Warrior Electric wins UW award

Warrior Electric, of Spokane Valley, was named Business of Tomorrow by the University of Washington Minority Business of the Year awards program.

The award is given to a company with revenues of under $2 million that is “poised for significant growth.”

Warrior Electric, a Native American-owned company, has 12 employees, revenues of $1.9 million, and specializes in commercial and industrial electric installations in Washington and Idaho.

Chewelah

49 Degrees North set to open new lift

The first new chairlift to be installed at 49 Degrees North in 26 years begins operating Friday.

The new Sunrise Quad chairlift, a four-person lift at the Chewelah ski area, climbs more than 1,500 vertical feet to the summit of Chewelah Peak. It accesses 500 acres of new terrain, according to a news release from the ski resort.

“You go over there and it’s like, ‘wow,’ ” said Josh King, a resort spokesman, of the new terrain in the Sunrise Basin.

In the past 70 years, 49 Degrees North has grown from a rope-tow-accessed mountain to a ski area with five chairlifts and more than 2,300 acres of ski terrain, the release said.

Plans for the new lift began years ago and were eventually submitted to the Washington state Parks and Recreation Commission and the U.S. Forest Service. Approval was granted in July 2006. The first concrete footings were poured in August 2006, the release said.

Washington

Pollution provision would exempt farms

Farmers would be off the hook for costly air pollution cleanups under an obscure provision slipped into a tax bill that may be the last act of this Congress.

Buried in the fine print of the bill filed Wednesday, the measure by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, would forbid the Environmental Protection Agency from applying the Clean Air Act to dust and soot from farms until 2012.

Environmentalists complain the moratorium would grant farmers a five-year holiday from the EPA’s health standards for fine particles and soot, which protect people living downwind.

An EPA rule last year set new standards for regulating soot, dust and other coarse air pollution particles aimed at industrial and urban sources, but it did not exempt farmers.

Grassley’s provision applies to any “particulate matter deposited in the ambient air as a result of the conduct of an agricultural activity (as that term is defined by the Secretary of Agriculture),” the budget provision says.

Groups that have lobbied for the provision include the American Soybean Association, the National Pork Producers Council and the National Association of Wheat Growers.