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Posts published in “Day: June 25, 2007”

Bent, crunched

June 25, 2007

To all things, there are limits, even in go-go places like the metros of the Oregon high desert. From the Bend Bulletin today:

Another Bend manufacturing company is leaving the city to expand elsewhere, saying Bend's limited industrial land supply and the high prices that the land commands have priced it out of the market. . . . Light industrial space in Bend is nearly gone, economic developers say, as the city's growth has quickly absorbed available land. While space dwindled, costs shot up, says Roger Lee, executive director of Economic Development for Central Oregon, or EDCO.

To be sure, we're not talking about moving out of region: the story is about Ameritech Machine Manufacturing Inc., a six-year Bend firm which is planning to move to Redmond, about 20 miles away. But it is an indicator: How high can prices go before they turn around and bite?

Mapping support

June 25, 2007
Washington presidential contributions

Washington presidential contributions

We're not many days away from the next round of releases of campaign contributions numbers for the presidential candidates. Before wading into and being swamped by that, we decided to take advantage of a new tool by the Federal Elections Commission and take a look at the contributions reported by the candidates from around the Northwest.

We weren't surprised to find the three states have highly distinctive patterns, but maybe a little to find that the state most different from the other two was Washington.

It was the one state of the three in which Democratic presidential candidates out-raised Republicans ($655,370 to $401,715). (A note: The Fred Thompson activity is too recent to show up in these numbers.)

Like the other two, the biggest single recipient here is Republican Mitt Romney, who who raised 68% of all Republican presidential money. (That percentage is bigger in the other two states.) Strikingly, his treasure chest wasn't King County or even the Puget Sound area overall (where most people in the state live) – or even east of the Cascades. His big source was Clark County, Vancouver and Battle Ground, which accounted for $139,525, about half of his total.

By contrast, all of King County (with about five times Clark's population) accounted for just about $100,000. Overall, King County yielded about $178,000 for Republicans, while Clark donated $142,715; practically all of Clark’s Republican money went to Romney. In contrast, second-place Republican raiser John McCain pulled about two-thirds of his money from King.

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