Consider that about 500 of China’s who’s who gathered last weekend at a place called Sun Mountain Yabuli Resort, north of Beijing near the Russian border for the 10^th annual CEF, with a focus was on the global economic challenges and China’s role in the emergence of positive economic growth in the world. They were joined by only about 20 attendees from elsewhere in the world, including a handful from Wall Street.

As business leaders in the Seattle area learn more about CEF and its relations to making business connections in China, they may map a strategy for putting this region at the forefront of visibility at forthcoming events. CEF for the past five years has held a “summer summit” in addition to the annual forum.

Wyatt, founder of The Wyatt Group, says the range of China opportunities relates particularly to clean-technology companies, since China has, by some estimates, become the main recipient of venture-capital money in clean technology.

For those who may retain the sense that Chinese entrepreneurship is an oxymoron, Wyatt points out that the flow of venture capital is only one indication that China has become a hotbed of innovation.

“To the extent that China is talking about being a leader for clean energy, since our focus is being a center for clean technology, then we have good reason to build focused relationships particularly in that area,” said Bob Drewel, executive director of the four-county Puget Sound Regional Council.

David Allen, executive vice president of Seattle’s McKinstry & Co., which is just opening its innovation center where clean-tech and energy-related start-ups will be incubated and accelerated, says “absolutely” some of the companies McKinstry is working with will be seeking to sell to China.

Wyatt points out that there are two sides to the doing-business-with-China equation. One is attracting investment from China into U.S. companies and the other is creating opportunities to build supplier or customer relations there. And strategic partnerships are the key to seizing those opportunities, he adds. “And building trust is the key to both halves.”

“As for green technology, as new emerging trends are identified, the ability to form strategic partnerships and financing from China is increased,” he says.  “It will be necessary to identify what type of green technology garners the most interest and how different approaches to those types of technology are compatible with the Chinese systems and can be readily adopted.” 

One China expert recently wrote that the Chinese government is trying to address soaring healthcare costs by reducing pollution and is thus actively encouraging foreign investment, including spending $9 billion a month on clean-energy research.

Wyatt says a goal he has is to create some long-term investment relationships between venture capital firms in the Northwest and counterparts in China.

"The strategy would be to bring Chinese v.c. investments to U.S. companies,” Wyatt said. “It would add a level of interest for the Chinese companies if local v.c. firms were co-investing in the deals.”

With respect to clean tech, Wyatt explained that the Chinese “need to be able to implement environmental standards in an efficient way that doesn’t detract from their ability to continue their level of labor employment.”

 Wyatt said that since continued availability of laborer jobs for the vast population from the provinces is vital to China’s stability, partners will need to understand that China has no interest in efficiencies that eliminate those jobs.

I found that the most complete information on this conference, for which neither Google nor an online search of the New York Times turned up anything, was in a news release from Melco China Resorts Holdings, owner of the resort.

In addition to providing a rundown on the names and titles of many of the prominent attendees as well as the speakers, the release trumpeted a new agreement under whose terms “all future annual forums ‘on a permanent basis’ would be held at the Sun Mountain Yabuli Resort.”

The Melco news release offered evidence that the Chinese have learned a bit from the U.S. about marketing and promotion.

“Both Parties also agreed to establish a ‘CEF Founders Club’ that actively promotes Sun Mountain Yabuli's resort vacation homes for purchase by CEF members,” the release read, “ And CEF will work with its 5,000 member companies to select Yabuli as the site for their corporate meetings and retreats.”

Four Seasons, Hilton or Starwood couldn’t have done it better.

The annual China Entrepreneurs Forum (CEF) attracts hundreds of that nation's most influential entrepreneurs and business leaders, along with key government figures, but apparently has attracted little interest or direct involvement from the West, even from a China-focused area like Seattle. 

Although President Obama’s decision to offer federal loan guarantees to jump-start new nuclear-power plants is a step welcomed by the utilities industry, the CEO of Washington State’s largest utility doesn’t anticipate any new plants being considered in his region in the foreseeable future.

