Congress, our delegation taking the lead, needs to push back IRS on PPP loans

Many would argue that the Internal Revenue Service will screw the taxpayer whenever it means the tax agency can take in more money for its actions. But in the midst of the coronavirus and the CARES act tax treatment of loans designed by Congress to help businesses survive?

Seems so, according to information my Seattle accountant, Mark Long, distributed to his clients this week, following up on information sent out a few days ago by Bloomberg News Service and other business-information sites.

His email memo said that last week, the IRS issued an order "which substantially changes the tax treatment of the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) loan program."

Long, of The Myers Associates, noted "the CARES Act explicitly states that the forgiveness of the loan is NOT taxable income."

"The IRS has concluded that while the forgiveness is not taxable income, the qualifying expenses (payroll, employee benefits, rent, etc.) will be non-deductible," Long said.  "The IRS Notice, therefore, does effectively make the forgiveness taxable income."

So the goal of discussing the issue here is that members of both the House and the Senate need to be pressed to push the IRS away from the table, in essence by nullifying the agency's decision, ideally in a high-visibility push back. The more public scrutiny and outcry on this the better.

And this state's Senators and members of Congress should be pressed to be in the forefront, and not with deliberative pace, but quickly.

PPP was established under the CARES Act. Operated by the Small Business Administration (SBA), it provides cash for two months of payroll costs. The measure, enacted by Congress in March, allows recipients to use the proceeds for payroll costs, employee healthcare benefits, interest on mortgage obligations, rent, utilities, and interest on any other debt. The loans do not have to be repaid if employers keep workers on the job or rehire laid-off workers.  

While the measure said the loan is not subject to taxes, it failed to let companies know whether they could still write off the expenses they covered with that money. In any other circumstance, IRS regulations allow companies to write off business expenses, such as wages, rent, and transportation expenses. The clarification adds the latest wrinkle, the news service noted.

It's a big difference," Long told me in an email. "And the biggest problem is that you have to make business decisions with minimal info.  If you want people to spend the entire PPP loan, then that's different than them spending part and holding part back to cover taxes."

The IRS Notice "is substantially different than all of the initial information released about the PPP program, and from what we have read, it is also contrary to the intent of the CARES Act legislation," Long added.  

At this time, it is unclear whether the IRS position will remain as stated in the Notice or if the Notice will be reversed.  It is also possible that a legislative fix is introduced.  However, it's quite possible this may not occur until after your 8-week loan forgiveness period is over."

Yosemite National Park is just one of the places that NatureBridge takes over 35,000 kids to learn each year.

The arrival of National Parks Week in the midst of COVID-19 closure of most national parks is a sad reminder for those who enjoy nature and the wilderness. But for an organization focused on the parks as learning centers for young people the closure poses a concern for what the future holds.
 
The organization is NatureBridge, a nonprofit that brings kids to national parks to spend days learning about science and the environment as they discover the pleasure of the outdoors while spending time with other young people.  
 
Closure of the parks means the organization's programs that bring 35,000 kids, mostly ages 12 to 16, to Yosemite and Golden Gate in California, Olympic in Washington State, and Prince William Forest Park near Washington, D.C.
 
Robert Holmes, a NatureBridge board member for whom the call of the wild has been a lifetime personal counterpoint to his role as a developer of both real estate and resort projects across North America, sees the closure as a "crisis."
 
A year ago the organization was preparing for its early May annual fund-raiser at the Iconic Bentley Reserve in San Francisco's Financial District where 300 attendees would spend "An Evening with NatureBridge."

The event brought people together to celebrate another year of cultivating the next generation of environmental stewards and raised $650,000.  
 
This year's event in early May in San Francisco has been canceled. And while the website calls visitors to "raise a paddle" for virtual donations, no one knows how much will be raised from would-be attendees, sponsors and supporters to avert what Holmes says is a looming revenue hole.
 
"In addition to the fact that  35,000 not 13,000 kids don't get to experience their national parks this year, our nonprofit will experience $5 million in lost revenue and significant staff reductions," Holmes said. "We, like so many others, are in crisis, which threatens NatureBridge's ability to continue its mission on the other side of this pandemic."
 
Holmes recognizes that the crisis facing NatureBridge is no different than that facing a myriad of other organizations and non-profits whose fund-raising events have been canceled or put on hold across the region and the country.
 
But Holmes, CEO of THG LLC (The Holmes Group) in Bellevue, has made a personal commitment to help make sure (if he can) that NatureBridge will be back to prepare for its 50th anniversary year in 2021.
 
In an email to friends and associates this past week, Holmes said "NatureBridge needs to survive this - for our parks, for our planet and, most importantly, for our kids. To that end, I am matching all donations (up to $25,000) made to NatureBridge before June 30."
 
And Holmes said there will be a video interview with Dr. Nooshin Razani, a NatureBridge alum who is now an infectious disease specialist in Oakland and the video is likely to accompanied by an ask, as has become the virtual substitute for an actual fund-raising gathering for a host of organization.
 
The students NatureBridge reaches usually apply through science teacher though in some cases whole classes attend or, as Holmes noted, "in some cases, like Cupertino, all the students from the school attend."
 
For those whose parents can't pay, students can get scholarships and financial support through NatureBridge,
 
This was not meant to be a column about Holmes. It's about his cause for which he has stepped into the breach to see if through the dollars he generates, along with other board members and their supporters, they can save the future for Nature Bridge.
 
But inevitably, a cause is judged, in part, by the quality and influence of its supporters.
Holmes' many involvements and adventures in the wilderness likely have played a role in some of his resort development efforts in addition to his commitment to NatureBridge.
 
He's made parachuting the sky-high part of his outdoors experience and focus since he helped create a parachute club as a freshman at Central Washington University and he recalls "we often jumped into college games and events."
 
Since then he has done "1,200 or so jumps," including tricky, multi-person jumps of up to 10 people that have led to skydiver performance awards and recognition.
 
"As a skydiver, I created wilderness jumps, including jumps into Mount Jefferson and then Mount Washington," Holmes recalled, adding "at the grand opening of the Inn at 7th Mountain in Bend, three of us parachuted in and that evening I met Lute Jerstad, who had climbed Mount Everest with Willi Unsoeld."
 
He says the jump into Mountain Jefferson and the climb that followed is what hooked him on mountaineering so he signed up for Jerstad's climbing school, But a climb on the north face of Mount Stewart came close to costing him his life as he fell about 80 feet and landed on a ledge, breaking his back. He spent 24 hours on the ledge before being rescued.
 
As to his business roles, before shifting to Bellevue where his projects have included Kemper Freeman's Bellevue Collection, Holmes was president and CEO of Intrawest USA and president and CEO of Harbor Properties in Seattle.  
 
In his resort projects, he has guided the development of the Village at Mammoth, Schweitzer Mountain Resort and the Village at Whistler.
 
As to the future, Holmes told me "We will be successful and will come back. The cause and the kids are too important." CLICK HERE to learn more and help NatureBridge help the children.

Out of the potential economic disaster, there may be a fortuitous convergence of the two-year-old Tax Cuts & Jobs Act with its role of stimulating the economy and the coronavirus-spurred CARES Act with its role of saving the economy.
 
"Opportunity" was the keyword for one of the most interesting provisions in the massive tax cut measure of 2017, a section providing for what was named Qualified Opportunity Zones. The QOZ, as they are known, are a device basically intended to allow the wealthy to defer capital gains if used to help the poor and create jobs.
 
Ralph IbarraCARES, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, opens the door to several interesting opportunities in addition to its basic focus on getting survival funds and loans to businesses. Opening the door to QOZ businesses would merely be a creative byproduct.

The possibility of a fortuitous convergence of two legislative packages, one borne of a surging economy and the other of an economy threatening to sink to a 90-year low point, provided a sign of hope for some who have been focused on Opportunity Zones since the tax-cut legislation was passed.
 
Basically the QOZ provision allowed temporary deferral of capital gains that are reinvested in geographic areas in each state designated as Qualified Opportunity Zones. Those are census tracts, selected in each state by the governors but they needed to include economically distressed communities. In other words, job-creating investment opportunities.
 
The key opportunity the CARES Act is meant to provide is billions of dollars in various categories to help small and mid-sized businesses survive and begin moving back toward where they were before.
 
But without distracting from that key goal, there are other opportunities that could improve the fortunes of some businesses when the economy is restored or is moving toward being restored.
 
And one is the kind of businesses the Opportunity Zones were designed to spur into existence and provide growth with capital gains millions.
 
The opportunity to use those capital gains benefits of individual taxpayers in "partnership" with the federal dollars in the CARES Act to restore economic viability for small businesses in areas that will have a harder time coming back is an energizing concept.
 
Particularly that's true for businesses in smaller and mid-sized cities who fear they will be left out of the federal stimulus dollars distribution or short-changed.
 
My longtime friend Ralph Ibarra, a fan of the Opportunity Zones idea from the outset who has delved deep into the details of the tax-break legislation in his Diverse America consulting business, says he felt it was a "golden opportunity" to provide a chance for investor dollars to work with federal dollars.
 
"QOZ Fund investments in small business concerns can be amplified with the provisions contained within the CARES Act," Ibarra suggested.
 
The CARES Act focus also represents a significant opportunity for innovative banks to build relations with small businesses by reaching beyond their roster of clients, but for some reason, many banks aren't doing that.
 
"Unfortunately, not all banks are broadly offering these loans," said Mark Mason, CEO of Seattle-based HomeStreet Bank.
 
"Many banks are limiting applications to current customers or to certain-sized customers and while we are prioritizing our customers, as you would expect, ultimately we expect to help non-customers as well," Mason said.
 
As Ibarra observed when we discussed banks using the funds for business development, "when banks show themselves as human, they make customers for life."
 
Another opportunity that could emerge beyond survival is the CARES dollars that can assist the little-known small business development centers (SBDC) to build relationships with the small businesses that have been supposed to be their target.
 
CARES provides $240 million for the SBDCs, an arm of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), to create the engagement with small businesses that have only been marginal at best.
 
The Washington SBDC, a member of the national SBDC program, is a network of nearly three dozen expert business advisors in nearly three dozen communities across this state located in places like chambers of commerce or port districts.
 
The state SBDC network is governed by a cooperative agreement between Washington State University, which is the statewide host of the program on its Spokane campus, and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).
 
Recovering from this economic crisis could bring with it, for small business, the SBDC services of helping small-business owners and entrepreneurs start, grow and transition their businesses that have been sadly outside the radar screen in the past.
 
Conrad Lee, the Bellevue city council member and former mayor who was SBA regional administrator from 2002-2004, told me "many businesses don't know how to access the funds."
 
Noting that not all banks are SBA lenders, he said SBA must work with all banks to assist small businesses to access the money and help.
 
"The one objective must be to help business survive,".Lee said.

It may seem strange to now begin planning for a fall awards event for rising young business executives in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that, as one young associate in this effort put it, "is leading people to care less and less about things that aren't meaningful."
 
