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Bert Caldwell

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News >  Business

Valley billing firm plans cuts

A company that handles billing and collections for anesthesiologists will lay off 63 employees at its Spokane Valley office by the end of June. Anesthesiologists Associated Inc. will keep only a small local presence, said Senior Vice President Craig Van Valkenburg, with a few employees working from home.
News >  Business

Spitzer discusses principle-based ethics

People and institutions that forge identities only by comparing themselves to peers waver between fear and hubris in an ethical no-man's-land, the Rev. Robert Spitzer said Wednesday. Fear that they do not measure up in power, wealth or intelligence, he said, or hubris when they perceive they have more of these attributes than those around them.
News >  Business

Car show draws the curious, serious

The heartbeat of the International Auto Show is the thump, thumping of slamming car doors. Dull thuds boomed through the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center on Friday as hundreds of would- or could-be buyers sank into driver's seats, scanned the gauges, surveyed the interior space and stepped back on the temporary showroom floor.
News >  Business

Germans may buy smelter in Addy

A German maker of polysilicon for solar cells and other uses is considering purchase of the idled Northwest Alloys plant at Addy, between Chewelah and Colville. Solarvalue AG representatives visited the smelter last year but have kept a low profile in recent weeks. The company, headquartered in Berlin, did not respond to an e-mail sent Wednesday or to a telephone inquiry forwarded by a consultant in the United States.
News >  Business

Woman scammed by ‘lender’

Just out of the hospital, with medical bills to pay and a Kettle Falls gift shop in need of inventory, RoseMarie McKee turned to the Internet for $5,000 that would help get her and the Silver Rose back on their feet. McKee said she thought a loan negotiated with Fairway Lending Group was the answer. It wasn't.
News >  Business

Exports advance by nearly 20 percent

New numbers from the U.S. Department of Commerce understate the value of Spokane exports but accurately reflect strong growth in international sales, the head of the International Trade Alliance said Tuesday. Spokane exports increased almost 20 percent from 2005 to 2006, the department reported last month. The 2006 total was $691 million.
News >  Business

Schweitzer labs adds 300 jobs

Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories Inc. will add 300 positions in 2008, most of them at its Pullman headquarters, the company announced Monday. Spokeswoman Susan Fagan said SEL employs more than 1,000 engineers, technicians, assemblers and salespeople on a campus that has grown to include 10 buildings. A manufacturing facility completed last fall doubled capacity to more than 200,000 square feet, she said.
News >  Business

SEC sues Spokane’s IBC over sale talk

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a lawsuit against Spokane-based International Broadcasting Corp., its former president and a former agent, alleging fraud. According to two complaints filed last week in U.S. District Court in Spokane, then-IBC President Daryn Fleming and agent Mathew Bruce made false statements on broadcasts of the company's Internet radio show, "Stock Talk Live," in October and November 2005. Their claims that IBC had purchased or become affiliated with three Florida radio stations boosted the price of IBC stock 50 percent after the first report and 60 percent after the second.
News >  Business

Heart attack indicator studied

A team led by Washington State University professor Cornelius Ivory has begun state-funded research they hope will enable doctors to detect heart attacks before they happen. Ivory is one of the first six recipients of a grant from the Life Sciences Discovery Fund, which was established in 2005 to foster medical research in Washington that might also generate new economic growth. His three-year, $750,000 grant is drawn from a pool of $6 million in private donations contributed to jump-start the program before the state's bonus share of a 1998 settlement with the tobacco industry can be tapped.
News >  Business

Mortgage-seekers may benefit most

The turmoil on Wall Street and efforts to respond on Pennsylvania Avenue should improve prospects for consumers on Spokane Falls Boulevard, local officials said Tuesday. The three-quarter percent cut in interest rates announced by the Federal Reserve Bank could substantially lower mortgage rates. The stimulus package, depending on what's inside, could slip new buying power into consumer wallets.
News >  Business

Bankruptcies on rise in region

Bankruptcy filings almost doubled in North Idaho last year and climbed 27 percent in Eastern Washington, but a stampede to the courthouses in late 2005 skews the comparisons, attorneys said Friday. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court office in Coeur d'Alene recorded 427 filings in 2007, up from 219 the previous year. The bulk of those were Chapter 7 cases in which individual or business assets are sold off, and the proceeds distributed to creditors.
News >  Business

Airport panel OKs bond sale

A $20 million overhaul of rental car operations at Spokane International Airport will increase capacity 30 percent by November, project manager Teresa Eckard said Wednesday. Although some preliminary work has been done, she said, construction should begin in earnest next month, when a contractor will be selected. Airport officials will open bids Tuesday.
News >  Business

Spokane Area gets a B in economics

The second Greater Spokane Incorporated report card on the area economy indicates progress on many of the business group's 20 objectives but difficulty with two – income and health insurance – important to most members of the community. Poverty and crime have decreased, but so has housing affordability.
News >  Business

