2012 BUSINESS IN REVIEW
NewSkyline2012: Lummi Gateway Center
The grand opening unveiled this first-of-its-kind, 10,000-square-foot, business incubator on Rural Avenue in Ferndale at the I-5/Slater Road exit. The $4 million micro-enterprise provides investment into small businesses and training opportunities to support existing and start-up tribal entrepreneurs. No other exists in U.S. tribal communities. As a Lummi Ventures Partnership with Lummi Nation, Northwest Indian College, and Northwest Area Foundation, it also received funding from the Northwest Area Foundation, Economic Development Administration, Washington Department of Commerce, Lummi Nation, a Rural Business Enterprise Grant, and the Bill and Melinda Gates and Paul G. Allen Family foundations. The center shares property with the Lummi Commercial Co.’s 260 Tobacco and Fine Spirits, and includes The Seafood Market, Lummi Gateway Café, Arts & Crafts Gift Market (about 70 artists’ works), Heritage Center, Totem/Canoe Carving Shed viewing area, and the Lummi Nation Service Organization and small-business start-up office. Photo courtesy of the Lummi Nation
U.S. News & World Report named it to the Best Regional Hospitals list that evaluates hospitals outside of major metropolitan areas. Major expansion headlinegrabbers included the opening of PeaceHealth North Cascade Cardiology in Sedro-Woolley, the Peace Island Medical Center in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, and the state-of-the-art Cancer Center in Bellingham. PHSJ also neared completion of an alliance with United General Hospital in Sedro-Woolley to lease and operate as PeaceHealth United General Medical Center, effective July 1 this year.The Hospital District retained ownership of facilities.
3. AND 4. DEMISE of SEARS, SEMIAHMOO: The ESS-ence of Dreadlines: News on Oct. 29 of Sears closing sent shock waves through the community. (Some months down the road, a mega-sporting goods brand, Sports Authority, will remodel and fill the space, also big news.) Semiahmoo’s fate held little surprise when, on Oct. 31, word went out that it would close Dec. 1. Shock value runs high because the hotel was the largest economic 68 | BUSINESSPULSE.COM
driver for the Blaine community: a 25-year-presence, more than 200 jobs, a million-dollar chunk of the budget for a town of about 4,750. The hotel paid about $1 million a year in taxes and utility usage. With that gone, the tax burden likely would spread to all remaining property owners. The reason for no surprise is that the hotel had been in financial turmoil repeatedly over the last 20 years. The Upper Skagit Indian Tribe still is majority owner, but still tied partially to the original developer-owner, David Syre of Trillium Corp. A Seattle Times report cited a “complicated financial condition” that fatally wounded the sprawling hotel that has 200 rooms and a boatload of meeting space. Semiahmoo hotel officials stated that the 224 laid-off employees would receive a month’s salary and continued benefits through Dec. 31. Sears’s 92 employees received severance pay and could apply for positions at other Sears locations (the nearest is Burlington) or with Kmart, a Sears Holdings Company property. Bellingham’s was one of 11 stores that Sears, Roebuck & Co. sold last April to the investment trust, General Growth Properties,
that owns Bellis Fair—also developed by Syre/Trillium. Adding to the surprise of announcement on Oct. 29 about Sears’ scheduled closing in late January was that employees had been told a week earlier, and an official was quoted saying that the management group knew seven months ahead in March. It’s a modern miracle in this age of instant and omnipresent communications that news didn’t leak.
4 1/2. And sold…. Birch Bay Square off I-5 at Lynden/Custer Road exit sold for $8 million to a Canadian group, North American 6666 Investments, LLC. The property has struggled constantly for survival; it consists of16 acres off of Birch Bay-Custer Road, with Bob’s Burgers and Brew, The Woods Coffee, and The Market at Birch Bay as attractions.
5. FIRE AT BP REFINERY Last Feb. 17 the Friday midafternoon skies lit up and filled with large streams of smoke when a fire erupted at the BP Refinery at Cherry Point. This rocked the local economy early in the year when the refinery had to cut back severely on