The Columbian | Serving Clark County, Washington

The Columbian’s top 2009 business stories tell of a regional economy slowly recovering from high unemployment, record housing foreclosures, shuttered stores, bankruptcies and the catastrophic failure of Bank of Clark County.

But in any transition, the bad news comes along with some good. Our top stories also include the second-largest real estate sale in Clark County’s history, an expanding health care industry, an infusion of federal stimulus dollars and expansions at the Port of Vancouver and Washington State University Vancouver.

For many Clark County businesses, the new year can’t come soon enough.

Southwest Washington faces an uncertain and challenging recovery in 2010, but without a doubt, the community’s new economy rests on this year’s successes and failures. And things have come a long way since January, when state and federal regulators seized the assets of Bank of Clark County and shut it down. The locally owned bank had been a source of pride in the community until the closure, which revealed an abundance of bad construction and commercial real estate loans that overwhelmed the bank with debt.

Coupled with the global financial crisis, the bank’s closure sent ripples throughout the county’s economy that haven’t yet subsided. The area’s remaining banks are now competing to fill the void left by BOCC. And the grab for market share has brought new bank branches to the county even as lending has all but dried up.

Job loss

In the first six months of the year, Clark County’s unemployment rate climbed to over 13 percent, up from 5 percent and 8 percent in prior years. The county has shed 5,900 jobs since last November in the single biggest decline in employment in Southwest Washington’s history, said Scott Bailey, regional economist with the Washington state Employment Security Department.

Virtually no industry was left untouched in the cascading effects of the recession.

“In the 2001-2002 recession there were big chunks of employment lost, SEH cut employment in half and Vanalco (an aluminum smelter in west Vancouver) closed,” said Bailey. “It’s much more diffused this time; death by a thousand cuts.”

High unemployment led in part to falling retail sales that caused many longtime Clark County stores to go under. Koplan’s Home Furnishings closed in April after 50 years in downtown Vancouver, followed by Joe’s sporting goods in May. They joined a host of other outlets going out of business including Studer’s Floor Covering and Kmart, which has announced it will close early next year after 35 years in Vancouver.

In all, slow sales caused the loss of about 900 retail jobs since November 2008.

As businesses pulled back spending, declining advertising revenues hit The Columbian Publishing Co., owner of The Columbian and the Camas Post-Record newspapers. After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May, the publisher proposed a reorganization to pay down debt and relinquish ownership of a six-story downtown Vancouver office building. The company, among the larger employers in downtown Vancouver, is optimistic that the business will emerge from bankruptcy early in the new year.

Record foreclosures

The construction industry suffered the most job cuts as a glut of homes on the market left nearly 4,000 shovel-ready lots standing empty in Clark County. Construction firms cut 4,300 jobs between November 2008 and 2009. And the slowly rising pace of home sales will likely push a rebound in new home construction off for at least 18 months, Mike Lamb, a Vancouver Realtor with Windermere/Stellar Group, told The Columbian in November.

As job losses mounted, so did the county’s foreclosure rate — the highest in the state from January until October when it fell to second-worst then to fifth-worst in November, according to California-based RealtyTrac. One out of every 718 houses in the county was estimated to be in foreclosure in November.

Historically low interest rates below 5 percent and a federal first-time buyers’ tax credit lured more home buyers back into the market in November and sales picked up 66 percent from the previous year. The boost in sales happened even as the median home price fell below $200,000 for the first time in five years.

Job growth

As some Clark County businesses closed or downsized, others expanded. SEH America, a subsidiary of Shin-Etsu Handotai and one of the county’s top 10 largest employers, in June bought Hewlett-Packard’s 174-acre site in east Vancouver for $55 million. It was the second-largest real estate sale in Clark County’s history and a deal that could eventually add as many as 1,000 jobs and represent a $1 billion investment in the local economy.

Renewable Energy Composite Solutions and NCS Power Inc. were awarded a total of $3 million in federal stimulus dollars to build wind turbines, wave energy components and energy-efficient light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, here. RECS, a sister company of Christensen Shipyards LLC in Vancouver, hopes to create 101 permanent and 99 temporary jobs with its $1 million grant to build vertical wind turbines. And NCS will open an LED manufacturing facility at the Port of Camas-Washougal with its $2 million grant. NCS expects to hire 290 permanent workers and 90 temporary workers by the end of 2012.

The health care industry also grew amid the job losses and store closings. Health care employed an estimated 15,200 workers in the county in November, or 700 more workers than the same time last year, according to the Employment Security Department. Both local hospitals spent millions of dollars on new patient rooms and more services during the year.

Port, WSU expand

The Port of Vancouver broke ground in August on an $18 million rail loop, part of a $137 million project to improve rail access at the port. Port commissioners and state officials gathered in August to celebrate the opening of a new marine terminal at the former Alcoa-Evergreen aluminum site where contractor Rotschy Inc. has since begun work on the rail loop. The site will be leased for storage of imported wind turbine components as well as space for new tenants when it’s completed in June.

Expansion is also under way at Washington State University Vancouver, which broke ground in August on a $43.5 million Applied Technology Classroom building and celebrated the grand opening of a $28 million Undergraduate Classroom building.

High-tech executives have worked for seven years to bring a research and development center like the Washington Technology Center in Seattle to WSUV to grow tech-related employment in the region. The industry moved quickly this year to help secure an additional $26.7 million for the Applied Technology Classroom building, the only new capital project in the 2009-2011 state budget.

Columbian staff writers Cami Joner and Julia Anderson contributed to this story.

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