In this case, the honoring event I am helping put together happens to be the 21st annual San Diego 40-Under-40 gathering that last October became a two-county event celebrating the young professionals from both San Diego and Orange Counties.
 
But Bob Page, my 84-year-old friend, former boss at UPI and a long-time publisher of major daily newspapers and later Southern California weeklies, perceives that the young leaders who emerge from this frightening and challenging time will be outliers of a new kind.
 
As the owner of a business magazine called SD Metro that owns the San Diego 40-under-40 event, Page each year has presided at the Chairman's Luncheon where the honorees are introduced.
 
As Alicia Iorio, a 33-year-old fast-rising executive and one of the 40-under-40 honorees at the 20th annual luncheon, put it to me: "The young leaders who emerge will be those who combined success and sacrifice in a model that will become the new order. And in doing so we begin to set a new standard."

"Crises reveal the core, either good or bad, bringing forth those people and companies whose highest priorities and deeply held beliefs that represent their driving force will rise to the fore and become the new basis for recognition," she added.
 
"It needs to become how much did you care and what did you give even while continuing to have one eye on business success?" she added,
 
"Given those thoughts. you're going to be on the team, as a past honoree, putting this together," I told her.
 
Her summation of what we want this event to become as we emerge, or begin to emerge, from this crisis can be applicable to the array of 40-Under-40 events around the country, including Seattle, where success has been measured on the business achievements of the young executive.
 
In fact, it was because the Seattle 40-Under-40, created in 1999 by my son, Michael, for Eastside Business Journal and then taken over by Puget Sound Business Journal to present thereafter that Page, whose event was born that same year, asked me to help with the 2019 event.
 
So virtually every event, ranging across the spectrum from business to sports to non-profit fundraisers or community events has been canceled or postponed so that crowds are not induced to gather, particularly at a time when there might seem little to celebrate but life itself.
 
But I concluded the effort on behalf of this event, which at its 20th anniversary last October 1 in San Diego had become a San Diego-Orange County one, was a story worth sharing because my young business associate, Alicia, suggested it was an important initiative, because of this environment in particular.
 
So I decided to write about a Southern California event in a column whose readers are mostly in the Seattle area and the Northwest because the idea of a new rationale for what kind of young leaders should be honored merits consideration in every region.
 
And the 40-Under-40 event, because it's held in most every important metro area in the country, may be the most logical place to begin honoring the new breed of business outlier as the passing of the virus allows resumption of most such events, hopefully with many seeking new models.
 
I view Iorio as an example of the new model. After she spent more than a decade in corporate accounting and financial consulting, she turned to healthcare and is now president of CBMD, which she describes as a "physician-backed, medical-grade" CBD company.
 
In addition, she is responsible for community outreach for OC Hospice. She also serves as chair of OC Gift of Life, a worldwide bone marrow registry seeking to provide patients battling blood cancer with a second chance.
 
Because I need to contact her on occasion as this 40-under-40 effort takes shape, I've been struck by how often she texts me "I'll have to get back to you later. I'm with a patient at the hospital right now."
 
So it may come to be that the virus passes and the 40-Under-40 event can be held in the fall and when Page stands before the audience at the Chairman's Luncheon, it will be an honoring of those young executives whose rite of passage was a litany of caring and concern and community, not merely a financial success.

Some people are born into wealth and riches and others achieve them by ingenuity and hard work, often with a touch of luck thrown in. John Stone, who created a series of high-visibility businesses across the Northwest, might chuckle at the suggestion that he had it both ways.
 
He was born into the "wealth" of the St. Aloysius neighborhood in Spokane where the mom's kept track of all the kids and grabbed them by the collar if they were acting up and gave them a smile or hug when they did well. For those who went to St Aloysius Grade School, the Holy Names nuns knew well both the collar grab and the smile.
 
John StoneWhen my mom died in 2004, John sent me a note after sitting quietly in the back of the church for her service to tell me that she had been one of the "angel moms" who kept him from straying very far from the right path.
 
The "right path" took Stone, who turns 77 next month, on a path from Boeing computer systems to his own computer service firm, a multi-state mini-storage company, then in the early '90s, he entered the multifamily and senior housing segment of the real estate industry. Stone developed luxury apartment projects in San Diego, Seattle, and Portland, in addition to Spokane, then independent living assisted living and Alzheimer's facilities.
 
He was to be honored this week by the Spokane Journal of Business at its Icons event, the publication's annual celebration of Inland Northwest business pioneers and innovators. I was to introduce him at the luncheon event.
 
But like all events scheduled during this virus-impacted time, the event was canceled but the Journal of Business produced a special supplement on the Icons of 2020 in this week's issue.
 
When I asked publisher Paul Read about his sense of why Stone deserved the honor, he replied: 

"John Stone's legacy as a business Icon in our region will be marked by his bold vision for what real estate development could and should look like, his willingness to take risks where others wouldn't, his courage and tenacity to speak his mind on civic issues, and his humble philanthropic spirit."

Were it not for the trauma the coronavirus is visiting on this region, the travails of Boeing's effort to restore the lost luster that made it the model for corporate success and community treasure would likely be the subject of negative conversation wherever community leaders gather.
 
Now David Calhoun, new to the Boeing CEO role but a decade on the board during which the crises within the company were being spawned with no sense the board saw anything to question now-ousted CEO Dennis Muilenburg about, is seeking to right the ship.
 
As if to prove that the board had no sense of anything amiss until the two 737 Max crashes and the challenges that have dogged the company since then, Calhoun admitted, in an interview two months after he took the reins, that things inside the company were worse than he had thought.
 
"It's more than I imagine it would be, honestly," Calhoun said, adding "it speaks to the weakness of our leadership," an indictment aimed at ousted CEO Muilenberg.  

But there are some who would suggest it might logically apply to the board. Part of a board's responsibility, after all, is being accountable to the public for the quality of services and goods delivered.
 
It's quite likely that the congressional report that scored "a culture of concealment" and "grossly insufficient oversight" was referring to more than the executives who ran the company.
 
I recall when I first heard that Boeing charged its airline customers an additional amount for installing devices that would ensure greater safety of its products, my first thought was "the board needs to determine if that's true and, if it is, simply say 'don't do that anymore."
 
But some will protest, "boards don't do that!" Tell me about it.
 
So if you haven't, it's worth looking at the board whose job it is to protect the traveling public and the customers who fly them, no less a responsibility than overseeing shareholder profits.
 
It's definitely a board that could compete admirably with other boards in "the fame game."
 
First, there is (The) Caroline Kennedy, who most recently served as ambassador to Japan, and former South Carolina governor and U.N. representative Nikki Haley.
 
The board has military star power. Adm. John Richardson was appointed to the board last year after completing a four-year term as Chief of Naval Operations, and Adm. Edmund Giambastiani Jr. former vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, is completing a decade on the board.

Board chair is Lawrence Kellner, former chairman and CEO of Continental Airlines, who has been on the board since 2011

Other board members were company chairman and CEOs, Robert Bradway at Amgen, Arthur Collins Jr. at Medtroni, Ron Williams at Aetna and Ed Liddy at Allstate president and CEO, as Lynn Good at Duke Energy and Mike S. Zafirovski, at Nortel. Susan Schwab.  
 
Professor at the University of Maryland school of public policy and the former US. Trade representative, named last year fills out the board.
 
All seem capable of more innovative action than just to name one of their own as CEO.

The fact is, the Boeing that was created in Seattle in 1916 by William Boeing and grew to become one of the most successful and admired companies in America hasn't been the same since it moved to Chicago a week before 9-11. Bean counters, represented by Harry Stonecipher who as president and CEO of McDonnell Douglas orchestrated the merger of the two companies and replaced ousted Phil Condit, took control of Boeing in 2003.

In fairness, a defense-department procurement scandal that eventually led to Condit's resignation, among other embarrassments to the company, began when Boeing was still a Seattle-based company and only exploded after the move to Chicago.

Hard to know whether the culture might have continued in Chicago if Alan Mulally, then president of Boeing Commercial, where the airplanes were made, had been named Boing CEO, which he had expected when Condit was replaced. So instead he went to Ford two years later and worked his engineering-leadership magic for a car company.

Nevertheless, what would be the reaction if that Boeing board decided on a dramatic move to prove the board members wanted a different culture and opted to return the company to its Seattle roots?

The culture shifted when the years passed with the corporate executives 2,000 miles distant from the place where the culture of Boeing's largest unit, commercial airplanes, was nurtured or diminished.

Given the corporate presence that has emerged here in the past two decades, not only in homegrown companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Expedia but expansions here by the likes of Google, a move home by Boeing could not only carry shareholder logic. It could also send a message to customers, lawmakers and employees about the desire to restore the culture and integrity that seems to have waned.

(This is the second of two articles in which I am offering readers of The Harp a reprise of the stories from the past decade that were most memorable to me, some of which got little in the way of broad visibility but all of which got repeated visibility here for reasons that will become obvious.)

The story that was my personal favorite was actually several Harps relating to my friend Joseph L. (Joe) Galloway, one of the best-known correspondents of the Vietnam War, who has been on the road much of the past decade doing interviews with veterans of that conflict to preserve their memories.

The interviews by Galloway have been part of the 50th Anniversary Vietnam War Commemoration to honor those who fought in that war but were never thanked when they returned to a divided nation.
 
Galloway's travels to do the interviews, mostly about two hours in length and which he told me now number about 400, embody his commitment to producing the "the body of material for future generations who want to know what this war was all about."  
 
The formal launch of the 50th Anniversary Vietnam War Commemoration was on Memorial Day of 2012 and since 2013 Joseph L. (Joe) Galloway, one of the best-known correspondents of that war, has been on the road doing interviews with veterans of that conflict to preserve their memories.

Galloway, a reporter assigned by United Press International to cover the war, was selected by the Defense Department unit charged with administering the program to do the interviews to preserve for future generations.

Galloway, decorated for battlefield heroism at the Battle of Ia Drang in November of 1965 where he was the only correspondent and joked to me that he turned in his camera and took a machine gun, spent a week doing interviews in Seattle in the spring of 2015. I had urged him to come to Seattle for a round of interviews and found KCPQ TV willing to make its studios available for his interviews. He returned to Seattle for another round of interviews two years later.

I've written several columns on Galloway and his Vietnam interviews, partly because we were UPI colleagues (he in war zones and I as a political writer and later a Pacific Coast executive for the company). But in a broader sense because of a fascination with his perspectives on the war in articles and speeches, and the import of the battle in the Ia Drang Valley that Galloway and the late Gen. Hal Moore, then a lieutenant colonel in command of the U.S. Army forces in that battle, made famous in their book and a subsequent movie.

The battle became the subject of Galloway's and Moore's book, "We Were Soldiers Once...and Young," and the resulting movie, "We Were Soldiers," as well as a second book, "We are Still Soldiers... A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam" when the two returned to the battlefield years late.

