineen produced his first wine under the Dineen Vineyards label in 2003, primarily for personal consumption, but about four years ago he got his commercial bond to permit him to market and sell his wine.

"That was primarily to promote the vineyard," he said. "My plan is not to get any bigger since I'm retired. We could get bigger but chances are we won't."

Dineen, discussing his decision to be in the group who put up money to launch Puget Sound Bank in 2005, says "I had a good career in banking, made good money, and wasn't looking to get back into the business. But I figured I could do this with a minimal amount of time and effort. It hasn't turned out that way."

Dineen says Puget Sound Bank, a $200 million, single-office bank, "has a strong balance sheet. We didn't get into problems because we avoided real estate and focused on commercial and industrialized loans."

Dineen started his banking career with Seafirst Bank after moving West following graduation from Marquette University and five years in the Air Force. He then joined Spokane-based Old National Bank, which was acquired by U.S. Bank, where Dineen eventually served as president for Washington before he retired.

Looking ahead at the industry, Dineen said "we're going to see a lot of branch closures in an era when people can do their banking from anywhere. They could care less today if your bank has a branch on the busiest corner in town."

He notes "there aren't many healthy banks changing hands these days because banks looking to sell find that their book value is pretty much what they're being offered today."

"A few years ago, selling prices for banks would have been twice book value or even better for an attractive bank," he added. "Until we get back there somehow, you're not going to see much movement among healthy banks."

The tax breaks for high-tech companies that are now seen by some as depriving the state of millions of dollars at a time of dire budgetary challenges were a proud accomplishment of his administration, says former Gov. Mike Lowry, noting they were created to lure new business to Washington.

 "We were coming out of what was, at that time, the state's worst recession and we needed to attract industries that would produce good-paying jobs," Lowry recalled of the proposal he came up with and pressed through the 1994 Legislature.

The focus of the current criticism, and Lowry's comments during a recent interview, are what the critics refer to as "tax loopholes" and he calls "incentives" that have permitted high-tech companies to avoid paying state sales tax on new facilities, including equipment.

"We were absolutely correct to come up with policies to lure companies to the state that would create high-paying jobs that were basically the jobs of the future," Lowry said.

"We kept encountering companies that said they had looked at and then rejected this state as a place for new facilities," Lowry recalled. "The incentives allowed us to move into one of the most competitive positions among states."

One of the state's key competitors in the hunt for new high-teach companies was neighboring Oregon, which had and has no sales tax, and that put this state at a dramatic disadvantage.

Soon after enactment of the sales-tax exemption legislation, Washington State won a major victory when Taiwan Semiconductor announced it would be locating in Clark County rather than in Oregon. "The largest one-time capital investment ever in this state," Lowry said. Other wins were a Sharp Electronics facility and an Intel plant in southern Pierce County

A $132 million tax break for Microsoft, due primarily to its construction of data centers in Quincy in Grant Country, has raised some eyebrows among those viewing the state's list of the dollar impact of such tax preferences.

While he is convinced about the importance to the state of having created the sales-tax exemptions, he is equally convinced that they need to be reviewed periodically to ensure they are doing what was intended.

"Those tax breaks shouldn't just continue automatically," Lowry said. "Each piece of tax-incentive legislation needs to be looked at individually from time to time for possible sunset (termination). Each must be justified on the basis of expansion of jobs."

In fact, in the intervening period since Lowry's program in 1994, sales tax exemptions, and exemptions from the state's business & occupation tax have proliferated and been extended to logical industries like aerospace manufacturing, biotech and medical-device manufacturers.

Other also logical exemptions are for manufacturing in rural counties and manufacturers of timber and wood products, though some of the exemptions may cause more head-scratching, like fruit and vegetable processors, dairy and seafood processors and cold-storage warehouses.

The State Department of Revenue's most recent figures on the tax exemptions, for 2009, indicate 278,000 jobs were credited to the tax incentives, which cost the state $236 million, $109 million of which was claimed by high-tech firms while $80 million in reduced state and local tax receipts was for rural manufacturers.

Mike Fitzgerald, who was a key member of Lowry's team as director of Community, Trade and Economic Development and who has held held similar positions in three other states and may  be one of the nation's most experienced economic-development experts, reserves special praise for Lowry. Fitzgerald credits Lowry with really understanding the way the game had to be played to bring jobs to the state.

"He would bring his entire cabinet together and tell us that we were not to violate any environmental considerations, but otherwise we each had a role to play in working together to go after these companies," Fitzgerald recalled in a visit about a year ago. "Under Lowry, we recruited or were in competition for more big business than maybe under any other governor."

Washington State's life-sciences sector has remained, through the economic downturn, a jewel in the state's economic development crown. But the challenge of accessing capital that bedevils the industry's emerging companies, including the possible demise of the Life Sciences Discovery Fund, could hinder future growth.

The role biotech and biomedical companies have come to occupy as one of Washington's five largest and fastest-growing sectors, generating tens of thousands of high-wage jobs and more than $10.5 billion in economic activity, creates an important anchor for the state's economic future.

But as the Washington Biotech & Biomedical Association (WBBA) prepares for its annual meeting next week, in partnership with The Governor's Life Sciences Summit, there's an ongoing focus on seeking to ensure that emerging companies in the industry find the growth capital they need. And that could be increasingly challenging.

"With 70 percent of our companies having 50 or fewer employees, access to capital is the greatest challenge we face," said Chris Rivera, WBBA president.

An important part of that funding has been the Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF), the program created by tobacco-settlement dollars that came into existence in 2008 and has been championed by Gov. Chris Gregoire as a key to fostering more biotech innovations and jobs in Washington.

But it has taken deep cuts each session as legislators grappled with yawning state budget deficits, and now could face elimination.

Rep. Glenn Anderson, the Eastside Republican who is one of four legislative trustees for the fund, says "it's an open question whether the fund will survive" the next session's budget cuts.

"The fund has done a good job of encouraging basic science and marketable, actionable, investable outcomes," Anderson said. "But I'd say there's only a 50-50 chance it will survive and if it doesn't survive, I think that would be shortsighted."

Rivera puts numbers on the fund's successes to provide definition to shortsightedness.

"LSDF awardees have been able to leverage their grants and bring in $9 for every $1 awarded," he said. "These are real dollars from out of state.  This has led directly to job creation, and great innovation in our state.

"I believe that LSDF has proven to be a smart investment by our state into a sector of great current economic value and future potential," he added. "Other states have poured hundreds of millions into life sciences, as they see the potential economic value of this sector and are willing to invest strategically."

Beyond the fund, WBBA has mounted some initiatives, as have supporting organizations, in seeking to develop alternative sources of capital, given both the now-challenged traditional lending sources and the problems facing the venture capital industry.

Bruce Jackson, vice president for business development at EnterpriseSeattle and ex-officio member of WBBA's board, says that despite the success of the biotech and medical-device sector, these are "clouded times" for young companies seeking to ramp up.

"In addition to the fact federal regulations can create a headwind for companies, access to capital for some deserving companies can be difficult," Jackson said.

EnterpriseSeattle's year-old partnership with the City of Federal Way in a medical-device incubator called Cascadia MedTech Association is an innovative approach to helping grow the industry, though Jackson concedes "the model hasn't been proven yet."

"The companies we're supporting must transition from being supported by grants to creating cashflow," Jackson added.

WBBA itself touts the program it created called VIP Forums, through which quality investors and strategic partners (VIP's) are invited to Seattle for a showcase of the most promising life science companies and research opportunities.

In addition, in spring of 2009 the association formed a non-profit angel network called WINGS, whose role is to close the early-stage funding gap to speed medical-technology innovation "from lab bench to patients."

The gathering of industry leaders and others for whom the industry is part of the economic hope for the future will likely hear an upbeat assessment as they review the WBBA's third annual Life Sciences Economic Impact at their gathering on November 18 at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue.

Comments from the governor, who will be attending her last WBBA annual conference, and University of Washington President Michael Young, attending his first, are likely to focus on upbeat prospects for the sector's future. But both may also share concerns about the impact of funding availability on that bright future.

And a comment from Rivera during an interview this week could set the stage for some discussion among attendees: "I understand and know that these are difficult times, but I hope that our state leaders are strategic in where they place our precious resources, and help this state maintain its competitiveness nationally and globally."

Sixty disadvantaged kids and their personal elves board  Alaska Airlines' flight 1225, dubbed  "Santa One," Dec. 10 at Spokane International Airport for a Fantasy Flight to "the North Pole" on the 737 900 and a visit with Santa. It's an event that could be described as the place where the real magic dust of Christmas has been scattered, because this special trip is unique in the world.

The children, between the ages of 4 and 10, are selected from programs for homeless and underprivileged kids in the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, ID, areas for this once-in-a-lifetime fantasy adventure to Santa's home.

A number of other airlines, including United and Continental, have been doing the North Pole "flights" in various cities, some for nearly 20 years. But Alaska is the only airline to actually take the kids aloft for their magical trip, in which they pull the window shades down as the flight nears its conclusion, say the magic words that allow them to land at the North Pole, and land at other side of Spokane International Airport.

It's there that they're greeted by Santa and Mrs. Clause and an additional host of elves.