In fact, Steve Reynolds, president and CEO of Puget Energy and its subsidiary, Puget Sound Energy, suggests that any new plants will likely be built “where there are already existing plants, where communities are already accustomed to having a nuclear plant in operation.”

I was prompted to telephone Reynolds for his current thoughts on nuclear power after President Obama’s announcement of $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two large nuclear power reactors in Georgia. That was a move basically seen as the first step in committing the nation to a nuclear future.

That announcement by the President followed his call in the State of the Union address last month for a “new generation of clean nuclear plants” with billions of new dollars in the budget to guarantee loans for such plants.

“People I know in the industry who are ready to propose new nuclear plants are planning them where they already have an existing site,” Reynolds added. “Where we see a new one, it’ll be where there already is one.”

 In fact, the two new reactors in Georgia would be units 3 and 4 at an existing Southern Co. nuclear plant.

While the interview with Reynolds was about the business implications of Obama’s announcement, it’s impossible to overlook the political implications.

“Would it be accurate to suggest,” I asked Reynolds, “that just as only Nixon, as a Republican president, could have opened the door to China, only Obama, a Democrat, could open the door to nuclear?”

Reynolds chuckled and replied, “that’s probably pretty close. George Bush could never have come out so strongly.”

The President’s embrace of nuclear power, giving it new life for the first time in three decades in this country, amounted to a willingness to confront the anti-nuclear litmus test of the liberal wing of his party in order to move the country toward new-energy policies. He has taken the politics out of nuclear power.

Thus some observers would suggest it’s now the turn of Republican leadership to take the politics out of climate change, seizing the opportunity to demonstrate their own statesmanship with a willingness to confront the litmus test of the GOP’s conservative wing on that issue.

“For the last five years, the industry has known that nuclear needed to be considered,” Reynolds said, but added that no publicly traded energy company wanted to be visible raising the issue.

“We’re talking about it today primarily because of the growing recognition that we need to do something about carbon in the atmosphere,” he said. “I think you’ll see five or six proposals for new nuclear facilities emerge over the next two years.”

But don’t look for Puget’s name to pop up as one of the utilities looking to nuclear, despite the deep pockets of its new owners, long-term global investors Macquarie which owns PSE as Puget Holdings LLC.

Nuclear in Washington State is synonymous in the public’s mind with the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the U.S. Department of Energy is engaged in the world’s largest nuclear-site cleanup, and WPPSS, the $2.5 billion default on grand plan in the 1970s and 1980s to build five nuclear plants in the Pacific Northwest.

Jerry Henry, who in the role of Senior Advisor to the Chairman was basically Reynolds number two until his retirement last year, suggests that “the benefit of a government guarantee is that it will give utilities a chance to say ‘if government is willing to go ahead then it’s okay for us to begin talking about this.’”

In addition, analysts have long made the point that Wall Street investors aren’t going to loan electric companies the money to build new nuclear plants, which can cost $12 billion and up, unless Uncle Sam guarantees the loans.

Along with the opportunity for nuclear that Obama’s loan-guarantee commitment brings is the emergence of dramatically smaller and less expensive nuclear plants. Some in the industry are suggesting that the facilities might be modular and as small as a railroad boxcar with a cost about one-tenth of a conventional plant.

But Reynolds points out that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the key step in the Federal portion of the approval process, “is not in a position to expeditiously approve any non-traditional nuclear plants.”

Both Reynolds and Henry, who is now a consultant for energy companies, cautioned that the issue of nuclear waste remains a formidable problem.

“It’s a huge issue and it’s still out there,” Reynolds said. “There’s now no place to store nuclear waste except on the site of the nuclear facilities. Half the security required at a facility is to protect the spent stuff.”

But Henry said the solution to the storage problem is vital because “without nuclear, there’s not enough renewable energy to begin to address the issue of reducing greenhouse gases.”

But even cheaper more efficient plants are not likely in this area’s future, Henry agreed. “Getting public acceptance is the same issue it always was, in terms of the permitting process,” he said. “And if we can’t get a viaduct or a bridge built in Seattle without a huge permitting battle, can you imagine trying to build a nuclear plant?”