In an earlier column, I quoted Galloway about his time on the battlefield, particularly at Ia Drang: "The men I met and the time we spent together fighting for one another was a life-changing experience that transcends the bonds of friendship and brotherhood."

During one of our interviews, Galloway said of the Vietnam veterans: "They are not bitter but I am bitter in their behalf. It makes me angry that those who came to hate the war came to hate the warriors who were their sons and daughters."

It was seven years ago that I first learned of and wrote about the then decade-old commitment by Bellevue business leader and philanthropist Joan Wallace to the mostly Hispanic children in the Yakima Valley community of Granger that changed their lives and the life of their community.  

Wallace listened over Thanksgiving dinner in 2003 while Janet Wheaton, her sister in law and principal of Granger Middle School, expressed concern that the children, who had little food at home, would be going hungry without their two in-school meals a day over the Christmas holidays because the school would be out.

When Wallace returned home, an email donation request to pay for Christmas baskets of food went out to a few dozen of her closest friends and associates and soon thereafter, a non-profit named "Children of Granger" was formed.
Joan Wallace

Thus began an ongoing commitment by two women, one an educator and one a prominent Bellevue business leader. Their continuing involvement changed the future for the families in the city of 3,500 where the population is 84 percent Latino or Hispanic and 35 percent of the families live below the poverty level.

After writing the first Granger column, an annual update of the dramatic things that continued to unfold in Granger because of Wallace and Wheaton became my regular Thanksgiving offering to readers of The Harp.

Everything they did was aimed at helping kids break the poverty barrier, from giving each child in all grade levels an annual $200 "slush fund" for things like shoes and coats to giving mothers of pre-schoolers learning toys that brought grants once they had proved the value of their "Ready for Kindergarten" program.

"While doing our best to take care of the immediate needs, we also believe it is equally important to cultivate self-sufficiency and to enable these children to finish school," Wallace said.

But the most dramatic story of the impact that the two women had was with the successful campaign at the middle school five years ago to build a program to improve attendance because of its key to educational advancement. They came up with a slogan that became a mantra, "Every Child, Every desk, Every Day."

Thus in 2014, I was able to share that the little non-profit had put together a relationship with nearby Heritage University and its largely Hispanic student body and that the relationship had led to the first-ever grant to Families of Granger.

The $15,000 grant from the Yakima Valley Community Foundation, due largely to the involvement of Heritage student and mother of four Alma Sanchez, was used to implement an attendance-incentive program that Sanchez had created.

Those two things basically made 2014 the little non-profit's most important year. And there was a degree of magic in the results of Alma's idea. a quarterly incentive program aimed at perfect attendance.

Driven by the attendance-campaign slogan and the commitment of children, parents, and teachers, the school set the mark for best attendance record in the state, with an absentee rate of 4 percent, compared to a statewide average of 16 percent absenteeism, outdoing schools even in places like Mercer Island and Bellevue.  

I knew that accomplishment would go largely unnoticed by media and business leaders in Western Washington. So I met with Kemper Freeman, Pam Pearson of Q13 and Mike Patterson, since deceased, whose law firm represented a number of school districts and together we created a special award called Innovations in Education.

All involved, most especially Wallace, Wheaton, and Alma, were honored at a banquet at the Rainier Club and presented with plaques to help them remember the accomplishment that helped change a community.

The Yakima Foundation got involved with a grant for the attendance campaign and has supported the annual effort since.

Last week an email arrived from Wallace advising that the time for an exit to her active involvement in Granger had arrived. "The time has come and the path is not only clear but exciting and gratifying," she said, adding in the mail to her Friends of Granger, "together we have made a difference." She included a chart that showed "we poured $425,000 into the community."

"Friends of Granger will go back to the community to be run by a committee of teachers and community leaders," Wallace wrote.

My first column on Shabana Khan came when in 2015 when she was struggling to raise sponsor money to put on the Men's World Squash Championship at Meydenbauer Center as the first time ever for the event in the United States and I was asked to help her. I wrote a Harp then because I was intrigued about the sport and her efforts and other Harps followed as I watched her progress.

The men's world event turned out to be a success, attracting attention in all countries where squash is prominent, and within a couple of years, the 51-year-old former national women's squash champion had grown to become nationally and actually globally prominent as the queen of the promoters of the sport of squash.

That growing recognition for her efforts has come as a result of a few giant steps while to her frustration and the frustration of a few key supporters, her local visibility has come in small steps, including virtually no local media visibility.
 
Her late father, Yusuf Khan, brought the sport of squash to Seattle from his native India a half-century ago and, as one of the world's top squash professionals, proceeded to bring Seattle to the attention of the national and international squash establishments. Yusuf, who died in October of 2018 at 87, saw his two daughters become women' national champions, with Shabana beating her sister to claim the national title in 2001.

She put on a squash event last August that was the first of its kind in the country as she created a world invitational squash tournament that attracted the world's top squash talent, six men and six women and was pleased to have the event sponsors name the event after her late father.

The invitational event held at the Hidden Valley Boys & Girls Club in Bellevue was named "PMI Dave Cutler Presents the Yusuf Khan Invitational."

The "PMI Dave Cutler" portion of the title is for the two men, both internationally known in their respective professions, who have become the financial support for YSK Events, the little non-profit through which Khan carries out her squash events.

One is Dave Cutler of Microsoft, universally acclaimed as the key technical brain behind the Microsoft Windows NT and all the subsequent Windows versions. A decade ago he was recognized as a National Medal of Technology and Innovation laureate, perhaps the most prestigious honor in the country for developers of new technology.

The other is Robert Harris, founder, and CEO of PMI-Worldwide, a Seattle-based brand, and product-marketing company with offices in seven cities around the world whose corporate philanthropy has only recently begun to be recognized.

The two have come to team up for a $150,000 donation that for the past several years has allowed Khan to put up the prize money, which this year will total $300,000.

Among her important innovations for the sport has been her National College Showcase for nationally ranked students, 16 men and 16 women, aged 15 to 18, playing before coaches of the top schools where squash is a scholarship sport.  
 
Part of Khan's stated goal is bringing an awareness of squash to young people of all backgrounds rather than merely the children of the squash affluent, whose demographics are men and women, both players and fans, with median incomes of more than $300,000.
It seems that eventually, Khan's efforts on behalf of a sport that has begun growing in this country at a rate third fastest in the world will pay off with attention and support in this region, including sponsorships dollars.

It needs to be noted that when I refer to virtually no local visibility for several of the Harp topics I feature in this decade-ending reprise, I have to single out KCPQ13 television for the manner in which the station picked up on the Harps.

The station's VP and general manager Pam Pearson and her staff seized on the opportunity to provide support for Joe Galloway's veteran interviews and news coverage through his week of conducting interviews. And the station stepped up to be a sponsor of the Innovations in Education event for Joan Wallace and Granger involves. And they did an excellent interview with Art Harrigan that must have made other stations mutter "where the hell were we?"

Few journalistic tasks could be more subjectively challenging than that undertaken by various media entities as the old year faded into a new decade and they chose the best or most important news stories of that decade past. Thus came revisiting of the education funding battle, the various clashes over Sound Transit, the drama of Amazon's quest for a second headquarters, Boeing's travails and ventures into the absurdity of the Seattle City Council's machinations. But for me the challenge was easier: choose from a decade of Harps the stories most memorable to me, some of which got little in the way of broad visibility. These are not my most personal Harps like my daughter's selection for the Oregon Supreme Court, my involvement with the rise of the young biotech company, Athira, from being its first outside investor to watching its move toward national Alzheimer's treatment visibility, or my almost yearly opportunities to compete in the World Senior Games. But ones with broad impact that deserved more recognition.

The story that may have been the most impactful on the Seattle area in several ways was about Seattle attorney Arthur Harrigan, Jr., who had key legal roles in saving two of Seattle's professional sports franchises.

Harrigan's low-visibility legal maneuvers forced absentee owners Jeff Smulyan of the Seattle Mariners and five years later Ken Behring of the Seattle Seahawks to be pressed into allowing time for local buyers to be found rather than being permitted to move the teams.

The legal confrontations with the owners of the two professional sports teams came about because Art Harrigan's law firm, now Harrigan Leyh, long represented King County on its legal issues. And the owners of both the Mariners and Seahawks came into conflict with the county because they sought to abandon the county-owned Kingdome and their leases there.

Because the Mariners' decision occurred in arbitration session rather than court battles, there was no media visibility for Harrigan's victory that required Smulyan to not only allow an opportunity to find a local buyer but had the arbitrator set a "local value" $35 million below market value for the franchise. No visibility, that is, until Harrigan shared the stories with me nearly four years ago (search Flynn's Harp: Art Harrigan).

And five years after the Mariners were saved, a series of Harrigan legal maneuvers that ended up before the State Supreme Court and eventually NFL owners, left enough uncertainty about Behring's likely ability to move the Seahawks to LA that he sold the team to Paul Allen.

Harrigan's arbitration victory with the Mariners allowed the high-visibility work of then Sen. Slade Gorton and John Ellis in landing Nintendo as the new lead owner to unfold and Paul Allen to emerge as Seahawks owner. But Harrigan deserves a moment of thanks as each Mariner season opens and when Seahawk fans gather for the first game of the year.

The story I personally found most memorable was the quest of Washington State University, President Elson Floyd, to convince a legislature that was initially reluctant to give him a hearing, to create a medical school at WSU.

Getting the 2015 Legislature to approve the creation of a new medical school at WSU, despite bitter opposition from the University of Washington and its powerful lobbying influence, was the crowning achievement of Floyd's eight years as WSU president.

It only later became known, as his battle for his medical school was being won through the tireless effort of hours of testimony before legislative committees and engaging lawmakers in one-on-one meetings, that he was waging another battle.

Floyd apparently learned early in that 2015 session that he had colon cancer, which before long he learned would likely be terminal. But he fought with equal determination for the next four months against his cancer, a battle he would lose, and for his medical school, a battle he won.

He died on June 20, 15 days before Gov. Jay Inslee signed the bill containing the first $2.5 million to launch what would soon be named The Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, which would be located in Spokane and grow to serve communities in all parts of the state.

As a member of the national advisory board for what is now the Carson College of Business, I had the opportunity to get to know Floyd from soon after his arrival and was stuck, as many others were, with his focus on his conviction about what he viewed as the job-creating mission of higher education.

"We need to communicate with the Legislature and policymakers that we understand that we are about creating jobs, about economic development," Floyd said at his first meeting with the advisory board.

Thus he transformed WSU's role as Washington's land grant university into something far broader. He stood at the national forefront of college leaders in understanding that the role of universities in economic development was destined to become the issue it has become in most states.

And the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, in August of 2017, welcomed its first 60 students to its Spokane campus.

What I describe as the most interesting business-sports story of the decade was the decision by two of the icons of the cellular-wireless era to bring their mutual love of baseball to develop alongside their affection for their wireless business.
John Stanton and Mikal Thomsen were in their 20s when they teamed up in the early '80s 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. Stanton was actually second in command at McCaw.