"When we send out invitations to the kids, we have them give us a wish list of what they want for Christmas," explains "Bernie" the Head Elf, better known as

Steve Paul, president and CEO of Northwest North Pole Adventures, the nonprofit group that runs the event.

 "We take those lists and buy each of them a toy from that list. So as each child tells Santa what he or she wants, Santa can reach into his bag and pull that present out for them," adds Paul "The looks on their faces as he hands it to them is priceless."

To ensure that the selection is actually reaching the most deserving children, Paul's non-profit works only with the area's social agencies, which use their selection and screening processes to pull the children who desperately need to create positive Christmas holiday memories.

The children are picked up at the Spokane YWCA in the early afternoon and driven to the airport, where each child is given a "passport" to the North Pole and a personal "elf" catering to every need, including a backpack filled with school supplies. Then they board the plane, designated Flight 1225.

The flight has priority status with the FAA once it's loaded and ready to fly and "Santa One" comes up on the screen. Then the flight's own personal air traffic controller takes over, Paul said.  "It becomes just like Air Force One in that respect."

Paul is an out-of-work tech exec who has made the project his special commitment. As a result of his efforts, what he describes as "the 150 percent support of the community" and the Alaska involvement, the adventure for the Spokane children is brought closer to reality than in any other place.

He spends a number of months in preparation for the big day, lining up donations and contributions that this year amount to $150,000 of cash and in-kind, helping get the kids selected and arranging for the elves and gifts for the kids.

Brad Tilton, Alaska Airlines president who will be on hand with his wife for the event, says "the Fantasy Flight is an unforgettable experience for everyone involved. It's a

true delight for the children, who don't get to enjoy Christmas like most of us do and who, in many cases, have never had the chance to fly. And our employees,

who eagerly volunteer every year, get far more back than the time they put in."

Alaska and Horizon will have more than four dozen employees participating, from various locations on the airlines' systems. Some will be elves. Others will forego days off to work shifts for local Horizon employees so they can be elves.

This has been an amazingly off-the-radar-screen event, both during the eight years that United put the kids on a plane that taxied around the airport, and in the four years since Alaska Airlines came to the rescue of the event when United couldn't free up a plane with Alaska proceeding to turn it into a real airborne flight.

But that low visibility is changing as the list of kids registered and waiting has grown to almost 250 and media organizations have started to become aware of this special Christmas Season story. And there are some in the Alaska Airlines organization who understand the one-of-a-kind goodwill that this event represents, particularly because neither the company nor the employees has done this for the sake of visibility.

Horizon's Spokane customer service manager David Burris admits the visibility has been low key over the years, partly because broader visibility would only bring pressure to make the event bigger.

Is there an opportunity for other cities to follow suit with a special North Pole event?  Alaska officials suggest it would be difficult for the airline to take another plane and crew out of regular service during the heavy-travel holiday time. And Paul acknowledges that while he could provide the know-how to another community, he wouldn't have time to actually do another event over the Christmas season.

"A lot of people have said we should take this on the road," Paul notes. "I could do that if I could get people to define their non-profit or if our organization were to expand. But this is not some casual party. A lot of planning and time is involved."

Paul adds that he is having a movie done "that will in the future characterize the experience. We have a couple of elves who were parents of foster children involved in earlier flights who said the kids were so transformed by the experience that they had to get involved."

How real is this trip to the kids? As one elf put it: "If you're a little kid on your first plane ride and your ticket says North Pole, and the shades are drawn, and everyone, including the flight attendants and all the elves are saying the magic words, then who's to doubt that you have landed at the real North Pole? And then you see Santa."

Stuart Anderson, successful cattle rancher, restaurateur, author, television personality and entrepreneur, is finding that a comeback at the age of 89 is turning out to be more challenging than he had expected. It's not because of age so much as it is the economy and changes in the restaurant business.

The man who built Stuart Anderson's Black Angus from a single location near downtown Seattle in 1964 into a chain of 110 steakhouse restaurants across 19 states before selling the chain in the late 1980s was lured out of retirement by a shuttered Black Angus in Rancho Mirage, CA.

The appeal of reopening and rebranding a restaurant that he had originally opened in 1980 when his California expansion of Black Angus/Cattle Company restaurants was in full swing proved too much of a temptation, despite the protestations of his wife, Helen, who recalls saying: "Over my dead body."

"It was tough to see that restaurant go away, along with a crew we had come to know," Anderson says of his reaction when he learned in early 2009 that the restaurant he and his wife frequented had closed

"We thought we could help the economy by creating some jobs there," Anderson says. "And I thought Helen and I had the experience needed to reopen the restaurant."

But he concedes it has been more difficult than they had anticipated, originally convinced that "with my 60 years of experience, I felt we could overcome all the difficulties posed by this economy. But it's amazing how much you forget at the age of 89."

Helen, who has been Anderson's partner and spouse for almost 40 years and describes his comeback from a stroke three years ago as "miraculous," admits "we knew it would be costly, but it has been more of a financial drain than we thought it would be."

Anderson says "the restaurant business is more competitive and demanding than it used to be, with government regulations and additional costs we were unfamiliar with. It has been challenging," he admitted.

Many of those rooting for him to succeed again will be those from his home state. Not just Seattle, where the chain was headquartered as one of the most respected in America,  but also Spokane, where Black Angus number three became the most successful in the chain, and Ellensburg where his 2,400-acre ranch sprawled along Interstate 90. It was the ranch with its black angus herd, as well as the signature mustache and cowboy hat, that  made him the icon of cowboy country.

Over the course of nearly a quarter century, Anderson created a restaurant company with 10,000 employees and annual revenue of $260 million.

Shortly before Anderson's retirement in the late '80s with the sale of the company, industry publication Restaurants & Institutions, in a national survey, judged his chain the nation's best full-service restaurants three years out of four. And USA Today judged the chain best in the nation in the category of casual dinner.

He tried his hand as an author when he produced Here's the Beef! My Story of Beef, a book he describes as "fun and informative" that sold thousands of copies in the Black Angus restaurants. The book was a follow on to the highly popular McDonald's commercial in which an elderly lady asks: "Where's the Beef?"

And his stint as a television personality was as spokesperson for Seattle's Senior Housing Assistance Group's low-income senior housing developments.

Part of Anderson's concern for the amount of time and effort he and Helen are having to invest in their restaurateur entrepreneurial encore is that she doesn't have as much time as she'd like for her commitment to Umbrella Ministries. The Palm Springs-based national 501c3 is focused on helping mothers who have lost children.

The two spend "three or four nights a week" greeting customers and making the rounds of the restaurant, Anderson says. 

"I've seen tough times before and some of my restaurants didn't make it," says Anderson, noting the failures included the Tacoma restaurant that opened following Seattle.  

While noting his conviction that "the general economy has to change around here" and "there are too many restaurants," Anderson insists he and Helen will make Stuart's Steakhouse a success.

Helen McGovern, who three years ago put asidea career as elected official and prominent real estate executive to become the head of a non-profit engaged in fighting hunger in Pierce County, chuckles at the idea that a third career as Harlequin Heroine might await her.

While it may not actually turn into a "career" with the publishing house best known for its pervasive romance novels, McGovern and her role as what Harlequin describes as "making a positive difference in the lives of others" will be the inspiration for an ebook fictional short story.

McGovern received word a few days ago that she was one of three women voted winners in an online and Facebook competition to determine recipients of Harlequin's "More Than Words" award.

Seems that Harlequin, as one of the world's leading publishers of books for women, turns out more than romance novels. And the Toronto-based publishing house has as an aspect of its social corporate responsibility an annual award aimed at "celebrating the lives of women who make a positive difference in the lives of others."

McGovern, a woman from Ohio and another from Toronto were voted winners by Harlequin readers, 111,000 participating online and 7,800 via Facebook, and each will receive $15,000 for their cause and be "the inspiration for three fictional short stories," according to Harlequin. It was the first time in the eight years of the event that readers, rather than staff members, did the selecting.

The short stories on the three, written by Harlequin authors who are donating their time to talk with the women and gain inspiration to create stories based on their experiences and contributions, will be available in 2013 in ebook format and can be downloaded then at no cost.

As a Harlequin spokeswoman explained, when I called her in Toronto, the contest and awards "are to publicize to the women who read our books the causes of women worthy of being publicized."

Forsaking the corporate world and elective office for the dramatically more modest trappings as executive director of Pierce County's Emergency Food Network was a move McGovern had long anticipated as a focus on "a more purposeful life" when she made the move in April of 2009.

As a result of a column I did on her a year ago, McGovern was invited to speak before Seattle Rotary, which she did last week. And leading into her comments about guiding the nonprofit that distributes 1.3 million pounds of food each year to Pierce County food banks, she disclosed, with a chuckle, that she had received the Harlequin honor

But the jokes about being a romance-novel heroine, which is possible but not really the likely outcome of the short story she'll have written, didn't change the fact of this being an important recognition, following one a year ago with a Second Half Champions award.

That's was statewide award presented each year by Wells Fargo Advisors, along with ArtsFund and Seattle Community Colleges, to individuals who have "completely repurposed the second half of their lives to make significant contributions" after the age of 50.

It was after finishing her "most financially successful year ever" at Colliers and with her decision not to seek re-election after eight years on the Lakewood city council, including two years as deputy mayor there, that she decided the time had come for her move to a non-profit career.