BPA’s wind power tops 1,000 megawatts

The Bonneville Power Administration periodically delivered more than 1,000 megawatts of wind energy to the storm-tossed Northwest in November and December, spokesman Doug Johnson said Friday. At its peak, on Dec. 23 and 24, the agency's grid transmitted 1,180 megawatts, an amount exceeding the generating capacity of Bonneville Dam and more than enough to meet the electricity needs of a Seattle-sized city, he said.
News >  Business

Envelope, please – region’s mail No. 1

The U.S. Postal Service district that encompasses most of Eastern Washington and all of Idaho is best in the nation. Karen Fairlee, acting postmaster for Spokane, said the Spokane-based district bested 82 others in performance rankings based on service, financial performance, and employee safety and satisfaction during 2007.
News >  Business

Area economists hopeful

Two Spokane economists have joined the camp predicting a recession this year in the U.S. economy. But Eastern Washington University's Grant Forsyth and Avista Corp.'s Randy Barcus also said they expect the Inland Northwest to ride out the storm in comparatively good shape. International trade and high times on the farm should moderate the effects of whatever recession does develop, they said this week.
News >  Business

Plant will employ 50 by spring

Lighthouse for the Blind Inc. will open a Spokane manufacturing plant this spring and plans to employ 50 people in making communication boards for the federal government and a Chicago office-supply company. Lighthouse President Kirk Adams will announce his Seattle-based company's expansion at a Greater Spokane Incorporated breakfast Friday, then close on the purchase of a former Tidyman's grocery store later in the day. The company will have $4 million invested in plant and equipment when production starts in May or June, he said Tuesday.
News >  Business

Quarter tough for local stocks

The Inland Northwest was nowhere to hide for investors looking for a refuge from the storms that swept through the stock markets in late 2007. An index that tracks the performance of 15 area companies tumbled 9 percent during the last three months of the year, double the setback suffered by the Dow Jones industrial average. The index created by Spokane-based Hart Capital Management Inc. retreated 14.3 percent during all of 2007.
News >  Business

Regional export market surveyed

Dozens of small Spokane companies, many with fewer than 10 employees, have at least a toehold in exporting. According to a newly released survey for the International Trade Alliance, most of the 284 companies that responded do less than 15 percent of their business outside the United States, with Canada and Mexico the most frequently tapped markets. A handful depend on export sales for all their revenues.
News >  Business

Disputes derail Geiger spur

Efforts to redirect the West Plains Geiger Rail Spur have been sidetracked by disputes over rights-of-way. Two miles of the spur, which serves several Airway Heights businesses, must be moved off Fairchild Air Force Base for security reasons and to make room for a new Army Reserve center. Four miles of new rail would connect the spur to the Palouse River and Coulee City Railroad. That track intersects BNSF Railway Co. track at Cheney. The state has set aside $7 million for the project, which officials had expected would be completed last summer.
News >  Business

Sterling shares sink after report

Sterling Financial Corp. late Wednesday revised quarterly and annual earnings estimates, triggering a sharp decline Thursday in the price of its stock. The Spokane-based holding company for Sterling Savings Bank had projected fourth-quarter earnings between 52 cents and 56 cents per share in an Oct. 23 conference call with investment analysts. The estimate for all of 2007 was between $2.09 and $2.13 per share.
News >  Business

Group seeks professional help

Greater Spokane Incorporated has received $90,000 to help build a new corps of architects, engineers and accountants, professionals whose skills will be in short supply within a decade, a state estimate says. The Washington Workforce and Education Coordinating Board grant is the most recent, and probably the most unique, of several Spokane skills panels created in response to what economic development officials say has become their greatest challenge: recruiting and training skilled construction, manufacturing, aerospace and health care workers to replace retiring baby boomers.
News >  Business

Bert Caldwell: Sterling, feds are getting reacquainted

Les Weatherhead and Carol Friend saw each other for the first time in 17 years Thursday morning. The pleasantries were brief. Weatherhead, as attorney for Sterling Financial Corp., was questioning Friend about her actions as a former assistant director of the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision Seattle office.
News >  Business

Year offered something to build on

Will we miss 2005? If you dwell on the year's major news stories, probably not. Natural disasters dominated national and international headlines. The war in Iraq continued, with the outcome not certain. Locally, the recall of Mayor Jim West was the leading story.
News >  Business

Community banking has some room to grow

Every time a vacancy develops in the Mountain West Plaza office center at the corner of Ironwood and Government Way in Coeur d'Alene, the property manager notifies Mountain West Bank President Jon Hippler. Hippler is almost always in need of a little more space. His 12-year-old institution has become the largest state-chartered bank in Idaho, with assets of $700 million. From a single branch in a manufactured building, Mountain West has expanded to 17, with four more planned by the end of 2006. The growth has taken the bank into wealthy enclaves like Park City, Utah, business centers like Boise, and hamlets like Ione, Wash. Mountain West just completed the purchase of a former Zions First National Bank office in Bonners Ferry, where a struggling economy would not appear to offer much to a bank on the make.