Project developing in Spokane Valley
Centennial Properties Inc. appears to be planning a project on land the company owns near the Mirabeau Point development in Spokane Valley.
The Spokane company has filed pre-application documents with the city of Spokane Valley. Centennial Properties is owned by Cowles Publishing Co., which also owns The Spokesman-Review.
The 94,000-square-foot property is located at 13224 E. Mansfield Ave. and is zoned by the city of Spokane Valley for light-industrial development. That zoning is suitable for office use, according to city documents.
Wayne Frost, general manager of Centennial Properties, declined to comment on any of the specifics of the project except to say that the documents on file at the city are “premature.”
The pre-application is essentially an information-gathering session for the applicant to receive feedback about proposed buildings, said Micki Harnois, an associate planner with the city of Spokane Valley.
Centennial’s pre-application for the project discussed three buildings, but only one in detail, she said.
“Two were unspecified, one as an office,” Harnois said.
There were no specifics about the number of floors or the floor space of the buildings, but she said there was mention of a potential restaurant.
Liberty Lake firm wins statewide contract
Liberty Lake Internet Exchange announced Wednesday it has won a master contract to provide services for more than 1,500 Washington state agencies.
The announcement means Liberty Lake Internet Exchange is able to compete for contracts with those agencies without going through a request-for-bid process, said Octavio Morales, a company spokesman.
“This allows us a captive audience we can sell our services to,” said Morales.
LLIX, a data center and business services provider, is owned by Spokane-area tech entrepreneur Bernard Daines.
Along with offering data recovery, storage and backup services, LLIX intends to provide clustered computing for businesses and large organizations, which means sharing groups of computers for big data-crunching projects.
Morales said the new state award opens the door to working for all state agencies and a large number of nonprofits, including hospitals, health districts and schools.
Washington Mutual adds jobs at Texas center
San Antonio
Banking giant Washington Mutual Inc. said Wednesday that it will create 2,250 jobs at a new business support center in San Antonio, and that its plan calls for the number of employees to almost double in the next seven years.
Company officials said the first jobs to be filled will be at a call center that will pay $9 to $15 per hour. After that, the support center will expand to perform various financial back-office operations and other tasks, said Benson Porter, Washington Mutual’s chief administrative officer.
“We think this is the place where we want to build the foundation for our growing company across the country,” said Porter, adding that most of the hiring will be done in the San Antonio area.
The Seattle-based company already employs about 3,600 people in Texas, nearly all of them split evenly between Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It has nearly 250 retail banking and home-loan offices in the state.
GM, Ford, Toyota lead performance survey
Detroit Almost every automaker made significant strides in vehicle dependability in a new survey, but General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Co. were among the top performers, J.D. Power and Associates said Wednesday.
The closely watched survey, which has been published since the late 1980s, measures dependability by questioning owners of three-year-old vehicles about problems they’re experiencing, such as wind noise or excessive brake wear. This year’s survey questioned 50,635 owners of 2002 model-year cars and trucks.
Chance Parker, executive director of product and research analysis at J.D. Power, said the industry showed a 12 percent improvement in this year’s survey. The industry average was 237 problems per 100 vehicles this year, compared with 269 problems per 100 vehicles in 2004.
Lexus, Toyota’s luxury nameplate, was the top-performing brand with 139 problems per 100 vehicles, while Kia was the worst performer with 397 problems. Hyundai Motor Co. showed the most improvement, with 260 problems per vehicle compared with 375 problems in the 2001 model year.