From the young boy who told his elf "thank you for making this the best day of my life" to the surprise 70th birthday party for Mrs. Clause, this year's Alaska Airlines' "Fantasy Flight" carrying 64 needy kids and their elves to the North Pole from Spokane International Airport brought abundant tears and joy.
 
This story of love and compassion has been Alaska's annual holiday gift to not just the greater Spokane community but also to its employees and to those who, in learning of it, get to share vicariously some of what I've come to refer to as "the magic dust of caring" that's sprinkled on all those involved. This year the volunteers included 15Alaska employees from not just Seattle and Spokane but from far corners or the airline's system.

This "Fantasy Flight" to the North Pole, always known as Santa 1 as it takes wing carrying orphans and foster children ages 4 to 10 from Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, chosen by social service agencies, has been an annual event in Spokane, with sadly only occasional visibility from regular media, for 23 years.
 
But the real magic didn't appear until Alaska got involved in 2008 at the request of Steve Paul, now president and CEO of the non-profit Northwest North Pole Adventures (NNPA), and in his 20th year as a volunteer.
 
United had carried out the holiday event for a number of years but merely taxied the plane around the airport before stopping in front of a north-pole bedecked hanger on the other side of the airport for a party with Santa. But when Paul, then a traveling tech exec and now a senior IT project manager at Spokane energy management company Engie Insight, approached Alaska about replacing United, he asked why the plane couldn't take off and fly around for a bit before arriving at Santa's home. And so it happened.
 
And every year since. So last Saturday evening the kids and their personally selected elves hurried aboard an Alaska 737-900 for a 20-minute flight to visit Santa and Mrs. Clause at their North Pole home.
 
Paul, who is Elf Bernie when he puts on his costume including red top hat, said there were some changes this year, with a new, more expansive hanger arranged for to provide a North Pole Santa's home with more space for volunteers, and a new Santa, the first change in the jolly old man in a number of years.
 
Paul is a senior IT Project Manager at Engje Insight, an energy management company rebranded a couple of years ago from Ecova, who spends much of the year preparing for the flight, working with agencies that select the children, gathering sponsors and overseeing details like elf selection.
 
When I asked Paul prior to last year's column about his elf age, given that he was 43 in people years when he first got involved in 2000, he said his elf age is 907 years, adding that is really only middle age for elves so he still has a ways to go. And he leaves no sign of slowing down.
 
A key part of the event magic in recent years has been Alaska pilot Eric Hrivnak, who has been at the controls for a half dozen or so years. As the flight nears its conclusion, the passengers are told to pull the window shades down and chant the magic words that will allow them to land at the North Pole.  
 
As the kids pull down their shades and do a chant, each wave a magic light wand they were given as they boarded and then Hrivnak deploys the engine thrusters when Santa and Rudolph appear on the radar screen, providing the confirmation that the "Santa 1" flight has entered North Pole airspace.
 
The jetliner taxis to a hanger on the other side of the airport, where the passengers are greeted by a group of elves, with live reindeer milling about, and are they taken to meet Santa and Mrs. Clause.
 
The surprise party for Mrs. Santa was to honor Leslie Lathrop, one of two women founders of the nonprofit, who has been Mrs. Claus 21 of the event's 23 years. As her party began at the donors' celebration, her family emerged from the fireplace in standard Santa style.
 
It was a youngster named Linkin (CQ) whose day of excitement prompted his comment about the best day of his life to his elf, Gwindor, who in real life is Alaska pilot Scott Hitchings, who is retiring next year but told Paul he wants to continue to participate.
 
I first wrote of the event in 2010 when I learned of it from my friend, Blythe Thimsen, then editor of a Spokane magazine, who was to be an elf that year, an experience she shared with me then subsequently wrote about and sent me a copy of the article.
 
And as I explain each year, retelling and updating this story has been my holiday gift to readers of The Harp since then because it's a story of human caring and compassion that not only won't get old but perhaps becomes more needed each year.

If there was a need for evidence that Alaska Air Group Chairman and CEO Brad Tilden and his executive team understand that attention is a key to affection, in the form of loyalty, visits Wednesday to one of the airline's major West Coast markets following a Monday visit to one of its smallest should provide it. 

The Wednesday visit will be with a Tilden-hosted gathering of business and civic leaders in San Diego, which has become a major Alaska Airlines market where its service has grown dramatically in volume and importance since Alaska completed its acquisition of Virgin America Airlines in early 2018.

The San Diego event will follow by two days the visit by Tilden and his executives to Pullman and the Washington State University campus, where Alaska recognized important ties of a different, but no less important, kind.

The visits exemplify that affection, or regard, from its customers and the communities it serves has long been a point of pride for Seattle-based Alaska Airlines and a principal reason for the company's financial success and its ability to successfully push back against the competitive pressures from Delta Airlines over the past few years.

Tilden's San Diego remarks will amount to an update on Alaska's growing service to that city in the form of new non-stops added since the January completion of Alaska's acquisition of Virgin America, including the addition of 19 non-stop flights from San Diego this year.

Tilden and his execs who will be on hand for the event at The Prado in San Diego's historic Balboa Park want it to serve as an example of how they are working to deepen the Airline's relationship with the San Diego community.

The visit by Tilden and his team to the WSU campus Monday was for a series of events, including a prize-filled paper airplane toss, to recognize the airline's relationship with the university, which includes research there on sustainable fuels and Alaska's Imagine Tomorrow Competition.

Alaska Airlines Imagine Tomorrow is an interesting story in its own right as it challenges 9th through 12th graders to seek new ways to support the transition to sustainability. Students research complex topics related to sustainability, then innovate technologies, designs, or plans to mobilize behavior.

As Alaska's website for Imagine Tomorrow notes, students "forge connections in their communities and create positive change. In this competition, as in life, solutions are limited only by imagination."

And WSU is an important partner with Alaska through the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance with which Alaska and WSU are advancing the production and use of aviation biofuels.

Back to the San Diego visit, Tilden and his team will be providing an update on San Diego service, focused on the non-stop service additions of the past year, and discuss more broadly Alaska's West Coast growth, the strength of its presence in Southern California and its support of the community.

Alaska's San Diego passenger load has been growing an average of 13 percent per year over the past five years, including 22 percent in the past year. The airline recently announced new Spokane service and plans to add a San Diego from Paine Field when service commences next year from there. And the airline just announced the addition of service to El Paso, TX.

But underlying those statistics will be Tilden's message of the important, longstanding and growing role Alaska's business, employees and loyalty in Southern California play and how the Airline's strength in California supports strength for local business in the Pacific Northwest.

I've been intrigued to watch, in recent years as San Diego has become an important personal tie for both business and friendships, how a number of businesses in either Seattle or San Diego have reached out to open offices in the other market.

Thus Perkins-Coie, Seattle's largest law firm, opened a San Diego North County office a few years ago, as did Seattle commercial real estate firm Kidder Mathews, while San Diego is a key part of Seattle-based HomeStreet Bank's Southern California commercial banking business. Seattle

Barter company BizX expanded into San Diego in 2017, and Bastyr University in Kenmore on Seattle's Eastside became the first Naturopathic College in California in 2012 when it opened a branch campus in San Diego.

Any legislation created by Congress with the promise of helping the rich get richer by providing for them to help the poor is bound to be challenged from its birth, faced with a mix of believers, skeptics, opportunists, and cynics.  
 
So it is with the Qualified Opportunity Zones (QOZ) provision in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that will permit those owing capital gains tax to delay, reduce or even totally avoid those taxes by investing in special funds designed to start businesses and provide other steps to help economically distressed communities.
 
Ralph IbarraAnd now the OZ legislation, signed into law by President Trump three days before Christmas in 2017, a sort of holiday gift to taxpayers and, significantly, a bipartisan one, is drawing a lot of scrutiny from critics who contend it is turning out to be merely a tax break for billionaires and focused far more on real estate projects than on job creation.

Supporters counter that much of the criticism has a political ring to it a year before the presidential election in which Trump could point to it as an example, albeit a rare one, of Congressional bipartisan progress.
 
Meanwhile, officials in most states, including Washington, have been slow to roll out examples and promote projects the act has made possible with its capital gains tax breaks. Nor has there been much creativity on the part of state leaders to convince some of those wealthy investors to look at potentially winning projects, or in maybe putting state funds into projects that, coupled with the tax breaks, could become attractive for major investors.
 
The "politics" accusations are coming because Congressional opponents are starting to discuss what they see as the need for changes, including a possible effort to terminate zones that are not sufficiently low income. That was one of the key criteria for census tracts to gain OZ eligibility in the original list put together by the Treasury Department.
 
A recent high-visibility example of the criticism was a New York Times article that rained vilification down on Michael Milken, alleging that he tried to take advantage of the Opportunity Zones tax incentives to enhance the value of some of his Nevada property.
 
The Times article indicates that Milken, still widely recalled more as the billionaire king of junk bonds who went to jail than remembered for his decades of philanthropy since then, sought to press the Nevada governor and state officials to get the Treasury Secretary to classify the tract as an OZ.
 
There no real evidence that Milken did that, and there was no effort to paint any of his actions as illegal even if he had.  
 
The parcel was eventually included in the eligible census tracts, despite Treasury's concern that the residents were too well off to get the designation. Once included it was selected by the governor as one of the state's Opportunity zones.
 
Ironically, that Reno area OZ parcel in which Milken owns about 700 acres, contains many of the potential job-creating aspects of what proponents of the tax break indicated they hoped would come about, including a planned tech incubator where smaller companies could set up operations and seek investors.  

My longtime Latino friend Ralph Ibarra, a fan of the Opportunity Zones idea from the outset who has delved deep into the details of the tax-break legislation, says he felt it was a "golden opportunity" to provide a chance for investors to get involved to achieve good ends.
 
"if you want to get investors to act in their enlightened self-interest you incentivize them in ways they understand and that's by offering them the opportunity to get a return," said Ibarra, who has shared several ideas on how he might get involved in ways that would generate returns for his clients and causes from OZs.
 
When I mentioned the Times Article on Milken to Ibarra, who as president of DiverseAmerica Network helps corporations with diversity issues and small businesses with access to opportunities, he said he didn't see a problem.
 
"Using your influence in that way is no different than the Port of Tacoma going to the governor and saying 'it would be helpful if you designated the Tacoma Tide Flats as an Opportunity Zone so we can attract capital to some projects.'"
 
"In fact, I did it myself when I looked at every potential opportunity zone from Seattle to DuPont, intending to try to influence the process, then went to the Lieutenant Governor's office and suggested ones I thought should be selected. I said 'respectfully here are tracts that I believe are worthy of being selected because of the lack of equity capital for small and distressed firms in those areas.'"
 