So she learned of the opening at Emergency Food Network, set up a meeting with the board, and when she was asked if there was anything she would like them to know about her, she calls saying: "Yes. This was meant to be. I was meant to have this job."

Social Venture Partners (SVP), the Seattle-based organization that describes itself as the world's largest network of engaged philanthropists, approaches its 15th anniversary with a couple of major initiatives about to unfold. One will extend the organization's international footprint and the other will enhance its impact nationally. 

First is an expansion into India next fall and second is creation of a "mezzanine fund" that will offer more philanthropic cooperation among member cities, allowing them to function much the way angel investors do in syndicating deals. Beneficiaries of that fund will be philanthropic organizations "with great models" who will be able to expand their reach into multiple cities.

Paul Shoemaker, who has guided SVP since 1998 when founder Paul Brainard convinced him to leave his position at Microsoft as group manager for worldwide operations to become SVP's first president, says the organization is coming off its best year for new members since its expansion year of 2000.

Shoemaker, now referred to on his business card and SVP website simply as Executive Connector, might suggest that the initiatives to be undertaken this year could expand the numbers dramatically.

The move into India, which will launch in Bangalore later this year, is driven both by the fact that "there are some basic forms of philanthropy there already" as well as by the large number of citizens from India who are drawn to the high-tech companies located in the Seattle area. Many could be attracted to SVP membership by the India initiative.

"There are so many connections between India and Seattle," Shoemaker observed. "And we're confident we've found the leaders there to make us confident of success, even if SVP will look different than it does here.

"It will undoubtedly be a different monetary level for members," he said, "and the social system in India is different but we'll bring the same core principles."

With respect to SVP's creation of its mezzanine fund, it will operate somewhat like syndication so that SVP cities into which a non-profit would expand will participate in the financial and personal support for that non-profit.

"What we are creating is a fund from cities across the system evaluating the strongest local grantees that have the interest and the best opportunity to expand into multiple cities," says Shoemaker. He explained it as "helping nonprofits with great models replicate and reach next level funding opportunities."

"They might now be operating in one or two cities and want to grow into three or five cities," he said.

The applicants for support from the mezzanine fund are currently being evaluated and those selected as grantees for the new program will be announced in the next month or so, Shoemaker said.

Shoemaker, who was named last August as one of the "Top 50 Most Influential People in the Non-Profit Sector" by The NonProfit Times, recalls that expansion into other cities helped spur the initial growth to what is now about 2,100 members around the country, plus Canada and Japan.

It was in 2000 that SVP, then only beginning to expand beyond Seattle, had its first surge of young partners. Many of them were successful techies, answering Brainard's and Shoemaker's call to get involved in a new model for philanthropic focus on creating a better non-profit sector.

Each agreed to donate $5,000 a year to SVP and become personally involved with one or more non-profits. The amount is now $6,000 a year.

The first cities into which SVP expanded were Phoenix, Vancouver and Dallas. Since then, the organization has expanded only into cities that sought to become SVP locations, but that is another thing that's changing this year.

"Up to this point we've been reactive, waiting until someone from a community contacted us to express interest in forming a group," Shoemaker said. "Now we're actively pursuing cities where we should be represented and most likely locations this year, in addition to Bangalore, are Austin and Raleigh/Durham."

There are currently 25 venture-partner cities in which SVP operates in the U.S., Canada and Japan. As of last January, the SVP network had contributed nearly $41 million in grant investments to 500 nonprofit organizations and provided tens of thousands of volunteer hours in service and counsel.

One of the more interesting developments in the evolution of SVP is the number of partners forsaking the private sector and stepping into leadership roles in the social and public sectors. In a large sense they are following the model established by founder and desktop publishing creator Paul Brainard and Shoemaker himself.

They include:

-- Lisa Chin, a former Amazon executive who stepped out of the private sector to become the first executive director of Year Up Seattle - helping urban young adults reach their full professional potential.

--Tim Schottman, who two years ago left behind a 17-year career guiding Starbucks international development to become chief global officer at Sightlife, building a network of eye banks to support corneal transplants with the lofty goal of eliminating blindness for 10 million people in the developing world.

--Peter Bladin, formerly of Microsoft, who headed up Grameen Foundation's technology Center for 10 years.

Shoemaker says "this is definitely a trend we are fostering, hopefully leading it, because it is significant for bringing people with key organization-building skills from the private sector into the non-profit world."

Diane Karle is out to prove that, despite the seeming unbreakable bond between beer promotion and sports events, wine and sports have become the most likely - and profitable -- pairing. She's already made a believer of one National Football League team, and is in negotiations with four others.

The conviction about wine and sports led her to launch Wine by Design LLC, aiming to guide profits for not just NFL teams and other pro sports franchises but also for college sports activities from tailgate parties to alumni gatherings.

Karle's belief that she can promote "wine as lifestyle" for clients, keying off of sports and entertainment events, guided her to relocate from her New York-based practice in sports and entertainment marketing to California wine country.

Making wine a key to brand development for clients is the goal of the four-year-old company that she launched in California after being immersed in the sports and entertainment marketing business in New York for 15 years. She was vice president for business development at-sports-and-entertainment giant IMG World, leaving in 2003 to start her own sports and entertainment marketing business, before the move to Napa.

Karle concedes that her expertise is in marketing and events, not wine. But as she comes to understand wine and what she describes as "an industry fragmented unlike others," she has grasped that working with wine means working not just with the industry in California, but also Oregon and Washington.

Thus Northwest wineries stand to become beneficiaries as she seeks to develop new brand relationships among sports teams, winemakers and corporations.

She admits to "fits and starts" when she first opened her business before getting traction in 2010 by signing the New York Jets, opening a wine bar at the team's MetLife stadium, doing pre-game tasting and creating the team's own label.

Ironically, part of the process of her creating the name, packaging and design of what  became" Jets Uncorked" was having the team's executives come to Napa to go through a tasting process with various winemakers before selecting Marco DiGuilio to produce the limited release.

 "The decision to use the tasting visits in our hunt for the best Napa cabernet was the outgrowth of a wine choice based on Jets' fan research, the first time something like that had been done," she adds. 

I asked Karle if it was possible to measure the success of her project with Jets Uncorked and she pointed to the fact that the team sold 5,000 cases of their wine the first year. Plus that relationship led her to meetings at the Super Bowl and negotiations with four other NFL teams, which she logically declines to name.

"We're seeing a lot of teams want to be more into wine and want to have their own brand," she adds. "Wine inevitably has to come, and not just to the NFL. Teams are about generating revenue and our goal is to be the bridge to help wineries learn how to leverage that association.

"When you go to an Oakland Raiders' game, you see the fans all painted up but they're drinking chardonnay," Karle says. "People having a little wine and cheese isn't how you might have thought of socializing at a Raiders game."

She calls her company "the first lifestyle marketing agency to create business opportunities and brand loyalty through the world of wine."

When I asked Karle to explain "lifestyle marketing" and its importance to the bottomline success of companies, she replied: "Lifestyle is what people get involved in when they are not working. And Coca Cola is the ultimate example of how its importance is viewed by successful companies, since 80 percent of their marketing budget is tied to lifestyle commitments."

"WBD," she adds, "applies the same successful marketing principles and practices used for years in sports, entertainment, music and other lifestyle categories."

But now she's looking to move her firm beyond merely being hired by teams "for retainers and commissions," and instead transitioning into buying the sponsorship rights at various stadiums, a step for which she'll need an infusion of capital.

"We need the money to buy the rights," she says. "I know what the rights are worth. If  we can raise $4 million, we can get 10 venues lined up to build our own wine-tasting rooms, do signature wines and build sponsor relations as well. We are making money now, but we need the investment to grow."

Meanwhile, her company remains focused on its main business areas of sponsorship development, licensing deals and event consulting. And it's expanding the role of wine in existing relationships.

"We will continue to introduce a variety of wine-tasting options to suite holders, sponsors and fans and those introductions will absolutely include wines from Oregon and Washington," she said.

John Stanton and Mikal Thomsen were in their late 20s when they teamed up at McCaw Cellular to become part of the birthing of a fledgling communications technology whose growth globally they helped guide through several major companies over the next 20 years, becoming iconic figures in the wireless industry.

Now just into their 60s, both have parlayed their business success into owning and guiding professional baseball teams, what they might well agree is a passion that rivals their business focus.

A business focus remains, however, as they continue to manage their Bellevue-based wireless venture and investment firm, Trilogy Equity Partners, formed by a collection of long-time wireless partners after the sale of their Western Wireless to Alltel Corp. in 2005.

Thomsen once told me that the opportunity six years ago to create the ownership team that bought the Tacoma Rainiers was like his “dream come true.” He would be owning his hometown team that he had grown up rooting for from the time his dad took him to his first game at age three. That was the year that the then-Tacoma Giants returned after a 55-year absence.

Stanton, who will soon assume the role of CEO of the Seattle Mariners after the ownership group he leads completes its purchase of the team from Nintendo of America, also recalls attending the games of his hometown team with his father. That was in 1969 when, as a teenager he became a fan of the Seattle Pilots in their first and only year of existence and recalls crying when they left town for Milwaukee.