 Susan Preston, one of the founders of the nation’s first women’s angel-investor group in Seattle a dozen years ago, recalls “an amazing response” to the idea of forming a group to help women become part of the “deal flow” that was happening at the height of the dot-com rush.

Preston, then a partner in a major Seattle law firm, was “doing a lot of deals, all of which included only male angels. I started talking to friends about whether or not it bothered them that women didn’t seem to be getting the same chance to be in early on these deals. It did.”

More than 150 women attended a first meeting in 1998 to explore the idea of creating an angel group for women. With major support from women executives at the family-owned Laird Norton Co., Seraph Capital Forum was formed with a dozen women as launch members and more than 50 joining during the first year.

Janis Machala, another in the Seraph founders group, had launched Paladin Partners in 1996 and served as advisor and mentor to start-up companies, often as interim CEO, COO or board member. She says she “saw firsthand the need to grow our angel population.”

“There was a lot of wealth in this region at the time and some of it was coming to women,” Machala recalls. “We wanted to help season that, help provide advisory roles and board memberships for women and increase the support for women entrepreneurs.”

Support and opportunity did come about for women who were either members of the Seraph group in the years since then, or who were entrepreneurs seeking funding and expertise for their start-up ventures.

Seraph founders and current leadership still see a need for a women-only angel-investor group while others in the angel community aren’t so sure. But there seems to be general agreement that women represent a special brand of angel investor.

Preston says she “absolutely” thinks the need for a women’s group remains. And Machala agrees.

Preston, now based in San Francisco and the general partner of CalCEF Angel Fund, a first-of-its-kind angel fund for seed and start-up stage clean energy companies, says a study she worked on for the Kauffman Foundation “found women invest differently than men. And unfortunately, many feel a bit intimidated about asking questions in a room full of men.”

Villette Nolon, who is current president and chair of the all-volunteer Seraph organization, that currently has 25 members, feels the need still exists because “the profile of women who invest as angels is still very different than the profile of men who invest.”

Nolon, founder and CEO of the home-remodeling site HomeSavvi, feels that women “still aren’t in the places where deals are put together. There’s still an old boys club in deals and women who join formal groups thereby get access to those deals.”

Nolon (on whose HomeSavvi advisory board I sit) says “angel investing is still a mystery to a lot of women. So a number of women are co-investing with their husbands.”

In fact, couples investing may be the trend, as Liz Marchi, fund coordinator for the  Frontier Angel Fund in Whitefish, MT., and coordinator of the Montana Angel Network, suggests.

“We encourage couples to be involved together in the process and have found that creates a good culture of inquisitiveness,” notes Marchi., though she touts the talent individual women bring to her group.

“Smart women are truly astounding thinkers in terms of relationships, markets and strategy,” she says. “I can’t imagine our fund without women.”

“I’m a graduate of a women’s college so focusing on women investors and entrepreneurs is in my DNA,” Marchi adds. “I find women keenly interested in being angel investors.”

“Couples,” in fact, is one of the selling points for Zino Society, a for-profit angel organization created five years ago by Cathi Hatch, long active in the Seattle area’s philanthropic and non-profit communities. Hatch, who is also a Seraph member, has sought to create “camaraderie” for members with a mix of business, wine and investing.

Mary Holmes, Zino’s vice president for business development, says the organization’s goal of bringing entrepreneurs, investors and entrepreneurs together “in a relaxed and supportive environment” has spurred husband-wife membership participation in the 230-member organization, which includes 79 women.

M. Todd Dean, president of Keiretsu Forum Northwest, the other for-profit angel organization, estimates that about 20 percent of members in his four groups in Seattle, Bellevue, Portland and Boise are women.

“But the number of women is more like 35 percent when you include spouses, since we have a lot of husbands and wives in the group,” Dean adds.

Among those who doesn’t think it matters whether the angel investor is male or female is Michael Elconin, a leader of the San Diego chapter of the Tech Coast Angels (TCA) group, the major angel organization in Southern California.