Ibarra's point was he was seeking to use his influence with the lieutenant governor because of projects he had been involved with relating to the state's second-highest elected official.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, who wrote the 2017 Investing in Opportunity Act measure that was filed and then forgotten in committee, gathered support from moderates of both parties in a true example of working together to revive the bill as an addition to the major tax bill. Thus was born the Opportunity Zones.
 
Governors of the 50 states were brought into the implementation of the act by having the chance to designate census tracts where various business ventures would be eligible for the OZ benefits, through investment by Qualified Opportunity Funds.
 
Jessie J Knight JrA key business figure I asked about the emerging criticism of wealth-enhancing projects just getting off the ground was Jessie J Knight Jr., a retired prominent San Diego business leader closely involved with oversight of the OZ legislation and one for whom philanthropy has become a retirement focus through his family foundation, Knight's Angels.
 
Knight, a retired Alaska Airlines board member who was chairman of San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas Co. both subsidiaries of Sempra Energy, where he was executive vice president, said: "judging this legislation on projects already in place is short-sighted and ignorant about economic development."
 
I reached out to Knight because he is one of the national business leaders selected to serve on a task force chaired by Vice President Michael Pence and Senator Scott that is overseeing the progress of the OP-zones program.
 
"This effort can only be judged in what new investment doors are opened to the private sector in the short run, and in the longer term, what businesses and communities have been improved in years five, seven and 10 (the years in which capital-gains taxes due are evaluated for reductions)," Knight said.

An effort at work in Washington may help provide the model for how Opportunity zones can help bring progress and job creation to economically deprived areas.
A working group, that includes Chuck Depew and the National Development Council for which he is a senior director and West Team Leader, is working with local communities and has come up with some promising projects, in Wenatchee and on the Colville Reservation in Central Washington.

The involvement of the state's Native American Tribes and Opportunity Zones designated near or adjacent to them has yet to fully emerge, but will be essential to future success, Depew says.

But he cautions, with a message that critics of OZ need to digest, that projects that will attract mission-driven investors who want to do good while gaining financial return take longer to put together than the low-hanging fruit that has attracted the wealthy investors looking only to get easy tax breaks.

"The challenge in the program is how can Opportunity-Zone communities, rural, urban and tribal, encourage mission-driven investors, including private, community and family foundations and social impact investors to be involved," Depew told me for an earlier column. "That takes time and resources."

Serial entrepreneur Peter (Pete) Chase is sympathetic to the pushback from communities upset about the impact of looming 5G cellular technology on their esthetics and infrastructure, but he's convinced the new company he's putting together will help ease much of that community concern.
 
Chase, whose Easy Street Solutions will be based in his hometown of Spokane, is referring to the suit filed by more than 100 municipalities around the country, including Seattle and Bellevue, against the Federal Communications Commission over its plan for the rollout of 5G networks across the country.

Pete ChaseThe 5G stands for fifth-generation cellular wireless, which will be required in order for industry leaders AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint to develop and introduce new wireless communications platforms, including the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a transition from existing networks that will require millions of what are described as "small cell towers" placed mainly in urban areas where data usage is greatest.
 
The politics that is accompanying the emergence of the new networks is that the FCC has pre-empted the right to control how the networks of new towers come about and that has local officials up in arms because they are basically being pushed aside on details of things that could have a major impact on the communities.
 
As PC Magazine noted in an article in its August issue, "you should expect the big 5G applications to crop up around 2021 or 2022 and until then, things are going to be confusing as wireless carriers jockey for customers and mindshare."
 
Meanwhile, Chase will be seeking to attract investors as well as wireless carrier "mindshare" for a company that he says will produce towers that "will fit well into the look of the communities."
 
"What we are doing is designing a very aesthetically flexible pole, 20-to-40 feet in height and one-tenth the weight of current poles and one that allows a lot of different options," Chase explained. "These will fit well into the look of the city."
 
"The FCC and carriers need to work with cities to find solutions that make both happy," said Chase. "The big thing for the FCC is that we need to beat China to 5G and you can imagine that China is not going to spend a lot of time thinking of things like building permits," he added with a chuckle. "However, I did see that China is claiming 5G systems are up in several cities - they are definitely ahead of us at this time."
 
"You can't blame communities who feel they have the right to make their own decisions, only to watch that power taken away," Chase said.
 
"Something to note about the FCC mandate is that along with insisting that cities not slow down 5G projects, they also are capping the lease rate per site that the cities can charge the carriers, Chase added.
 
"It's an educational thing on both sides since the cities need to understand that if they want 5G in their cities, they have to work with the carriers.
 
And the carriers need to accept that they can't just start to put up ugly poles everywhere since these poles will be about 800 to 1,000 feet apart."
 
As he begins seeking investors for Easy Street Solutions, which, Chase says is a name that "addresses the issue of how do you deploy this technology and make it easy for all stakeholders," he is likely reminded of his first entrepreneurial go-round with a telecom startup, Purcell Systems.
 
That was in 2000. He was 40 and recalls with a smile that he was guided in that launch by "blind optimism" in the future of what became a $140 million revenue company as a maker of outdoor telecommunications cabinets.
 
The company was sold six years ago to NYSE-listed EnerSys, a manufacturer of batteries for various uses, for $115 million.
 
His success with Purcell earned Chase official entrepreneur status with selection as an Ernst & Young (E-Y) Entrepreneur of the Year and for several years thereafter he was a judge in the EoY competition.
 
His entrepreneur focus took Chase in an unusual direction after Purcell as he launched Columbia International Finance in Spokane to become a player in the Immigrant Investment Program called EB5 that was passed by Congress 30 years ago to stimulate the economy through investment by foreigners. The vehicle was to grant green cards to a specified number of foreigners in exchange for $500,000 invested by each foreigner in projects in this country that created at least 10 new jobs.
 
Chase said he intended to use the EB5 program, which initially and quickly turned into a real estate financing tool by developers, as what he called a "true economic development tool," focused on funding new businesses across the state rather than just real estate.
 
He applied for and was granted approval for Columbia International Finance to be a regional center, which the act decreed would serve as the vehicles to turn the investment dollars into job-creating projects.
 
He found little opportunity in Spokane but got involved in several projects in Seattle to which he directed foreign investments but laments that congressional action to raise the $500,000 investment fee to $900,000, effective Nov, 21, "is going to put the brakes on the program. It's a victim of the effort by Congress to slow applications down because they just don't want immigration."
 
So turning back to his 5G initiative, I asked Chase: "If blind optimism was the attitude you brought to Purcell, what's driving your 5-G effort?"
 
"Confident zeal," Chase replied quickly. "Nothing will stop the growth of data and the Internet of Things, but you have to have a reasonable solution to 5G deployment to pull it off. We do the extremely necessary dumb stuff to make the smart stuff work."
 
"But it's important to remember that 5G networks don't exist now, although there is certainly testing in some venues like sports arenas, so what's in play right now is a lot of marketing fluff," Chase said, adding that "real 5G is probably two years out for the average consumer."

We call the Columbia Tower Club's breakfast interviews On the Shoulders of Giants in the hope that those who accept the invitation to be our guests fit the role of giant whose shared wisdom can permit us to stand on their shoulders, as it were, to perhaps learn from them in shaping our own futures.
 
And despite his likely reluctance to accept the "giant" characterization, former Governor and U.S. Senator Dan Evan comes about as close as any public figure in this state to earning the accolade "giant."
 
So we hope to put some of his thoughts and deeds on display and in the discussion next Friday morning, October 25, the date when he has agreed to be our guest interviewee.
 
Daniel J EvansIt was 55 years ago this November that Daniel J. Evans was elected governor, the state's youngest governor, defeating two-term incumbent governor, Albert D. Rosellini, who was seeking a third consecutive term in the 1964 election. Evans bucked a Democrat landslide nationally that year in winning.
 
It was an election season not unlike this one in terms of the fierce political battles that then, as now, even created divisions within parties, with the John Birch Society creating a right-wing focal point for Republicans.  
 
Despite being a Republican and a self-styled conservative, Evans became known for his administration's liberal policies on environmental protection as he founded the country's first state-level Department of Ecology, which became President Nixon's blueprint for the federal EPA.
 
He was a strong supporter of the state's higher education system, including founding Washington's system of community colleges.
 
And he fought unsuccessfully for a state income tax, basically telling voters that if they rejected his tax plan they maybe should reject him as well. But voters made up their own minds and kept Evans while rejecting his income tax.
 
He achieved national prominence in 1968 as he was chosen to give the keynote address at the Republican National Convention that nominated eventual president Richard Nixon. Evans was talked about for a time as Nixon's possible running mate but his refusal to endorse Nixon, instead of throwing his convention support to Nelson Rockefeller, ended vice president talk.
 
In reflecting on Evans in preparation for the interview next Friday, I went over some previous columns I did on him and was reminded that he was an elected official who was impossible to pigeonhole ideologically. As both governor and senator, he avoided ideological rigidity and found good ideas might sometimes spring from the Democrat side of the political aisle. And that dumb ideas could sometimes be offered by his fellow Republicans.  
 
Proving he was impossible to typecast politically, Evans was equally comfortable blasting "talk show hosts screeching about waste in government," proponents of term limits and a balanced-budget amendment, environmental extremists, and excessive regulations that stymie growth.
 
In a memorable speech he made in Seattle to an audience of business leaders in the mid-90s, Evans offered a couple of bits of political wisdom that bear sharing.
 
"By constantly trashing our political leaders, we also breed disrespect for our own system, of government," Evans said. "The result is a new political landscape dotted with constitutional amendments and initiatives designed to protect citizens from 'evil' politicians."
 
Of two ideas whose proponents have continued to seek traction, Evans told a business-leader audience: "The balanced budget amendment is a loony idea that is meaningless until we decide how to keep a national standard set of books so we can measure balance."
 
And of the idea of term limits, Evans offered: "As a voter, I am outraged by those sanctimonious term limiters who would steal from me the freedom of my vote."
 
But in addition to hitting "those talk show hosts who cater to the base emotion of people," he took to task "the politicians who blithely promise what they know they cannot deliver," and "those rigid environmentalists who will see you in court if they don't get all they seek."
 
Thus he has always been a leader in what I, and many, feel is an unfortunately disappearing breed, those who view ideas on their merits rather than insisting that any new idea must be vetted based on where it fits ideologically.
 
Evans celebrated his 94th birthday this week with friends, followers and admirers, and students of history, still awaiting completion of his autobiography.

The phrase "senior support group" takes on a whole different meaning when the senior is a 79-year-old seeking to remain athletically competitive and the support group is a trio of unusual healthcare providers and a nationally prominent track and field coach seeking to contribute to the process.  
 
Members of this particular senior support group came to the fore in the past three weeks to see if collectively they could salvage my hope, after a leg injury while working out, to get to this year's Huntsman World Senior Games in St. George, UT, where I have competed in my age group in the 100-meter sprint half a dozen times in the past decade.
 
