News For Reasonable People

TR International, a global chemical distributor, is moving from its home of more than two decades in downtown Seattle, crossing the county line to neighboring Edmonds. The company is one of at least 160 businesses that have left Seattle since last March. While some of the companies that have left Seattle is due to the coronavirus pandemic, business leaders have said that much of it could be traced...

The federal judge overseeing police reforms in Seattle fired a shot across the bow of the Seattle City Council and its efforts to defund the Police Department on Thursday, saying those actions could put the city at risk of running afoul of a federal consent decree. U.S. District Judge James Robart said it appears the council, which imposed police budget and salary cuts in the wake of protests this...

“I really loved our downtown Seattle location,” said TRInternational CEO Megan Gluth-Bohan, who recently relocated her business to Edmonds. “But with street crime on the rise, our employees and out-of-town customers were feeling increasingly unsafe — and the political will to change things just isn’t there.” A world-class distributor of raw materials since 1994, TRInternational maintains branch of...

Minneapolis is planning to spend $6.4 million to hire dozens of police officers, at a time when some City Council members and activist groups have been advocating to replace the police department following George Floyd’s death. The City Council voted unanimously Friday to approve the additional funding that police requested. The department says it only has 638 officers available to work — roughly...

California has spent $13 billion in the last three years to tackle a massive homelessness problem likely to worsen with the pandemic, yet its approach is so fragmented and incomplete as to hinder efforts at getting people into stable housing, the state auditor said in a report released Thursday. The office of State Auditor Elaine Howle said that California continues to have the largest homeless po...

Tenants in Oregon owe $378 million in back rent, according to a new study by Portland State University. While that’s a lot of money, the study points to even bigger losses if lawmakers don’t act. Right now, 89,000 people have fallen behind on rent payments because of the coronavirus pandemic. They’ve been allowed to stay in their homes because of an eviction moratorium that runs out in July. The s...

Authorities are seeing a dramatic increase in catalytic converter thefts all across King County and the Greater Seattle area. But with few arrests, it's also becoming one of the most difficult crimes to solve. The King County Sheriff’s office provided us with a surveillance video showing an alleged crook, removing a catalytic converter in less than 10 seconds. Investigators say a similar crim...

Last fall, in one of the bigger victories for the movement to defund the Seattle Police Department, the Seattle City Council awarded a $3 million contract to a community coalition to research new ways to assure public safety. That coalition, King County Equity Now (KCEN), was a leading organizing force behind last summer’s protests against systemic racism and police brutality and one of the most p...

Jeff Bezos would owe about $2 billion a year in state income taxes under Washington’s proposed wealth tax, according to legislators. As part of an effort to reduce inequality and offset the state’s lack of an income tax, Washington state legislators are proposing a 1% levy on wealth over $1 billion. Lawmakers say the tax would raise about $2.5 billion a year in revenue and would only apply to so-c...

The number of new building permits filed in Portland last year plunged by 27%, falling even below the trough of the Great Recession. A slowdown was already underway before the coronavirus pandemic hit, following a boom in new hotel and office construction in downtown Portland and new regulations on apartment builders. Then COVID-19 hit and protests rocked the downtown core, accelerating the fallof...

At a Wednesday press conference in Chinatown to discuss a series of disturbing robberies and assaults targeting Asian seniors and neighborhood shops, Mayor Libby Schaaf criticized City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas’s approach to public safety. With Bas standing behind her at the gathering, Schaaf said that a budget proposal drafted by Bas last summer—a plan that was voted down—would have c...

Americans are furious following Fox News’ report that Bank of America may have handed private customer information over to the U.S. government related to the Capitol Hill riot. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson reported on Thursday night that Bank of America, at the request of federal investigators, combed through customer data in search of people and transactions that fit a certain profile – potentially p...

Imagine a mark-to-market capital gains tax, like the one proposed in New York, generating liability in a GameStop-style situation where retail investors have shares that have soared in value by orders of magnitude, get taxed on those gains, and then hold on too long and sell as the stock crashes back to earth. Whether you see the GameStop saga as a Robin Hood-style victory for the little guys or a...

