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In case you missed them, here are some of the top stories of the weekend:
Vancouver is experiencing a “renaissance of economic prosperity,” Mayor Tim Leavitt said during his State of the City address late last month.
The big announcement was that another slice of Silicon Valley’s high-tech wealth plans to move to Vancouver. RealWear, a company making head-mounted tablets, signed a letter of intent with Fort Vancouver National Trust to open offices in the renovated Artillery Barracks.
“The work we’ve done over the past decade has positioned our city well for future growth and development,” Leavitt said.
However, he acknowledged, work remains on addressing homelessness and affordable housing. A few days prior, The Council for the Homeless announced that street homelessness was up 18 percent from last year. At a Vancouver City Council meeting, people hotly debated how to deal with the blight of homelessness downtown. (Vancouver has not yet seen benefits from a 2016 voter-approved levy intended to generate more affordable housing.)
Vancouver, and Clark County at large, are experiencing extremes that can be measured in the widening gap between rich and poor. Celebrations around an influx of high-wage jobs contend simultaneously with tensions around homelessness, housing affordability and poverty.
“The income has gotten more unequal in Clark County in the last eight or nine years,” said Scott Bailey, regional economist with Washington’s Employment Security Department.
Read the full story: Economic scales tip out of balance
This legislative session, Southwest Washington lawmakers were determined to meet regularly, work cohesively and move past personality conflicts, which in previous years hindered what they could deliver for the region.
The effort looks like it could be paying off.
Both the Senate and House capital budgets — money for land, buildings and equipment — were recently unveiled and for the first time in a while, the region fares well. The House passed the capital budget out of committee last week.
“By us having our meetings, we did absolutely phenomenal,” Paul Harris, R-Vancouver, said. “I want to let you know, I’m shocked.”
Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center, echoed his sentiments.
“This is the power of us working together and singing with one voice,” Rivers said. “We did really well, and I do believe it’s a result of the larger delegation cooperation and working together.”
Last legislative session, lawmakers from the region couldn’t recall when they met as a group on their own accord. They have gathered nearly every week of this session.
Read the full story: Lawmakers’ effort to compromise pays off
Vancouver’s long-running street basketball tournament has dunked its last. Hoops on the River won’t be back, its organizers announced this week.
Maybe it’s a victim of its own success. The charity tournament, which was launched in 2005 by Share Vancouver, has grown steadily — with a one-year hiatus in 2013, when it was taken over by the One Team Kids Foundation — to the point where its organizers now say they’re overwhelmed.
Sponsorships and finances are fine, they said; what never materialized is the massive amounts of volunteer labor needed to operate dozens of simultaneous 3-on-3 games involving thousands of players and their spectating families and friends.
Read the full story: Organizers of Hoops on the River say it won’t be back
Ken Condliff has always been a tinkerer.
So when he lost his job in high-tech manufacturing during the Great Recession, Condliff turned his engineering mind toward reinventing his career and launching his own business in a different field.
“A lot of what I worked on in manufacturing was innovation, how to make something new and better,” Condliff said. “I took the same thinking to food, and I said, ‘Peanut butter hasn’t changed in 100 years. It’s peanuts with salt and sugar, some kind of gooey flavor. Let’s junk the gooey flavors and go with sunflower seeds, flaxseed meal, organic quinoa, chia seeds and hemp seeds.’ ”
Those early days of the new venture seem like a distant memory to Condliff, now the owner and self-proclaimed “Chief Nutty Officer” of Nut-Tritious Foods, a Vancouver-based nut butter maker with a growing market in Seattle and Portland. He began distributing his line of nut butters — made from pecans, almonds, pistachios and all sorts of other nuts and seeds — at Whole Foods in Portland and Vancouver several years ago. Since then, he’s expanded into farmers markets and health food stores around the Northwest.
This winter, Condliff sent about 400 tubs of his five best selling nut butter varieties to PCC Natural Markets in the Seattle area — his largest order to date. Now, Condliff is setting his sights on an even bigger target.