The support team is composed of Bryan Hoddle, one of the nation's most recognized and honored track and field coaches; Dr. Robert Greczanik, an acupuncturist, and practitioner with athletes both amateur and proof what he calls "energetic technologies;" high-intensity trainer Ann-Marie Anderson, and skilled Reiki practitioner Trini Evans. Interestingly, they are also teamed in that they are each other's friends and clients, as I am their client or, in Hoddle's case, friend.
 
Hoddle and Anderson have both been subjects of Harps (Flynn's Harp: Bryan Hoddle and Flynn's Harp: Ann-Marie Anderson) while columns on Greczanik and Evans are in planning, not because they are friends but because what they are doing to bring new definitions to healthcare merits attention.
 
The challenge they are now helping to address with me is that during a recent workout on a Bellevue track, as I wound up my workout with a series of full-speed 100's, near the 80-meter mark of the second 100 meters, it suddenly felt as if an alligator had bitten into the base of my right hamstring. I instantly knew I had torn it, or at least pulled it.
 
The details that follow will be interesting to some readers, amusing to others who think they know all about sports medicine.
 
I called Hoddle to ask if I could do any sort of exercise in the following three days before I could get in to see "Dr. Bob," given the injured hamstring and pain accompanying it.
"Don't do anything until you see Dr. Bob, and make sure to ask him if you locked your big toe," he added.
 
It was a weekend and I knew I wouldn't be able to see my acupuncture doc, "Dr. Bob," at his Energetic Sports Lab in Bellevue until Tuesday since Monday is the day for Seahawks to see him repair game day injuries.
 
Robert Greczanik, known to most as "Dr. Bob," has a doctorate in the practice of acupuncture as well in Oriental Medicine and for 20 years has been serving athletes (and others) to "achieve peak performance," avoid injuries and recover rapidly when injury does occur.  
 
Acupuncture is a technique in which practitioners stimulate specific points on the body by inserting thin needles through the skin. It is one of the practices long used in traditional Chinese medicine.  
 
Since he has worked with organizations and athletes from the Seattle Seahawks and Sounders, Buffalo Bills, Los Angeles Clippers, Portland Trailblazers and numerous other pro and college organizations and individuals, I was pleased and grateful that he has had time for an old runner. Being friends helped.
 
When I asked Bob about Hoddle's "frozen big toe" comment, he replied that I hadn't frozen it but he made the point that "most people are unaware of the fact that there are fibers in the big toe that help determine the health of the hamstring as well as other parts of the body. Yours is okay."
 
I remarked to Dr. Bob that I realized there was no way I was going to be able to run a competitive 100-meter race in three weeks but that I'd like to begin getting my hurting hamstring back to health.
 
"Hey, 'white lightning' (his nickname for me that he knows will bring laughter), don't worry about it" he replied. "You'll be running fine by then.'
 
So he placed the needles in my hamstring and areas in the other leg and after 25 minutes on the table, he removed them and the hamstring felt like new. But I realized I needed to avoid full-speed effort until the race day.
 
"So what can I do on the track now," I asked and Dr. Bob replied, "ask Coach Hoddle."
 
Coach Hoddle counseled me to do 40 percent-speed work out on the track, followed by 60 to 70 percent speed three days later. "I tell my guys returning from an injury to remember the 72-hour rule."
 
Hoddle is one of the nation's most recognized and honored track and field coaches whose attention to developing young athletes and counseling coaches came to include aiding disabled athletes and now a national focus on wounded veterans who have lost limbs and need to learn to run again.
 
And he's full of sayings, as in when I worried that I wished I could get one more workout in before heading for St. George, he said "Don't worry about it. The hay is in the barn." When I asked what that meant he replied: "You're set. Don't need any more preparation." Hd followed that with "People don't realize that less s frequently better."
 
When I returned to Dr. Bob the following week, he placed his needles in several places but none in the injured hamstring and when I questioned that, he replied "Hamstring is all well now. Go for it."
 
Meanwhile, sessions with my high-intensity trainer to keep muscle strength as close to normal as possible and Reike to enhance the healing, as well as deal with a sore back muscle, added key elements to the return to health.
 
Trini Evans, my Reiki Master/Teacher practitioner in the form of healthcare that is based on the idea that human hands can redirect "life force energy" to heal stress and assist in the body's natural healing processes, became a key part of the healthcare team seeking to restore my ability to compete.
 
In addition to the Reiki healing process, she regularly provided the counsel "relax. Focus on your ability. You'll do fine." Maybe that was mental Reike.
 
Interestingly, Reiki is now viewed by many as an effective, accepted alternative practice in mainstream America, where at least 1.2 million adults have tried the energy healing therapy that 60 hospitals have adopted as part of patient services and education that is reportedly offered at 800 hospitals.
 
And the high-intensity training sessions with Ann-Marie Anderson, one a week, as I have been doing with her in her Ideal Exercise Gym for more than three years, became important for her focus on ensuring that I retained the upper-body strength key for sprinting.
 
Anderson is a nationally recognized leader of a small but growing group of practitioners of an exercise technique called high-intensity resistance training, which Greczanik, also one of her clients, describes as "the new paradigm of training."
 
So after my workout on the track at 90 percent of full speed over the weekend, I told each member of the team this week: "Thanks, guys. I didn't really expect to be ready for the starting line in St. George after the hamstring pain hit, but I now know I will. So we'll see when the gun sounds mid-morning on Oct. 16 how many seconds before I reach the finish line, as well as how many guys got there ahead of me."  
 
Oops! Each of my healthcare team has admonished or scolded me on several occasions in the past three weeks to quit focusing on the idea that some will be ahead of me. "Sorry, guys!"  
 
The reality is I've never taken first in this race at the Games, but I've taken 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 6th. So some year there may be no one ahead of me at the finish line.
 
So of the Huntsman World Senior Games themselves. The late Jon Huntsman Sr.'s vision of creating an event that would attract hordes of seniors to Southern Utah annually to engage in competition with each other if he named it the World Senior Games has become, over three decades, likely the most successful event of its kind in ...well...the world.

Macy's announcement that it will close its downtown flagship store and thus bring permanent closure to the last vestige of the retail icon whose decades of visibility as simply The Bon was actually ended by Macy's in 2005 prompted two people for whom The Bon had deep roots to share their thoughts on what it meant to Seattle retailing.
 
One, Chuck Nordhoff, recalled how his great grandparents, Edward and Josephine Nordhoff, she 18 with a two year old daughter and he 32,, came west to Seattle from Chicago in 1890 to create a small dry goods store they named the Bon Marche, after a famous 1800s retailer in Paris, a European capital where Nordhoff worked for a time.
 
John BullerJohn Buller, on the other hand, had a key role in shaping The Bon competitively and changing the culture of the retailer in the '80s when, as training director and Director of Corporate Culture, researching the history of the company was part of his approach to aide employees in understanding their roles as current employees. He described his role to me as "changing the culture from a clerk environment to a selling environment."
 
In his research relating to history, Buller discovered some of the details that helped fashion The Bon's early appeal and that built regard for the Nordhoffs among citizens of what was, at that time, a population of about 40,000 residents scattered in and around the Seattle area.
 
One was the fact that Edward Nordhoff was one of the earliest discount retailers and the story of how he fashioned that role is an amusing bit of history that should have been more enduringly told.
 
It seems that Nordhoff, in the face of competitors who included Donald E. Frederick and Nels B. Nelson (like the Nordhoffs in their 30s when they founded Frederick & Nelson) went back to New York and returned with thousands of pennies. He gave customers back a penny for each dollar spent, basically offering a 1 percent discount on all purchases, the idea of a 1 percent discount being nothing to sneeze at in those days, apparently.
 
Chuck Nordhoff's thoughts are more future-focused as he shared with me concern about what will become of fixtures and parts of history still located on the walls and doors in the store.
 
"If there's one thing the family is interested in, it's what will happen to things like the bust of Josephine Nordhoff over the elevator door and the series of panels that are mostly dated from the earliest era, including one panel that talks of Josephine," he said.
 
He suggested there would be room for such memorabilia in the Museum of History and Industry, whose board he has been a member of and chaired.
 
In fact, Josephine Nordhoff is a woman appropriate to be remembered well beyond the store. Little recalled is her role as a prominent Seattle businesswoman. In fact, Edward Nordhoff credited her with guiding the success of the store. She was also a prominent supporter of community causes, including the Seattle Day Nursery and the Seattle Orthopedic Hospital Association.
 
As early as 1918, she championed the eight-hour workday, a controversial position at the time. She died of cancer in 1920. On the day of her funeral, all of Seattle's major downtown retailers closed their stores in her memory.
She was the first woman inducted into the Puget Sound Business Hall of Fame early in the history of the event created by Junior Achievement and the Puget Sound Business Journal.
 
Nordhoff recalls that his father, Arthur, who turned 90 on September 11, was born a year after The Bon was sold to Hahn Department Stores. Five years later Hahn Stores was bought by Allied Stores Corporation.

Seattle's Discovery Institute is planning what it's billing as a national technology summit in Bellevue in late October with some of the nation's most noted experts in areas from technology to economics on hand for an event with the compelling goal "to explore the impacts of the coming technology disruption and convergence."  

And it may be that while the topics for the October 23-25 event range from artificial intelligence, blockchain, crypto, and international political impacts, the best draw may be the discussion of "life beyond Google."

The summit gathering is called COSM, which Discovery Institute president Steve Buri explains is not an acronym but means the world and stands for what organizers tout as the era of emerging and converging technologies.

Tom AlbergThe event, which will be held at the Bellevue Westin, is the brainchild of George Gilder. Discovery Institute co-founder and noted lecturer and author who is described as "a peerless visionary of technology and culture." 

He was, among many things for which he is prominent, a proponent of supply-side economics in the early '80s, particularly through his best-selling Wealth and Poverty in 1981.

With the increasing controversy about Google, its social media pervasiveness and the growing concern about the security of personal information, there are likely to be more than a few attendees eager to learn more, including from Gilder whose Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy may key discussion.

The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an amazing time. But conference speakers are among those who say it's coming to an end.

In Life after Google, Gilder explains why Silicon Valley is suffering what he refers to as a nervous breakdown over what lies ahead and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns.

And Gilder won't be the only guest speaker challenging Google's supremacy. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and one of the most successful and controversial venture capitalists, has a problem with Google.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Thiel accused Google of being unpatriotic for operating an artificial intelligence lab in China while simultaneously developing artificial intelligence for the Pentagon. Thiel has been prominent in his criticism of Google in recent years and at a July speech at the National Conservatism conference, he called the research "treasonous."  

In addition to Gilder and Thiel, speakers include Steve Forbes, Ken Fisher, inventor, and futurist Ray Kurzweil and venture capitalist Tim Draper, a major proponent of Bitcoin and decentralization.

The conference is targeted toward anyone seeking to peek into the future of technology, including corporate senior executives from CEOs to CIOs, investors, researchers, and technologists.