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler sat down (remotely) with KOIN 6 News Thursday to answer our questions about skyrocketing gun violence in the city, protests, livability issues, and the increasingly hostile political climate that has resulted in the mayor hiring security to accompany him when he’s out in public. Q: At various times in the past couple months there have been talks about bringing the Gun Vi...

WeWork is preparing to close at least one and possibly two of its big co-working offices near downtown Portland, the latest blow to the city’s struggling core business district. The Portland Business Journal reported Friday that WeWork notified a Portland tenant that its flagship U.S. Custom House facility will close at the end of February. A second tenant confirmed receiving the same message from...

Tanium co-founder and CEO Orion Hindawi may not be as well known as Jeff Bezos, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates or other Seattle area billionaires. After all, it was just a few months ago that Hindawi and his family left the San Francisco Bay Area for Seattle’s Laurelhurst neighborhood, bringing his $9 billion cybersecurity company to the region along with him. So far, Hindawi seems to be fitting in pre...

Take an in-depth look a the red hot Seattle Real Estate Market based on the Northwest Multiple Listing Association End of month statistics. Homebuyers who have been precluded from entering Puget Sound’s competitive market may want to consider condominiums as an option, according to industry experts who commented on the latest housing statistics from Northwest Multiple Listing Service. “With the tr...

After a year that saw the Seattle-born retailer lay off workers and close stores, Nordstrom said Tuesday it will leave its offices on Seventh Avenue near Olive Way downtown, where it occupies a large part of a 24-story tower. In a statement, the company framed the move as a chance to rethink office work post-pandemic. “As we think about returning to our corporate offices later this year, we find o...

Two Northwest grocery industry trade groups are suing Seattle over the city’s new law mandating $4-an-hour pay raises for grocery stores. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Seattle, alleges the city’s law interferes with the collective-bargaining process between grocery stores and unions and also “picks winners and losers” by singling out large grocery companies. Seattle’s law,...

BOEING Co. has said it will dole out annual performance bonuses next month to most employees despite losing $12 billion over the last year during the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the company's employees did not receive annual bonuses last year after it lost $636 million in 2019 because of the grounding of the 737 MAX by the Federal Aviation Administration, The Seattle Times reported. In resp...

A new idea to flip Washington’s regressive tax system goes straight to the top: it seeks to tax the state’s billionaires. Sponsored by Rep. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, House Bill 1406 would apply a 1% tax on a state resident’s taxable intangible wealth above $1 billion. If passed, the tax, which would impact fewer than 100 people — but would raise a torrent of money. A fiscal analysis of the bill estim...

A woman was shot multiple times early Tuesday morning in Northeast Portland, police said. The woman called 911 at 3:16 a.m. and told dispatch she woke up to gun fire coming into her bedroom at her home in the 5200 block of Northeast 91st Avenue. She said she'd been shot five times and was in her bed but couldn't move. She also told dispatch that she had two pit bulls in the house. Becaus...

Coronavirus cases across the United States are continuing to plummet even as deaths from the virus continue to hold steady. On Friday, a total of 164,665 new infections were reported, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, which much lower than the 274,703 infections that were recorded just three weeks ago    Although the Friday total is higher than the totals over the last few days, the...

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his administration faced a barrage of criticism in the wake of a report from his own state attorney general claiming that the state had undercounted Covid-19 nursing home deaths by as much as 50 percent. The state's public death toll for nursing homes does not include residents who died from the coronavirus after having been transferred to hospitals, only deaths...

The city of Seattle must pay $81,997.12 to attorneys for Black Lives Matter to cover their fees and costs in pursuing contempt-of-court violations against the Seattle Police Department for the improper use of pepper spray and blast balls against peaceful protesters. The amount arrived at by U.S. District Judge Richard Jones was significantly less than the nearly $264,000 in fees and costs being so...