Thomsen would undoubtedly echo Stanton’s “I am first and foremost a baseball fan” comment  that he made to the media gathering at Safeco Field when he was introduced as the leader of a 17 member local group that would become 90 percent owner of the team and he become the CEO, once Major League Baseball owners bless the deal.

Thomsen and his wife, Lynn, and Stanton and his wife, Terry Gillespie, are all alums of McCaw Cellular in the ‘80s and are now on the team of co-owners of the Tacoma Rainiers, though the oversight of the franchise, including attending many games and spending about 10 hours a week in the office during the season, falls to Thomsen.

The owners are fortunate that the baseball team acquisition included Aaron Artman as club president, a former Microsoft executive who oversaw the $30 million renovation of Cheney Stadium and remained with the new owners in the role of president.

Stanton’s and Thomsen’s baseball involvement extends across the state and all the way down to the West Coast League, an amateur collegiate summer league, where they are among owners of both the Walla Sweets and the Yakima Valley Pippins.

But it was when Thomsen had the opportunity to put together the purchase of the Tacoma Rainiers in 2011 that he turned to Stanton and his wife, an avid baseball fan herself, to become part of the ownership group.

Thomsen has immersed himself in his hometown baseball team and has enthusiastically committed to its increasing success, despite being the smallest market in far-flung Pacific Coast League and being the closest Triple-A team to a major league city.

In fact, the Seattle Mariners and the Rainiers are not only geographically close, which Thomsen admits may sometimes cost the Rainiers attendance of fans heading for Seattle, but close in that the Rainiers are the Mariners’ triple-A farm team.

As Thomsen puts it: “Most of the Rainiers fans are Mariners fans who enjoy keeping up with both teams and hearing about the players they saw in Tacoma performing with the major league club. I think the nearness of the M’s cuts both ways.”

In addition, the relationship is good for the Rainiers’ bottomline since the Tacoma roster is determined by and players’ salaries paid by the Mariners.

A lot of the changes brought about since Thomson’s group bought the team relate to community things, but he is pleased about what has happened in the stands and on the field.

At this point, atop PCL pack, the Rainiers seem headed for their first playoff appearance since Thomsen’s group bought the team, though Thomsen cautions that “it’s a long way from certain. We are only three games up on Fresno.” Plus the team appear on the way to another franchise attendance record, though beating the 352,000 attendance mark of last season is well behind the nearly 680,000 of the Sacramento River Cats.

In addition, Thomsen notes that the decision by the ownership group three years ago to build a new set of stands in left field “has been a stunning success,” adding that he celebrated his 60^th birthday there in early May this year “with a couple hundred friends.”

He says the change of the team’s logo two years ago to “the now somewhat iconic ‘R’” has helped drive merchandise sales “through the roof.”

In terms of community involvement, he says the Rainiers “teamed this past off season with Tacoma Parks, the Cheney Foundation and Mary Bridge Hospital to add a playground behind the right field berm that includes a whiffle ball stadium,

“It is packed for most games and open as a public park when games are not going on in the stadium,” he adds.

“The community views this as a partnership and we go out of our way to be great partners,” Thomsen says with obvious pride.

Alaska Airlines’ goal of winning friends and influencing people in the Bay Area, whose hometown airline is about to be absorbed by the Seattle-based carrier, began in earnest Tuesday night in San Francisco as Alaska executives and board members hosted a gathering for local leaders.

Some 250 business, political and community leaders were on hand at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco for an event whose theme was “Flying Better Together.” The goal of the gathering of Bay Area who’s who was for them to meet and begin to get to know the leadership of the airline that is buying Virgin America, the Richard Branson-founded carrier that began service as San Francisco’s hometown low-cost airline nine years ago this month.

During that nearly a decade of service, Virgin built what many in the Bay Area have described as “almost a cult following,”with many regular flyers enthusing that they “love Virgin.”

Aware of that challenge, Alaska CEO Brad Tilden and his executive team have sought to express sensitivity to the cultural issues and the initial backlash from Virgin fans. That awareness was pointed up a few weeks ago when Tilden told the Wings Club, a group of aviation professionals in New York, that he was thinking of running the Alaska and Virgin as separate airlines within Alaska Air Group.

Such an outcome may or may not still be a possibility, but when I asked Joseph Sprague, Alaska senior vice president, after the Tuesday event, about Virgin continuing to function as a third carrier, he said: “ Initially it will be a third airline but by 2018 it will be merged into Alaska.”

But Alaska leadership is playing up a cultural fit they see existing between Alaska and Virgin, rather than addressing the different styles.

Sprague said “a lot of the integration pre-planning work has revealed an encouraging number of similarities from which we can build.” 

He noted that Tilden, in his comments to the group Tuesday, pointed out three such similarities: “both have an obsessive focus on the customer, we both want companies that are employee-driven and we both have a strong leaning towards innovation around the customer experience.”

Alaska’s San Francisco community gathering came exactly s week after shareholders of Virgin America approved the acquisition by Alaska Air Group, with Virgin’s chairman announcing the voting results at a brief shareholders meeting on July 26.

That Virgin shareholder approval was the next-to-last major hurdle for the takeover, with the remaining step being U.S. Justice Department approval. Closing by October is expected for the $4 billion deal ($2.6 billion in cash and the rest in assumed debt and other costs) that Alaska had to put together to beat out Jet Blue.

It’s quite possible that the shadow of Delta Airlines’ seeming predator pursuit of Alaska that left key Alaska supporters concerned Delta was seeking to force a takeover played a role in Alaska’s decision to acquire Virgin America for a very large premium.

But in addition to likely ending concern about Delta coveting a takeover, Alaska also gets Virgin’s lucrative California routes as well as keeping Jet Blue, the losing suitor in the Virgin bidding contest, from acquiring the routes.

In fact, it’s perhaps amusing to consider the community response if Delta, after a hostile takeover of Alaska, held a reach-out event with the theme “get to know us.” They’d have faced a ferociously hostile audience in Seattle.

But obviously Alaska, which has been successfully serving the Bay Area from three airport for years, isn’t perceived as a bad guy, more just a carrier that locals don’t know a lot about other than it has an excellent record in all the areas airlines get rated.

In fact, as Phyllis Campbell, Alaska board member and Pacific Northwest chairman of JP Morgan Chase, put it after the event: ‘I think it is emblematic of Alaska Airlines to reach out to the community in a spirit of collaboration and collegiality. Having dinners like this send the message that we want to be the best airline going forward for the Region and also the best citizen in terms of community partnership.”

In fact, the event was apparently successful enough from Alaska’s perspective that Sprague said “we will likely do additional events, both of our own and sponsoring others.”

Still there are Virgin supporters whose love affair with the airline was partly due to the fact it was the Bay Area’s hometown airline. And the takeover will mean not just the end of Virgin’s “hometown” ties, but also that California will no longer have an airline based in a state that has served as home to a variety of important carriers over the years.

As Mary Huss, publisher of Puget Sound Business Times, summed up when I asked her about it: “I think people were very proud that Virgin chose to locate and start up here when it did.”

But while Jet Blue lost the bidding to Alaska, it is seeking to woo Virgin fans away before Alaska can convert them by looking for ways to exploit what it senses as uncertainty of flyers about the transition. It has been touting giveaway deals to potential frequent users of Jet Blue’s longhaul service from New York to San Francisco and Los Angeles, including its tongue-in-cheek wooing of Jet Blue “virgins,” those who haven’t previously tried Jet Blue.

Stephen Vella, a congenial Brit who spent his career building airlines before turning his attention to creating flying mansions for the global elite, is the man whose Kestrel Aviation Management oversaw creation of the first VIP interior on a 787-8 Dreamliner.

The first VVIP outfitted BBJ, as its officially referred to, has gotten global visibility for those who partnered with Vella’s company, which had turnkey responsibility for the project from purchase of the plane to planning and design of the special interior to meet the requirements of the Asian client who will operate the aircraft. The partners included Greenpoint Technologies of Kirkland and Pierrejean Design Studio of Paris.

The specially outfitted Dreamliner is back in Moses Lake, where the work to install the unique interior was done, as it awaits final signoff by the FAA and final closing of the sale to an undisclosed owner.

“Undisclosed owner” is the usual description of individuals, countries or companies who decide they wish to own a castle in the sky and contract with Vella and Kestrel to manage the purchase, design and delivery of the aircraft. Nohl Martin, Vella’s vice president for business development and communications, says outfitting the special interiors can cost as much as the airplane itself with the finished product, once the widebody is aloft, sometimes described by buyers as airborne oases of peace.

But these are oases that are reserved for the elite, both in stature and resources, and the fact they seek out Vella has made him a valued relationship for Boeing, but also for Airbus, since the contract for design and implementation of one of these widebody interiors begins with the purchase of the plane itself.

I had an opportunity recently to interview Vella while he his partner Martin, a longtime friend of mine, were on a visit to Kirkland, where she has family.

The Dreamliner, representing the first conversion of a composite and nearly all-electric aircraft to incorporate a high-end cabin and thus requiring virtually the entire focus of the Kestrel team for the past two years, is the 11^th widebody conversion that Vella’s team has managed from purchase through entry into service. The company has also done 10 narrowbody VVIP cabin conversions.