The summit is being co-sponsored by Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group, whose founder, Tom Alberg, will serve as co-chair as well as moderator of a panel on alternative vehicles, called "Will Pilots and Drivers Soon Be Obsolete?"

This is a topic of particular relevance to the Seattle area as Bellevue pursues a strategy focused on an eventual 23,000 autonomous vehicles with autonomous vans as their primary transportation role. Meanwhile, Seattle's $68 billion Sound Transit light rail system could face a challenge from driverless cars in its effort to attract rail supporters.

Steve Buri"Technology and Science are ever-present in our lives, actually more obvious than they have been in previous decades given the phone in our pocket and constant news flow that raises questions about where it is all going," said Alberg. "COSM will bring together people from different backgrounds and points of view to talk about the impact of science and technology on culture.  These are the conversations we have around the dinner table and Seattle has experts in so many of these areas."

"Rather than being focused on specific areas of technology - we are going to take a broad look at the big themes that will continue to have an impact for decades to come," Alberg added.    

An interesting focus at the conference will be on cryptocurrencies, including a first-day panel on the question: "Can crypto reverse the tech decline (and enable an internet renaissance)?"

As Gilder puts it: The future lies with the "cryptocosm" - the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google."

"Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a 'great unbundling,' which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet," he added.

Or how about this discussion point from Gilder: "The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have proved hopelessly permeable."

That discussion alone strikes me worth the price of admission to an event that Buri said Discovery Institute hope will become an annual summit event. Meanwhile, it is looking for other sponsors for this first event.

The director of Income Security at the AARP Foundation, Aliza Sir, seems an unlikely messenger for her talks to entrepreneur-support groups with her attention-getting message that today's entrepreneurs are just as likely to be empty nesters or grandparents as typical tech-savvy younger people.

So it's appropriate on this World Entrepreneur's Day, created by the Alliance of International Business Associations to focus awareness on entrepreneurship and innovation, for the entrepreneur-focused Kauffman Foundation to discuss "encore entrepreneurs," in keeping with Sir's message.
 
When I retired in 2006 and bought the domain name "Entrepreneurial encore," it was because I knew that would characterize my post-retirement path and that at some point, I could create a website with that focus for others seeking the same encore. I just didn't realize that I was merely ahead of the curve.

Kauffman, the Kansas City, MO, organization that is the nation's largest non-profit focused on entrepreneurs, notes that "America is not getting any younger," adding that "in fact, last year the U.S. Census Bureau's national population projections forecast that by the year 2030, older people, 65 years and older, will outnumber children under age 18 for the first time in U.S. history."

And Kauffman's most recent Index of Startup Activity points out that the highest rate of entrepreneurial growth over the last few years is not Gen Y startups but Boomers over the age of 50, a trend that has attracted the tag "Encore Entrepreneurs."

According to the Kauffman Indicators of Entrepreneurship, the percent of the U.S. population that starts a new business is highest in the 45 to 55 age category at 39 percent with the 55 to 65 age group following closely behind at 38 percent. In both age groups, the number of new startups trends upward. Moreover, the percent of new entrepreneurs who created a business by choice instead of necessity in the 55 to 64 age categories registers just over 88 percent, higher than any other age group.

"The future of work is something that we think about a lot," Sir added. "The trend of older entrepreneurs offers amazing potential for people to leverage their experiences, work for themselves, and transform Main Street economics. It's incredibly important to celebrate and lift up those entrepreneurs."
 
Comes now the State of New York with a leading-edge initiative that is most likely to spread to other states, and hopefully, Washington State will be at the forefront.
A bill called the "encore entrepreneur,", proposed by Sen. Rachel May, a Syracuse Democrat would establish training and education programs across the state to allow older citizens to more easily open and operate their own businesses. It's been approved by both houses of the legislature and is awaiting signature.
 
"What we're seeing in New York and around the country is that, more and more, there are people over the age of 50 turning to entrepreneurship," said the lawmaker's chief aide. "We need to understand that, while New York's population is getting a lot older, it doesn't have to be a problem. We need to see it as an opportunity. And one opportunity is the potential for encore entrepreneurs."
 
Supporters of the legislation say it will establish a more robust system that would allow the state to better incorporate older citizens into the economy.
 
As key supporters note, "many older people have significant work experience, deep networks of contacts and are typically placed in the low-risk lending category."
 
But many seniors often lack direct knowledge of starting and growing their own business or maybe intimidated to work in an incubator space surrounded by dozens of millennials decades younger.
 
My first reaction to that was that as WeWork, with its the soaring success, has changed the way people think about work and office spaces and Seattle-based Riveter has created a model for co-working space for women, some entrepreneur will soon come up with a plan for co-working space for seniors.
 
The New York plan could lead to something like dedicated educational and mentorship programs directed towards seniors within a business incubator, or it could be a dedicated space for just seniors to work in.
 
"No state to date has done much to explicitly support senior encore entrepreneurship," he said. "One of the reasons that we felt a piece of legislation was important is to nudge the state into taking more of an active role," said the New York lawmaker's aide.
 
At my retirement party, as I left Puget Sound Business Journal's publisher role in April of 2006, the late Herb Bridge said to me: "I can't envision you being retired, Mike."
 
"Herb," I replied, "there are various ways to retire. It's like if your tires are getting in need of a change, you drive into Costco to get a new set of treads and you emerge re-tired and ready for another trip."
 
I figure an increasing number of those like me, including a number of friends reaching 70s and beyond, will find themselves looking to re-tire for a new trip and that a growing number of support services, including from states and dedicated workspace, will emerge to help fuel the trips.
 
My friend and venture capitalist John Fluke Jr. has a message for senior entrepreneurs that relates to not trying to fly alone and reminds those hoping to find investors for their businesses that most of the investors that seniors might hope to attract are likely to also be seniors, well into their 60s or beyond.
 
Fluke is chairman of Fluke Venture Partners and chairman of Athira, the regenerative-medicine biotech that is attracting national attention to its human trials on a drug to regrow brain cells and in which he and I were fortunate enough to be the first two investors (at dramatically different amounts!),
 
He says his interest in investing in an entrepreneur company has more to do with the team being assembled than in the age or gender of the entrepreneur.
 
A lone entrepreneur is going to be less interesting than one who has begun to assemble a team, Fluke said. "There's a reason why a commercial jetliner always has two pilots."

S. Michael (Mike) Kunath, who died in his sleep early Saturday after a nearly two-year battle with cancer will be remembered for his successful financial guidance of some of the region's most prominent business people, his active support of charitable causes and his nurture of entrepreneurs.  
 
But for many who knew him, their memories will start with his table at the Fairmont Hotel where plans for most of his business, charitable and community involvements took shape and were vetted by those gathered there.

Kunath was a fan of this column and once hired me to help him create his own blog. And he often said to me: "You should write a column about this table." So here it is, Mike: a column about the table, and the unforgettable guy who held court there for nearly a quarter century through ownership of two hotels.
 
It was always an interesting group gathered over wine at his oval table just outside the bar at the Fairmont, whether they were there for important business discussions or merely someone wandering through the hotel lobby and invited to sit down. All looked on as any newcomer was advised by Kunath, leaning to his side in his chair, in earlier years, puffing on his corncob pipe: "tell us who you are and why you are here."
 
But first briefly about his background before reflection and recollections on the man his 46-year friend and co-investor in various businesses and charitable events, Brendan O'Farrell, referred to as "a true Renaissance Man for All Seasons."
 
Kunath was the son of a diplomat and spent his growing up years being educated in various places in the world before attending the University of San Francisco as well as Seattle University from which he graduated, then got his MBA. After time as a financial advisor, he became a founding partner and principal at Kunath, Karren, Rinne and Atkin, LLC in Seattle.
 
One of the most interesting ideas to spring from the Kunath-table discussions was one of the last. It was the suit he filed in July of 2017, a few months before his cancer emerged, challenging the Seattle City Council's plan to impose an income tax on Seattle residents.
 
Kunath, known as a political moderate, was incensed at a City Council that openly, and proudly, touted the measure before cheering supporters as an effort to "tax the rich." For days, his anger at a council that had departed so far from the moderate council members and mayors of old was on display to all who visited the table. Then came the lawsuit idea.
 
Filing suit against the tax was discussed and framed in table discussions for a couple of weeks, with it being important to Kunath that his suit is the first filed (eventually two other suits were filed against the City) because he was typically certain his arguments would be more persuasive before the court.  
 
Juarez, Kunath, BledsoeKunath's suit was filed by his attorney, Matt Davis, minutes after then-Mayor Ed Murray signed the tax into law following City Council passage. By lottery, it was the suit first destined to be heard before King County Superior Court Judge John R. Ruhl in November, but the City Council decided to withdraw the income tax plan before Judge Ruhl could hear the case and rule on it.
 
While the suit over the city income tax was the most visible, it wasn't the most impactful of Kunath's involvements. The ones that likely fit that description of "impactful" came in the '80s.

First was the effort to turn the small leukemia support event called Celebrity Waiter into something significant.
 
His longtime friend, Mike Bledsoe, recalled in a conversation after Kunath's death, how he, Kunath and their mutual friend Gene Juarez, who was also a client of Kunath's, stepped in to turn the $12,000 fundraising lunch into what became the most successful Celebrity Waiters event in the country at about $500,000.
 
"We felt we could improve on the total amount raised and have a darn good time doing it," Bledsoe said. "The more zany things we could think up, the faster the event grew."
 
"I remember Kunath convincing me to travel with him to Vancouver B.C. a few years ago to convince a group of locals there that they should create, with our help, a sister group to the Seattle Celebrity Waiters group so we could have someone to compete with," Bledsoe added.
 
It was the same threesome of Kunath, Bledsoe, and Juarez who helped fulfill the dream of the founding of Heritage College on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Toppenish by Dr. Kathleen Ross, a Catholic nun of the Holy Names order.
 
Ross planned to launch a fully accredited four year College, Heritage College, in an abandoned old Schoolhouse with the dream of bringing quality education to the Native-American students in the region.
 
"It looked like a long shot to us and so it was too big of an idea to ignore." And thus with business advice and arm-twisting of contacts for a financial contribution, coupled with Ross' vision, what has emerged in Toppenish is Heritage University. It was the Hispanic youths who have come in large numbers to Heritage, which now has branch campuses at two-year colleges in the Tri=Cities and Yakima.  
 
Back to Kunath's table, which always sported a "reserved" sign throughout the day and which was, since Kunath always picked up the tab for wine there, a significant source of revenue for the hotel.  
 
Kunath and I were the same age, our birthdays a day apart so we inevitably found time for a toast to the fact we were still here and life had been good to us the previous year. But there was no toast to our 79th this past April. 
 
Kunath, OFarrell, HatchAmong the most regular of attendees at the table, always serving as both table humorist and key Kunath advisor, was Ken Hatch, the retired 30-year chairman and CEO of KIRO Inc, who died in November of 2017.
 