“We have relatively few women in TCA, maybe 5 percent of total membership,” Elconin said. “Frankly I don’t see any difference between our women members and male members, either in term of participation with due diligence or investing.”

Sherry Zins, a Keiretsu member who was business development vice president for the organization before joining the staff of Washington Technology Industry Association, says she dislikes women-only groups. “I prefer the mix because it’s more healthy.

Dan Rosen, who chairs Seattle’s Alliance of Angels (AoA), says the organization has “10 to 15 women among the 60-plus who regularly attend” luncheon meetings of the angel group that is Seattle’s oldest.

Rosen, who four years ago left the venture firm he had helped found in order to form Dan Rosen & Associates to focus on early-stage companies, says he doesn’t think gender is so much the issue as is the evolution of angel investing.

“It’s gone from part-time activity, where angel investing was a hobby, to professional angels, where investing is their day job,” he says.

And given the positions now held by Preston at  CelCEF, Marchi with the Montana angel groups, Hatch with her for-profit Zino venture and Machala, who just finished a stint as number two at UW’s tech-transfer operation, it’s clear that some of the “day job” roles have been assumed by those who learned the investor game  as women angels.

As local governments across Washington State and elsewhere go looking for funds for development projects or small-business assistance in this critical economic environment, many are finding the funding source of last resort isn’t federal stimulus dollars but a non-profit entity called the National Development Council (NDC).

New York-based NDC is a 40 year old organization little known to the general public but a key source of federal funds for state and municipal governments seeking capital. It’s an organization that prides itself on functioning as would private investment bankers, private developers or private lenders.

Except that the pockets of financing that NDC taps are an array of federal assistance sources like SBA guarantees or tax credits that it has either learned how to employ by negotiating through the federal maze of instruments and requirements or, in some cases, it has helped counsel Congress to create.

I only recently became aware of the NDC and found it intriguing because the 501c3’s role is to bring private-sector practices and efficiencies to the use of federal funds of various kinds to state and local projects as well as programs to assist small business.

Readers of this e-mail who are already familiar with the organization need read no further. Those who aren’t might find the way it operates to represent an interesting bridge between the polar-opposite views of government, between those whose view is that only government can resolve key issues and those whose view is that if government is involved, only waste and mismanagement will follow.

NDC, which operates with an annual budget of  $15 million to $16 million, has been instrumental in helping Washington State municipalities find funding for, manage and complete a variety of community and economic development projects. Along the way, has become a major owner of Washington real estate.

NDC’s holdings in Washington State are estimated at $1.36 billion with most of that in the Puget Sound area and $825.9 million in Seattle. Its $850 million worth of LEED-certified buildings gives it perhaps the state’s largest portfolio of such real estate.

 In reality, it only “owns” the real estate on behalf of the communities who will receive the properties without cost once the loans are paid off.

But owning real estate on behalf of eventual municipal owners is a relatively small part of what NDC does, according to John Finke the Seattle-based Senior Director for the Western United States. It also helps funnel SBA-guaranteed funds to certain types of small business, including most recently the Recovery Café, which is a non-profit that provides recovery services in Downtown Seattle.

In fact, Recovery Cafés grand opening of its new facility, secured with $9.75m NDC helped garner for land acquisition and to help renovate a historic building with a special round of New Market Tax Credits, is this week.

“As a nonprofit organization, NDC is able to offer tremendous benefits to municipalities, small businesses and other partners,” said Finke. “Through our diverse range of funding mechanisms, spanning government loans, New Market Tax Credits and bond issuances, we are able to deliver the best expertise, talent and cost to enable public projects to move forward with substantial cost savings.”

In the four decades since its founding in 1969 by one-time Sen. Robert Kennedy aide Sam Beard, who still serves as chair of the organization, NDC hasn’t sought publicity.

But as it becomes increasingly active in the Northwest, guided by Finke as well as Chuck Depew, who oversaw the Recovery Café investment and who provides technical assistance in project finance, housing finance and other assistance to communities throughout the Northwest, explaining what it does may become increasingly important.