But as communications vice president Martin points out: “Sadly it is a sector that rarely allows us to publicize our work -- until this 787 project.”

Visibility was not a problem for Vella when he was turning around airlines, particularly the nearly 15 years he spent helping turn Qatar Airways from a struggling, five-plane regional airline into one of the handful of the world’s Five Star airlines.

When Akbar Al Baker, Qatar’s group chief executive, was tapped by the Qatar government in  1997 to take over the failing airline, he contracted with Vella, who functioned for the next 15 years as basically the airline’s COO, doing the long-term planning, fleet management, overseeing brand development as well as mergers and acquisitions.

By early this decade, Qatar Airways was operating 150 planes with another 200 on order, producing billions of dollars in sales for Boeing, but also for Airbus since the fleet, Vella estimates, is about half from each manufacturer.

Vella, 62, is a native of Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula, and he explains that, despite being a citizen of the United Kingdom, Spanish is his first language.

His upbringing in Gibraltar and his fluency in Spanish, along with a healthy dose of self confidence, allowed him to build his reputation in the airline-turnaround business early.

He recalls that he was still in college when he took time off to visit with an official the prime minister back in Gibraltar and convinced him to grant Vella a Masters scholarship in return for assisting the City architect in redesigning the airport terminal.

After graduation, he approached executives of British Caledonia and pitched that the fact he was bilingual would allow him to launch the airline’s Latin America routes.

He recalled with a chuckle that the pitch allowed him to land a job at a time when there were no jobs to be had and while he worked for peanuts, he was able to see the world.

By his early 30s he had become general manager of British Caledonia’s fleet management division, but at that point left to start his aviation consulting firm and early on helped Richard Branson acquire his first 747.

Vella has turned around eight airlines, including Qatar and the Spanish airline Air Nostrum, a Iberia affiliate, which is now the largest regional carrier in Europe, and started several airplane leasing companies, including one for Rupert Murdoch.

I asked Vella to give me a sense of what he thinks the future holds for the industry and he offered a couple of predictions. One, Asia is a fertile field for new airlines to come into existence. And he suggests that in this county we’ll see consolidation bring the industry down to four large airlines. He declined to name those he thinks will compose the final field of four.

If a company deserve to be judged by the leader it keeps and leaders by the companies they build, then Alaska Air Group and its chairman and CEO Bill Ayer should be judged well.

Ayer, 57, who steered the company for the past decade through an increasingly successful flight while for the rest of the "legacy" airlines the 10 years proved an image-scaring and scary ride, has announced that he is officially turning over the CEO reins to Alaska president Brad Tilden.

Ayer, who has spent more than 30 years in the industry since launching his own little start-up airline in his mid-20s, offered some reflections this week on his career from entrepreneur through leadership of the nation's seventh largest airline. And those reflections by its leader, shared in an e-mail exchange of questions and answers, indicate why Alaska has remained a favorite of investors, its customers and its communities.

Two of Ayer's convictions are that you learn from, rather than make fun of, your competitors and that a small-company feel makes it easier for employees to work together and be open to change, no matter how big the company.

The former is perhaps best exemplified by an email exchange we had several years ago after Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary suggested his lowest-cost Irish airline (frequently also referred to as the cheapest airline) might consider charging for use of airborne restrooms.

I suggested to Ayer that it might be time to revive the amusing television ads from years ago that showed the travails of a passenger who needs a 25-cent fee for entry to his plane's restroom and proceeds to try to obtain the quarter for an increasingly high price from passengers on the plane.

"You never want to make fun of competitors' actions because you never know what steps you might be required to take yourself," he e-mailed back.

I asked him this week about that exchange and his reluctance to criticize competitors.

"Sometimes what seems like a lousy idea from a competitor turns out to be pretty

Smart," he replied. "If we have a 'we're better than you' attitude, we won't take the time to evaluate it.

"Our focus has been on controlling what we can control and not simply hoping that something bad happens to a competitor to improve our situation," Ayer added. "We were surprised at how controllable our business was once we started to really focus on what we could do differently."

The fact that Ayer was an entrepreneur, then executive of a fast-growing start-up airline before joining Alaska in 1995 as vice president of marketing and planning has undoubtedly guided his belief in the need to retain a small-company feel.

He was in his mid-20s, a regional manager for Piper Aircraft Co., when he launched Air Olympia, a small commuter serving several Washington cities that operated for two years.

He jokes that "we didn't go broke, but probably would have if we had stuck with it."

Instead, he was lured to close up his little carrier and join the late Milt Kuolt and his team at the fledgling Horizon in 1982, the relationship that eventually led to Ayer's role atop the parent company of both airlines. Alaska acquired Horizon in 1987, along with Ayer.

Bruce McCaw, a Kuolt confidante and one of his key advisors, recalls that "Milt was quite impressed with Ayer, even though he was very young at the time. He knew Bill was smart and had a lot of good ideas."

"I liked Bill from the moment we met and we worked well together," McCaw recalled.

Ayer remembers Air Olympia as "a great place to start, although it felt like a leap into the

deep end of the pool. That experience convinced me that I had a passion for

this business which I should pursue."

He recalls the days with Horizon as "difficult. We were always worried about having enough cash to make payroll. But (it) shaped our conservative approach."

The shaping of that financially conservative approach undoubtedly helped guide Ayer's decisions as he steered Alaska basically unscathed through a decade of airline-industry turbulence that saw all of its legacy competitors go through bankruptcy.

So now Ayer turns the reins over to Tilden, expressing the conviction that "a CEO can overstay his or her welcome" and "there should be different leaders for different times."

He and the Alaska board, which Ayer says he's had involved over the past couple of years in the planning of the transition to Tilden, view him as "exactly the right leader to take us to the next level." The skills that Ayer and others see in Tilden may indicate that a company is also judged by the leadership-successor it picks.

John Torrance, whose vision for a retractable-roof stadium in Seattle led to the eventual construction of Safeco Field, has come up with a detailed plan for construction of a new arena and convention center on the Seattle waterfront.

Torrance, a senior vice president for CBRE, the commercial real estate giant, has guided creation of a plan that would turn 88 acres of Port of Seattle's Terminal 46 into a convention center and an arena, with provisions for a new cruiseship terminal and waterfront park.  The arena could house the NBA and NHL teams that Seattle covets and the convention center would be designed to catapult Seattle up the list of convention cities.

Torrance is unveiling his idea as an advisory panel prepares to deliver a report to Seattle City Council and King County Council on a plan by Chris Hansen, San Francisco hedge-fund manager and former Seattleite, to build an arena on property he has acquired south of Safeco Field.

And it also comes in the wake of word last week that the port is suffering a major loss of business to Port of Tacoma in July when three shipping lines, representing 20 percent of Port of Seattle business, relocate south.

Torrance suggests that the shift of major port business may help make the case that development rather than maritime represents the Seattle waterfront activity of the future. He hasn't yet discussed that with port officials or commissioners, on whom pressures to maintain the maritime focus come from longshoremen who would face the loss of jobs and traditionalists who wish to retain the working-waterfront character.

While Torrance's plan may seem like an eleventh-hour idea given the discussions of recent weeks about the proposal Hansen recently unveiled and has been vetting,  it's actually something he began investigating about two years ago, he says. And he's worked with architects and planners to put together detailed drawings in recent months.

He's already had early discussions with city and county officials and port representatives

and hopes to make contact with Hansen as well to outline the plan and seek to gather support.

"The Seattle area has twin needs to help ensure its long-term economic vitality. One is an arena that has the capacity to attract NBA and NHL franchises and the other is a convention center with the capacity to boost Seattle into major-league convention ranks," Torrance offered.

"Hansen deserves credit for coming up with a possible plan to address the arena issue but what we're hoping to do is address both arena and convention center on a potentially world-class site, without any risk of taxpayer obligation.

Ironically, the plan details he will be unveiling for the first time late this month before Seattle's 101 Club comes as the city prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World's Fair whose U.S. Pavilion became the arena that his father intended would be the venue to lure an NHL franchise.

His father, the late Torchy Torrance, knew the NHL required a 15,000-seat arena for any hoped-for franchise, and thought the new arena that would be left after Century 21 concluded would meet that requirement. But to the horror of the senior Torrance and NHL proponents, the completed facility seated 12,200.

It was the younger Torrance, a longtime leader in the commercial real estate industry, who first proposed a retractable-roof stadium for Seattle in the early '90s after visiting Toronto and conferring with officials there about that city's Skydome.

I remember when he first mentioned to me back in 1993 the idea of the retractable-roof stadium to replace the enclosed Kingdome, I was among those who muttered a quiet "good luck."

But Torrance is a dreamer with follow through and influence. He soon came up with the name "StarDome" for the retractable-roof concept and that helped provide a vision and thus momentum, and believers. Those included owners of the Seattle Mariners, who by the mid-90s realized the Kingdome would not be sufficient as a baseball facility into the future and began pressing elected officials for the new stadium..

Torrance's Terminal 46 plan may catch the interest of Seattle and King County elected officials edgy about any assurances from Hansen of taxpayer safeguards into the future. The one certainty for those public officials is that taxpayers in the county have made it clear they don't want to pay for an arena or a convention center so elected officials know not to go there.