An example that far more than wine was shared there was the comment from his longtime friend John Oppenheimer, founder and CEO of Columbia Hospitality, the Seattle-based hospitality management and consulting company.
 
"Kunath's table at The Fairmont was such a great place for all kinds of introductions," Oppenheimer recalled. "We met our Senior VP of Marketing, who has been with us for the last 10 years, thanks to Mike's table."
 
There was a time when conversations at tables cross the city shaped the future of the region, like the one on which a napkin drawing of a space needle provided a step toward what became Century 21, the Seattle World's Fair. And many of those conversations were at the same hotel, but more likely back in the day when it was the Olympic Hotel.
 
There likely will be a final gathering at, or more likely in the room surrounding the table. And Bledsoe predicts attendees will take turns sitting in the chair at the head of the table, sipping a glass of wine and leaning forward while looking at the crowd with a Kunath grin.

Shabana Khan's rise to national and global prominence as the queen of promoters of the sport of squash has come with a few giant steps while her progress toward recognition in the local community that she has put on the international squash map is happening in small steps.

One of the reasons she has gained high regard from youthful squash players, their coaches and parents are the national College Showcase that she put on last week for nationally ranked students, 16 men and 16 women, aged 15 to 18, playing before coaches of the top schools where squash is a scholarship sport. It was the fourth annual Showcase event.
Shabana Khan and Yasmine

The fact the young competitors were all from Washington and California while the coaches eyeing prospective scholarship talent were from schools like Amherst, Middlebury, Vasser, George Washington, Bates, and Brown points up the difference in focus on the sport on the East Coast and the West, including the Puget Sound area.

But another difference, one for which Khan deserves significant recognition, is the fact that similar tournaments on the East Coast cost the young competitors, or rather their supportive parents, between $3,000 and $5,000 to participate in one of the four-day events while the students competing here pay nothing.

Part of Khan's stated goal is bringing an awareness of squash to young people of all backgrounds rather than merely the children of the squash affluent, whose demographics are men and women, both players and fans, with median incomes of more than $300,000 and an average net worth of nearly $1,500,000.

A quest for awareness for youth squash is exemplified by her thus-far unsuccessful effort to convince the City of Bellevue that there should be a park for squash courts so that, as she puts it, "kids of ordinary means can learn to play without having to have their parents be members of a club."

In fact, as the mother of aspiring youth squash star, 13-year-old Yasmine, she knows the challenges of youth-squash competition.  

Readers of The Harp will recognize that I've written about Khan before. Beginning when she brought the Men's World Squash Championship to Bellevue, the first time (ever) in the U.S. The reason is because of a conviction that what she is seeking to do for Bellevue and its young people in particular merits far more attention than she is getting.

A couple of significant developments for Khan and her squash initiatives await in the coming months. One brings particular pleasure to the now 50-year-old former national women's squash champion.

That's the fact that her world invitational squash tournament in August for top squash talent, six women and six men, will be an event whose sponsors have decided to name the event, the only one of its kind in the country, after her late father. There are no other squash events in the country like it.

Yusuf Khan, who brought the sport of squash to Seattle from his native India a half-century ago and, as one of the world's top squash professionals, proceeded to bring Seattle to the attention of the national and international squash establishments and see two of his daughters become women's national champions, died last October at the age of 87.

The invitational event that will be held August 25-30 at the Hidden Valley Boys & Girls club in Bellevue will be named "PMI Dave Cutler Presents The Yusuf Khan Invitational."

The "PMI Dave Cutler" portion of the title is for the two men, both internationally known in their respective professions, who have become the financial support for YSK Events, the little non-profit through which Khan carries out her squash events.

One is Dave Cutler of Microsoft, universally acclaimed as the key technical brain behind the Microsoft Windows NT and all the subsequent windows versions. A decade ago he was recognized as a National Medal of Technology and Innovation laureate, perhaps the most prestigious honor in the country for developers of new technology.

The other is Robert Harris, founder, and CEO of PMI-Worldwide, a Seattle-based brand, and product-marketing company with offices in seven cities around the world whose corporate philanthropy has only recently begun to be recognized.

The two have come to team up for a $150,000 donation that for the past several years has allowed Khan to put up the prize money, which this year will total $300,000.

"Every player participating is ranked inside the top 10 in the world," Khan noted. 'The only one, not world ranked is our local player, Reeham Sedky, who has just recently begun her professional career."

I got to write about Sedky, though sadly it was her only local visibility, after the then 21-year-old who was born and raised in Bellevue and became the nation's best women's high school squash player as a student at Forest Ridge, upset one of the world's top women at last year's Invitational.

Sedky has begun her squash pro career after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania where she was women's national squash champion.

The fact that her father is Egyptian works for Amazon and played squash, is an example of the role the growing international diversity of the Puget Sound region can play in bringing squash, among the top sports in many countries, into greater prominence among activities for young people.

It's particularly appropriate that the PMI Dave Cutler event will be named this year for Yusuf Khan since it was 20 years ago that he and Shabana teamed to bring to Seattle the first women's world squash championship ever held in the United States.

Khan is adding a fun factor to the invitational event this year in the form of a tech company tournament that she explains will be called the Tech Challenge and will involve 12 teams, with four from Microsoft already committed. Each team of top squash players from their companies will put up $5,000 to compete.

"We need about $110,000 from the 'Tech Challenge' to fill out our $300,000 prize money," Khan said.

And a few weeks after the invitational event, Khan's plan for a new series of western youth squash tournaments called West Coast Squash will debut as a competitive Junior Squash series involving teams from Vancouver, Portland, San Jose, San Francisco, and the Los Angeles area. She said Orange County, "which has an excellent squash facility," could be added.

In the face of an apparent lack of interest, from the Eastside establishment, in what Shabana is doing for the image of the area in the global squash community and the many countries where squash is a top sport. I was struck by the answer that Harris gave me last year when I asked why he was such a strong supporter of Khan. It bears repeating here.

"It's pretty simple. In a world beginning to look inward rather than building international alliances and global partnerships, I believe it's increasingly important to support sports that are global in nature and connect people from around the world. This is the only way humanity, and our planet are going to survive and prosper."

It's a comment that leaders of the business and civic communities that have "other causes" than Shabana's might ponder.

Donald Bonker, one of this state's most respected experts on international trade across the past half dozen presidential administrations, suggests that when trade agreements become more about politics than economics, the stability of economies comes to be at risk.

In focusing on the current trade crisis with China, Bonker, a former seven-term Democratic congressman from Washington's Third District, suggests that "China has a historical and long-term perspective that is lacking in America. 

Donald Bonker"They have a five-year economic plan that enjoys strong support while America has presidential elections every four years, with incoming presidents often reversing the course of their predecessors," he said.

Bonker's trade credentials, both those he earned during his 14 years in Congress from 1974 to 1988 and from his involvements thereafter, have gained him broad respect in this country and abroad for his trade and foreign investment knowledge.

He was a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of the Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade. Bonker served on the president's Export Council and headed former House Speaker Tip O'Neill's Trade Task Force, which led to the passage of the 1988 Omnibus Trade Act.  

I knew Bonker well when we were both in our early 30s, he as innovative auditor of Clark County, laying the groundwork for an intended but unsuccessful run for secretary of state, and I as a UPI political writer in Olympia. And later, after his first unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, I had him write a regular trade-issues column for Puget Sound Business Journal.

In fact, I have had fun telling friends occasionally that after he left Congress, at one of our meetings, he gave me a photo of us that had been taken at a 1968 political fundraiser for Sen.Martin Durkan and that had hung on his wall during his years in Congress. After sharing the story, I then add that the reason it had hung on his wall was because of the other person in the photo, then-Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, one of his heroes.

Bonker, 82, travels back and forth regularly from his Bainbridge Island home to Washington, D.C., where he is an executive director and on the international advisory council of APCO Worldwide, global public affairs & strategic communications consultancy.

We hadn't visited for years when I suggested recently that we have lunch so I could learn about his newly published autobiography called Dancing to the Capitol, which begins with what the foreword describes as "a wry take on his brief stint as a dance instructor, which gives the book its title and its spirit."

The foreword, by former Los Angeles Times editor Shelby Coffey who is now vice chairman of the Nuseum, describes Bonker as "a man of faith--often struggling with being both a Democrat and a Christian," and noting that Bonker helped bring the National prayer breakfast to international prominence.

"He has been a key, if quiet, force for others of faith who contend in public life," Coffey wrote.

In fact, our luncheon discussion quickly turned from his autobiography to the issue of trade and politics. Bonker would like to see Democrats turn trade discussions away from the punitive to the progressive, meaning they should focus on building the opportunity for exports that could create jobs rather than be focused on trade barriers in the hope that approach can retain jobs.

During his tenure in Congress, Bonker authored and was a principal sponsor of significant trade legislation, the Export Trading Company Act and the Export Administration Act.

"The trade issues are very difficult for Democrats," Bonker said. "In their hearts they are global but labor has become so against trade that Democrats are left in a difficult political position."

"We should match what our competitors -- Japan, China, Germany - have been doing for years. They have ambitious government programs that give their exporters an advantage in this increasingly competitive global economy," Bonker suggested. "The U S., by comparison, is so preoccupied with limiting imports that there is little or no attention given to boosting exports. That is the real problem."
My alternative would be to export more, not import less," Bonker said.

"One example is the Export-Import Bank, which provides essential financial guarantees that allow U.S. corporations to compete with their competitors (Boeing versus Airbus)," he added.  

"This respected financial entity remains idle now, even though it does not require Federal funding," Bonker said. "Meanwhile, across America, there are about 50,000 domestic companies that are competitive but have difficulty pursuing foreign markets because the help that should be there isn't."

Bonker offered a bit of history on the political back and forth that has characterized this country's trade positions, starting with the passage in 1928 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that hiked tariffs, often up 100 percent, on 20,000 foreign imports.

"That prompted our allies and dozens of other countries to retaliate, causing the collapse of the world trading system that led to the Great Depression," Bonker said.

"Hoover was booted out, replaced by FDR, who championed pro-trade policies to repair the damage to international trade," he added. "Again, the political dynamic changed around the 1960s-70s, where Democrats, driven by labor unions, started to embrace protectionist policies, and Ronald Reagan arrived to champion free trade.  

"Trump's campaign rhetoric and subsequent actions are more in sync with Democrats and Bernie Sanders," Bonker added, with a jab at both. "Republicans are puzzled and frustrated.  It is contrary to their fundamental beliefs, alignment with their business support base."

As to the China trade concern, Bonker said: "whether China will retaliate to the latest round of tariff threats remains to be seen, but in long term, you don't mess with China, even if your name is Donald Trump."

Bonker, who specializes in Chinese investment in the United States, offers a criticism of both houses of Congress for their reactions to the Administration's tariff initiatives, saying"Senate Republicans remain muted and House Democrats discretely like what the President is doing, adding, "if we continue down this path of protectionism, it will be a repeat of Smoot Hawley."