While Torrance's idea for the project and in-depth discussions in Vancouver, Boston and San Diego were at his own initiative, he would undoubtedly have the resources of CBRE, a national player that is the largest commercial real estate firm in the state, to support his efforts.

"We hope we'd attract financing and CBE has access to a lot of clients who could wind up involved in a program to develop the site," Torrance adds.

Development that could create thousands of jobs and bring in millions of dollars in tourism revenue, plus open the door to two major league sports franchises, rather than continued maritime use of the pier, should be a preferred option, Torrance says.

While the idea for the project and in-depth discussions in Vancouver, Boston and San Diego were at his own initiative, Torrance would undoubtedly have the resources of CBRE, a national player that is the largest commercial real estate firm in the state, to support his efforts.

"We hope we'd attract financing and CBE has access to a lot of clients who could wind up involved in a program to develop the site," Torrance adds.

He says he's seeking to have conversations with Hansen, who has already invested in the site he's proposing for an arena, in the hope of "moving him over to the site we're proposing, since our development idea would add enough value to the property he's buying to allow him to recover his investment."

Torrance estimates that the port could generate up to $25 million annually from leasing activity and hotel developments, based on what's generated for the Port of San Diego. "That's about 10 times what the container business generates," he says.

As his original retractable-roof idea and the stadium that came about saved major league baseball for Seattle, his newest concept patterned after developments in Vancouver, San Diego and Boston could turn out to be the most workable plan for new hockey and basketball franchises. And along with that a dramatic new major convention facility.

When the Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame was created 25 years ago to recognize business leaders from the past who had contributed to the economic growth of the region, some quietly expressed concern that the event might soon run out of past leaders to honor.

A quarter century on, as Junior Achievement of Washington and Puget Sound Business Journal prepare to induct four new laureates into the Hall of Fame, it's become clear that the region had no shortage of business leaders to celebrate.

In fact, while the event retains the name "Puget Sound," it has grown in the past couple of years to include Eastern Washington business leaders among those eligible for selection.

Thus at a time when the quest for heroes in business is perhaps more important than it has ever been, the number of business leaders chosen over the years to be honored at this unique annual event passes 100 Thursday evening when the following four laureates are inducted:

 Jim Douglas, who created Northgate as the nation's first shopping center designed as a mall, helped launch Seafair as part of the celebration of Seattle's 100th anniversary and and became the "pitchman" for the vision that became the Space Needle, symbol of Century 21.

Edie Hilliard, A radio pioneer as one of the first female general managers of a major market station, who then built one of the nation's largest independent radio networks.

Budd Gould, founder and principal owner, and still president, of Anthony's Restaurants, who brought the essence of waterfront dining to communities from Bellingham to Spokane and Richland to Bend.

William Ruckelshaus, perhaps the nation's leading environmental figure of the past half century. who served two presidents as administrator of the EPA and also fashioned a career in the private sector as CEO of Browning Ferris Industries and senior vice president of Weyerhaeuser Co. He now is strategic director at Madrona Venture Group.

It was the late Jack Ehrig, Seattle ad-agency head and a key supporter of Junior Achievement, who in 1986 approached me, as publisher of PSBJ, about creating a local event that would parallel the national Business Hall of Fame event for which FORTUNE Magazine was the partner of JA.

FORTUNE chose the laureates for JA to honor in those years, producing a special insert in the magazine to introduce them to its readers and JA honored the national laureates at a prestigious annual banquet that cities competed for because it attracted some of the biggest names in business nationally.

In a similar manner, laureate selection became the role for PSBJ and JA produced the first banquet to honor those selected in 1987.

FORTUNE's rule was that honorees had to be retired from day-to-day involvement with the companies where they had built their reputations. That sounded to me like a good way to ensure there wouldn't be any lobbying on behalf of a currently active CEO so that became our rule as well. That also has changed a few years ago with the induction of Eastside business leader and developer Kemper Freeman, still very much active in his business.

From the outset, I populated the selection committee with people who were not only business icons in their own right, but also understood far more about business history than I did. Thus each annual selection gathering became a lesson in local business lore.

And it was the insight of those members of the selection committee, including from the outset longtime community and business leader Jim Ellis, who personally knew more than half a century worth of the prospects, that brought forward well-known and not-so-well-known names from the past.

Because of the prominence of JA Seattle in the national organization, particularly because we had built what many viewed as the best local hall of fame program in JA, it became logical for the Seattle JA leadership to seek to have the national event in Seattle.

That finally occurred in 1992, which happened to be the year that Steve Jobs, then between jobs since he had been edged out of Apple a few years earlier, was a laureate. But Jobs, with typical unpredictability, apparently decided he didn't care to head up to Seattle from Silicon Valley for the event and the word spread the day of the banquet that he wouldn't be there.

But by late afternoon, to the relief of all, it was learned that Jobs had changed his mind and would, in fact, be on hand to accept his award. Only a few insiders were aware that FORTUNE publisher Jim Hayes, a high-visibility figure at the national banquet, had telephone Jobs to advise him that if he failed to show up, his name would never again appear in the magazine.

The business leaders of JA Washington in 2008, led by longtime venture capital executive Woody Howse and wine-industry leader Michael Towers, began building a case for the return of the national event to Seattle.

But it soon became clear, as the Great Recession got its grip on the nation's financial throat, that the world had changed. National gatherings of business leaders for something like a Hall of Fame banquet, and the significant corporate financial support necessary to carry it off, soon seemed unrealistic. None has been held since then.

But the JA Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame remains a viable and important reminder each year of the role successful business leaders can play in representing role models for the business leaders of today and the young people of JA who will be the business leaders of tomorrow.

John Ellis, who was a reluctant CEO looking forward to retirement when he was called on 20 years ago to help find local owners to save the Seattle Mariners' franchise, admits that he wasn't even a baseball fan when he undertook the almost-lost cause of saving baseball for Seattle      

              __________________  

        Then-Gov. Mike Lowry recalls  

        legislative solution to fund what

               became Safeco Field 

                         (See sidebar below)  

               ___________________ 

"I didn't know much about baseball and wasn't really a baseball guy," Ellis admits, reflecting back on the events of late '91, early 1992. And he didn't really understand how deeply

embroiled he would become when he undertook the role that Seattle Mayor Norm Rice, and subsequently other business leaders, urged on him, a role in which he soon found how challenging saving the franchise would be.

 "I'm not sure if, to this day, anyone really knows how close we were to losing this franchise," says Ellis, who eventually served as chief executive officer of the Seattle Mariners and remains, 13 years after retirement, the team's primary representative to major league baseball.

It's a tale that deserves to be retold at a time when, rather than preparing a celebratory anniversary event for the Mariners to applaud what was achieved two decades ago, community leaders and baseball fans seem intent on railing against the Mariners for a variety of  perceived shortcomings.

It was in the midst of last week's outcry over the Mariners' push back on the idea of a new arena that they legitimately pointed out could bring a couple hundred more traffic-generating events a year to the Sodo neighborhood that I visited with Ellis over lunch. It was a visit scheduled several weeks ago so the controversy itself wasn't the topic of conversation, other than a brief, frustrated reference to it by Ellis.

I wanted his reflections on those tense days in late 1991, early '92, when an unlikely alliance of a dramatically wealthy Japanese businessman, a group of wealthy young local tech executives and a couple of senior community leaders was cobbled together to keep major league baseball in Seattle.

Ellis, as CEO of Bellevue-based Puget Sound Power & Light Co., had agreed to serve as an advisory board member to Mariner owner George Argyros, then to succeeding owner Jeff Smulyan, both commitments made as a community leader rather than baseball devotee. Thus he was logical member of a special advisory group Seattle's mayor turned to when it became clear Smulyan intended to sell the team.

"Norm's idea was for us to go out and find someone to buy the team, which at that point was appraised at $100 million," Ellis recalled. "After poking around for awhile looking for a possible buyer, we finally told the mayor we couldn't find anyone crazy enough to put up $100 million to buy a baseball team."

At that point, Ellis figured he could go ahead with his plan to retire as CEO of the  region's largest investor-owned utility, get on his boat and set out on a leisurely cruise to Alaska, as he had long planned to do.

But over that late December of '91, Sen. Slade Gorton's own efforts on behalf of saving the Mariners uncovered, to his astonishment, in a visit with Nintendo of America President Minoru Arakawa, an interest by his father in law, Haricho Yamauchi, purported then to be the third richest man in Japan, to buy the Mariners.

Ellis was quickly sucked into a furious effort to figure out how to get major league baseball, whose antipathy to any foreign ownership but Japanese ownership most of all, to even consider Yamauchi's offer while averting a sale to someone else that would render meaningless any Seattle effort.

After an aborted effort by "a totally naïve local group, led by the most naïve guy of all (referring to himself)" to meet with commissioner of baseball, Ellis found himself summoned to a what he describes as "a secret meeting," a "cloak-and-dagger"-like, assumed-name visit in St. Petersburg, FL, with unnamed major league owners.

Ellis arrived at the designated hotel and checked in for a meeting that never occurred with a small group of owners whose identity he never learned. But what did occur told him how close Seattle was to having the team leave before the efforts to save the franchise could even gain traction.

"I looked at the hotel shop across from the front desk and saw they were selling Tampa Bay Mariners shirts and hats," he said. "That experience and a couple of others that followed made it clear that the deal to move the team to Tampa Bay was already in the works.

"the simple fact is that if we hadn't put this together when we did, beating Smulyan's contractual deadline to get out of his Kingdome lease, the team would have been gone," Ellis said.

So as the Seattle-ownership deal began to gain traction, both the group of owners who had been brought together to join Yamauchi and Arakawa, and later, major league baseball executives as their opposition eased, insisted that Ellis be a part of the leadership of the team.

"At the June meeting of the owners, after all their conditions for our ownership group had finally been met, they told me they had two remaining conditions," Ellis recalls. "First they said they wanted me to serve as the team's rep to major league baseball, the person each team has who is empowered to act without anyone else's approval.

"The other condition floored me," he said with a smile. "They said they expected the owners' rep to have a significant financial interest in the team. I replied 'can you tell me what you mean by significant?' and they all broke out laughing because they had gotten to know me and knew the extent to which I could be involved. My financial role ended up being not very substantial."

But his involvement as CEO, between then and his retirement at the age of 71 at the end of the '99 season, was extensive and, as he recalls, every time he thought he'd be able to hand over the reins and head out on that boat trip to Alaska, a new challenge emerged.

First task was finding a new manager who would represent a statement. So after convincing Chuck Armstrong to come aboard as president and retaining Woody Woodward as general manager, he asked the two of them who should be the new manager "The guy atop both their lists was Lou Pinella."

The events that unfolded between then and his retirement included the Kingdome roof collapsing, the players strike, the memorable end-of-season race to the league championship series in 1995, the struggle to get voter approval for a new stadium, legislative alternative when the vote failed.

Although he retired in 1999, the stage had been set with the players and team executives who would two years later set the American League record for victories in a season at 116.

Since 2000 he has been the franchise's chairman emeritus, but has remained on the executive committee of major league baseball and has continued to be the Mariners' representative to MLB and on the ownership committee.

He remains a one-of-a-kind in major league baseball: as the team's retired top executive who never had more than a tiny piece of ownership but who is still viewed by the other teams' owners as the most important voice of Seattle baseball.

 
             -----------------------------------------

Mike Lowry recalls '95 legislative pact that

cemented franchise with stadium funding 

While John Ellis gets legitimate credit for his role in saving the Seattle Mariner franchise in 1992, of equal importance was Gov. Mike Lowry's role three years later when he brought the franchise back from the edge by getting the Legislature to agree on a new-stadium funding package.

A 1995 ballot measure to impose a sales-tax increase to fund construction of a new stadium was pushed from hopeless to near passage by the miraculous late-season dramatics of the Mariners that included a memorable victory over the New York Yankees before a championship-series loss to Cleveland. 

"After that sales-tax ballot issue failed by the razor-thin margin of about one-tenth of a percent, I remember Ellis calling a news conference to say the team would be put up for sale because it was losing a lot of money in the Kingdome," Lowry told me Tuesday in an e-mail exchange.

Lowry recalled that he was approached by his longtime friends, public-relations executive Bob Gogerty and Boeing's chief of governmental affairs, Bud Coffey, as well as the mayor and county executive, asking him to call a special legislative session to find a stadium-funding solution.

"I frankly wanted to do that," Lowry said, "because they had run a great campaign in their narrow sales-tax ballot loss. It was a media campaign that featured tremendous commercials that had young kids who were playing baseball morphing into the actual Mariner players, like Ken Griffey with a tag line that I think went like 'Heroes need a place to grow and become real.'"

Lowry says he called Ellis to ask if the owners could hold off on seeking to sell the team until he had a chance to see if he could get the lawmakers to agree to a brief special session limited to the Mariners' issue.

"I frankly got a positive reaction from the legislative leaders," Lowry noted. "I guess they didn't want to lose the Mariners either."

Thus in something that could probably have only happened in the political environment of yesterday, Lowry was able to work out a deal with key Democrats and Republicans from both houses on what he remembers as "a totally new funding package that was importantly different from the sale-tax measure."

"It was composed of taxes that were mostly on the users and beneficiaries of the new stadium, like admission taxes and sports bar taxes," he said. "As I recall, the only new tax in the package that was a stretch to say it was a beneficiary of the stadium was on rental cars."

In recalling his feelings in undertaking the legislative initiative, Lowry said "I simply did not want Seattle and the state to have the image of losing that major sports franchise. That struck me as Rust Belt."

As then-Gov. Gary Locke's staff was weighing which artist to hire to paint his official portrait, he was on hand at Safeco Field for the unveiling of the retirement portrait of Seattle Mariner great Edgar Martinez in the fall of 2004. After Mariner CEO Howard Lincoln unveiled the portrait on the field before 40,000 appreciative fans, Locke contacted his staff and basically said "I want that artist."

The artist who painted Edgar was Michele Rushworth and Locke, whose eight-year tenure as governor was nearing conclusion, thus became the first public commission for the Sammamish, WA, artist. It was a noteworthy step for a woman who, with little formal training in that medium, had decided a few years earlier to make portrait painting her career.

 The portrait of Locke, completed several months later, opened important and extensive new doors for Rushworth with governors in other states, as well as high-ranking officials, contracting with her to do their portraits.

It was in the late 1990s that Rushworth, with two toddlers she and husband, Tim Jones, had adopted from China a couple of years earlier, decided to give up her career as an office-products sales executive and turn to portrait painting fulltime.

When I asked her about formal training, she admitted that her art-college schooling some 20 years earlier was "avant garde video production, performance art and scrap metal welding. Not much drawing or painting at all."

"I've taken a few week-long workshops since then, but that was about it," she added.

It was really more of a "eureka moment" for Rushworth, who recalls having done portraits "rather informally" in high school and college, as she thought about what line of work to go into after the kids started full time in school.

She says she found a website she describes as "like a portal site for portrait artists. I remember thinking, I could do this, and saying out loud, 'this is it!'"

From the late '90s until the breakthrough with the Martinez portrait, much of what she did was "dozens of private family portraits, mostly children," including daughters Rachel and Emily.

How competitive is her business?

Well, it's not like Michelango or Renior lounging about waiting for a summons from the Pope or the monarch. Rather there's an entrepreneurism and business savvy that come into play to be successful, and she says her sales years "were actually a big help in knowing how to run a business and work in a professional way with people in all sorts of fields."  

"The business of doing portraits is very competitive," she told me. "There are probably 50 to 100 artists in the United States who do what I do and we all know each other."

As to how decisions are made on who to hire to do a portrait, she says "whenever someone needs a portrait done they may have a favorite artist in mind or they may look at dozens of portfolios. Quite often they'll have seen a portrait they liked and want to work with that same artist."

So it was with the charge to do portraits of two Nevada governors after the Nevada Arts Council saw the Locke portrait.

And the Nevada commission led to an unusual assignment to do several Wyoming governors after that state's legislature decided to "fill in the blanks" of 12 former governors who had never had portraits painted, and hired three artists to do the work.

"Some were recent governors and some were from a hundred years ago," says Rushworth, who actually did five of the 12. "For the posthumous ones I worked with archive photos, history books, family records, etc. In cases where the former governors were still living I went to meet them."

Rushworth recently completed official portraits of two high-ranking military officers in Washington D.C: retired Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen, and Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz at the Pentagon.

Now she is engaged in a couple of special assignments, one is to do Locke's successor, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, whom Rushworth describes as "delightful to work with," for a portrait that will be completed near year-end as Gregoire's eight years as governor come to a close. Gregoire's portrait will then hang next to Locke's in the gallery of paintings of the former state chief executives.

Then there is the second portrait of Locke, contracted for by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which Locke headed before becoming ambassador to China. That portrait will be unveiled in the fall, she expects.

Working with the man who is now ambassador to China on the portrait may serve as reminder for Rushworth of the memories of the country to which she and Tim, at the time vice president of sales for Puget Sound Business Journal, twice traveled to adopt their daughters.

She's fond of recalling how the portrait of Martinez that really opened the door to her success could have ended in amusement rather than applause from the thousands of fans. As she put the final finishing touches on the portrait, showing Martinez at home plate in his classic batter's stance, she recalls thinking that she was finished. Then she realized that she had left out home plate from the portrait. "I quickly fixed the oversight."

The nation's last fully operating news council is engaged in some soul searching about its future, including whether it has one, at a time when the proliferation of social and other forms of non-traditional media may make some sort of media "watchdog" more important than ever.

"We're in the middle of a process with a core group that I call my 'strategic transition possee' to look at our vision, mission and whether we're sustainable," says John Hamer, co-founder and executive director of the Washington News Council (WNC), which he helped create in 1998.

Meanwhile, as the Washington News Council (WNC) goes about its introspection, it's scheduled to hold a full-blown hearing in a few days on a complaint against the oft-offending but never-repentant major Seattle television station, KIRO.

That scheduled hearing points up the long-term importance of an organization like the News Council as a forum for public engagement with the media. But it also indicates the key challenge that has largely been beyond WNC's ability to overcome during most of its 14 years of existence.

The importance of such an organization is stated compelling by Ken Hatch, a founding board member and the influential former president of KIRO in the days when it was a TV-AM-FM titan owned by Bonneville Broadcasting.

"This mix of journalism and mass media compulsions, basically at the whim of anyone with an uncontrolled point of view, will not create a better world without some sort of 'point-counter point' forum like WNC," Hatch said.

The challenge has been the reluctance of the media to help any organization, including WNC, keep an eye on its performance, a reluctance put in perspective by Blaire Thompson, whose Washington Dairy Products Commission was among the entities that have come to WNC with complaints.

"The media readily arrogate to themselves the freedom, indeed, the right, to hold everyone in our society accountable to their scrutiny," said Thompson. "Unfortunately, what many media are reluctant to do is to allow themselves to be held accountable for their actions. The disinclination of most media to be held accountable can express itself in hostility to anyone who tries, and this has includes the Washington News Council."

Part of the challenge to "sustainable" is that WNC, which has operated on a relative financial shoestring and been run by a chief executive who has stayed committed more for love than money, saw its primary funding source come to an end last year.

That key funding for the past three years has been a $100,000 matching grant from the Gates Foundation, guided by Bill Gates Senior who has been a strong supporter of WNC and its role.

The end of the Gates challenge is part of the reason Hamer has guided the News Council to assess what he characterizes as "a crucial transition year."

The News Council's annual Gridiron Dinner, a roast of prominent political or business figures, has become the key fund-raising event for the organization. And this year's November roast of retiring Gov. Christine Gregoire and departing Congressman Norm Dicks has Hamer and WNC supporters enthused about the fund-raising such a special roast, attracting both Democrats and Republicans, may represent.

The WNC forum for public engagement with media has included a formal hearing in the event no accord was reached between a media entity and the aggrieved person or organization.

While the accused media have mostly always responded to the complaint in some manner, they frequently have boycotted the formal hearing when one has been held.

That was the case a few years ago when King County Sheriff Sue Rahr complained to the News Council about the unfairness of a Seattle P-I series. After a hearing in which WNC found for Rahr, with the P-I declining to be present, the Seattle Times did devote a full page to the hearing and its outcome damning the P-I.

But in most instances, the accused media knows that regardless of the outcome of a WNC hearing, other media will provide little public visibility on those proceedings. That removes much of the concern about being found "guilty."

So it is with CBS-affiliate KIRO TV, which has thumbed its nose in two previous complaints against it for reports by the same reporter, Chris Halsey, who is described by himself and the station, but by few who see his work, as an "investigative" reporter.

Without going into details of the complaints, all of which brought major outpouring of support for those wronged by KIRO, including Secretary of State Sam Reed, the fact is, as Hamer puts it, "KIRO has never given us even the courtesy of a response by phone, email or letter."

The latest complaint is from teachers and parents at Leschi School about a piece, more accurately a job, Halsey did for KIRO on the school's custodian.

Hatch, the former KIRO chief, said of one of the KIRO stories that drew a complaint: "It was a hurtful and stupid example of a bad performance by a reporter who carries the mantle of public trust. The reporter failed and so did the news director who must have been asleep at the wheel."

WNC was patterned after the respected Minnesota News Council, whose operation was supported by basically all newspapers and prominent broadcast outlets in the state. That included financial support from the Minneapolis Star and Tribune.

During WNC's early days, it became the key to growth of the concept nationally, getting a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to sponsor a nationwide contest to start two more news councils. California, which has since closed its doors, and New England, which still exists but has metamorphosed out of a watchdog role, were launched by WNC.

The Minnesota News Council recently closed its doors, due to change in leadership and the financial travails of the state's largest daily newspaper, leaving the Washington News Council as the last in this country whose scope extends all the way to full-fledged hearings.

That's why WNC's discussions about its future are important. Again, quoting Hatch: "We are seeing media and journalism destroying some of the quality parts of our free speech process. Lies and slander must be challenged by good minds and good people for this country to truly have a freedom of speech fostered by people of integrity."

Cell Therapeutics Inc., the Seattle biotech firm that has alternately raised and dashed investor hopes over the past 20 years, has scored a triple play in recent weeks, gaining European approval for a new drug, buying a phase-three cancer drug at deep discount and finding a major new investor.

The spate of recent news, while drawing little attention from Seattle area media, has left influential national bloggers and websites musing over why CTI's developments haven't attracted more investor interest and movement in its stock price. The stock has stayed under $1 for some weeks and is down 40 percent from a year ago.

Attention for CTI has peaked following late May word that the company's cancer drug Pixantrone, with the brand name Pixuvri, has received conditional marketing approval from the European Commission, following February approval from the European Medicines Agency.

National websites have enthused about CTI's recent successes, with the influential market blog "Seeking Alpha" a few days ago offering the intriguing headline, both promising and pointed: "Cell Therapeutics' Pixantrone - Is Hope Coming For Patients And Patient Shareholders?"

And the respected "24/7 Wall St. Wire" asked, in a column noting the recent successes, "Can a European Approval of Pixantrone Save Cell Therapeutics?"

The Pixantrone approval will allow CTI to produce revenue from the drug in a market about equal in size to the U.S. market, and will also mean that it can accumulate additional data toward FDA approval from the use of Pixantrone in patients with a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Just this week, CTI announced that it has completed the acquisition, first announced in April, of Pacritinib, a Phase III-ready drug that's part of a new class of targeting agents, known as JAK inhibitors, for treating myelofibrosis, a type of leukemia that affects bone marrow.

The Pacritinib purchase price of $15 million in cash and another $15 million in convertible stock was described by one national blogger as "a near steal" because, despite four competitors, CTI will be going after a piece of what the company views as a $7 billion market in the U.S. alone.

Finally, CTI announced a $40 million investment from New York-based Socius Capital, which analysts suggest paid about 10 percent above the CTI stock price for its passive-investment stake of just under 10 percent. That reflected, according to an analyst, "a high level of confidence" in the commercialization of Pixuvri and clinical development of Pacritinib.

But it's the Pixantrone success, enhancing the Pacritinib acquisition and spurring the cash infusion, that is most intriguing, particularly, since there are several sub-plots that come into play with the European announcement. Those include the politics surrounding FDA's handling of the pipeline for new potentially life-saving drugs, as well as the emerging controversy over high-priced drugs that offer only a few months of life expectancy for patients.

Then there's the on-going dynamic tension between CTI CEO  Dr.James Bianco and Seattle-area media, which have frequently targeted the company and Bianco for the $1.74 billion he's raised and spent without much benefit to shareholders and the wide swings in the stock price over the years, as high as $72 and as low as 88-cents. Bianco's defenders brush aside media criticisms, contending that the only reason CTI is still alive after 20 years is because of Bianco's creativity and leadership.

As one Bianco supporter put it, "let's just say the media and Jim Bianco don't like each other very much," the tension possibly due in part to the fact Bianco enjoys the perks that go with the CEO role and is a competitive kind of guy who doesn't shrink from a fight.

The latter isn't surprising given his Bronx upbringing as a second-generation Italian kid in a household shared by up to 20 relatives at a time in an environment where

"you were okay as long as you didn't leave the few square blocks of our neighborhood."

Then he smiled as he remembered that his bus to high school made its closest stop 10 blocks from his home. "Every day I sprinted to the bus because if you couldn't get there faster than anyone else, you were a statistic."

He admits he didn't do very well academically in high school, but by the time he found himself at NYU, he recalls that a major disappointment was the lone "B" he received among his "A's."

Medical school, internship and residency in New York led to Seattle and an opportunity at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, and eventually to the founding of CTI.

In addition to being high visibility in his business, he's also highly visible in fund-raising efforts for his special causes, including the Hope Heart Institute, where he and his wife, Sue, won the Wings of Hope award in 2002 and where he's helped revamp the key fund-raising event, and Gilda's Club, for whom he is planning the first capital campaign.

He's been involved with Gilda's Club for a dozen years, explaining that it "provides that other kind of Medicine, the kind you can't get in hospitals or clinics but that place where family, kids, friends etc have support. It's a great cause, but because they don't do research they're not sexy so funding in these times is tough. That's why I stay involved. It's in our (CTI's) DNA."

The manner in which the European Medicine agency's approach brought conditional approval for Pixontrone while the FDA dallied, eventually causing CTI to withdraw its application, represents another log on the fire of controversy that swirls around getting new drugs through the FDA to patients.

In Europe, 25 member states and five independent experts represent the review panel for an application and two-third of the 32 must give their okay. Critics of the FDA process of an office with a single final decision maker in each therapeutic category, from oncology to cardiovascular and rheumatologic, etc. call the European approach a more balanced review.

The critics contend that people are losing their lives while the FDA is holding things up and urge that Congress and the administration press for conditional approval as a more certain part of the FDA review process. For obvious political reasons, Bianco declines to join those criticisms, particularly since a new application to the FDA for Pixontrone is planned in a few months.

And since Pixontrone will cost, once the pricing is worked out with each of the European countries, somewhere between $33,000 and $38,000 to extend the lives of the target patients by less than a year, it will come to be part of the growing debate over end-of-life costs vs. benefit.

But over the longer term, it will be interesting to see how the developments of the past few weeks play out for Bianco and CTI, and to what extent the prediction of one of the national bloggers proves accurate: "It has been a long road for investors of CTIC, but it now looks as though the future is bright."