For one thing, it’s frequently employing what’s called the 63-20 bonding process that allows a private, not-for-profit entity to issue tax-exempt bonds to develop facilities for use by local governments, which become owners of the buildings at little or no cost when the debts are paid off.

That seems like a win-win, except state entities that traditionally sell bonds for such new facilities may not be happy with what they view as a new competitor.

Some proponents of what the NDC does also express frustration that segments of the public inevitably view things like SBA loan guarantees as grants that are somehow squandering tax dollars rather than being dollars that will eventually be paid back.

One NDC partner that viewed participating with NDC’s Northwest office as “an inviting investment opportunity” is the Seattle Foundation. It put $1 million into an NDC and City of Seattle partnership for what’s called the Grow Seattle Fund that offers financing for growing small businesses, those with annual revenues under $10 million.

In explaining the innovative involvement by the community foundation, Seattle foundation’s Michael brown said it was a reaction to “what we knew to be a challenging environment for small business to access capital and credit and a way to do our part in addressing that community need.”

Joe Galloway recalls how as a young wire service reporter in 1963, convinced that a then-escalating conflict in Vietnam would become his generation's war, he began an 18-month campaign of letters and phone calls to convince his bosses at UPI to transfer him to Saigon to cover the war.

They did in early 1965 and he arrived there as a 23 year old to launch a career in which he wrote about the soldiers from the places where they fought and died. He became the only civilian awarded a medal of valor by the U.S. Army for his actions during battle in Vietnam and eventually wrote what was viewed as one of the 10 all-time best books on war.

After Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf called Galloway "the finest combat correspondent of our generation-a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."

It was in that capacity of "soldier's friend" that for the past seven years he wrote a weekly column for first Knight-Ridder and then McClatchy Newspapers, serving as a gadfly on behalf of soldiers and a fierce critic of the civilian officials whose military decisions put them in harm's way.

Galloway's "We were soldiers once...and young " was judged by a group of military historians two years ago as one of history's top 10 books on war. That put it in good company with the likes of  Homer's Illiad, Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and Stephen Crane's "Red Badge of Courage."

Now Galloway has now written a "farewell" to his weekly syndicated column. Although we only met once, 30 years ago when we were both employed by the now-defunct UPI wire service, we've reconnected by e-mail a couple of times recently. So when I saw his final column, I e-mailed him some questions to provide fodder for this salute to him. I decided it was time someone wrote about him, rather than reading what he's written about.

I asked Galloway, who as a kid from Refugio, Texas, had actually received a 1-Y draft status because of his asthma (meaning he was medically deferred), if he had views of war that were changed by his time as a correspondent, as well as how he managed to take part in some fierce battles without being trained as a soldier.

"All I knew about war I had learned from reading the collected works of Ernie Pyle (famed World War II correspondent for Scripps Howard) and watching John Wayne movies," he e-mailed me. "But I was a country boy from Texas, had learned to shoot and hunt when I was 7 or 8 years old, and knew some fieldcraft learned in a hard environment where everything else out there was equipped with fangs, venom, claws or was armored against those things.

"The fieldcraft and Mr. Pyle stood up when I got to Vietnam. Most of the rest, including my opinions about war before I had actually seen it, did not," he added.

He was a reporter who actually carried a rifle as well as a camera and in 1998 was awarded the bronze Star Medal with V for rescuing wounded soldiers under fire in the Ia Drang battle that was to be the subject of the book. It was the only medal of valor the U.S. Army awarded to a civilian for actions during the Vietnam War.

There are those who felt his bite, officials of both the Bush and the Obama administrations, who will be happy to see the last Joseph L. Galloway byline over a column. Many of those in the military will be saddened.

Of the former, Galloway e-mailed me that he "didn't really know what heat was till I started writing the column and began criticizing some of the appointed officials. I got a lot of rude, personal attacks by email from the true believers."

"I wore out the 'delete' key on my keyboard every year," he said. "I didn't take it personally. Most who wrote such diatribes calling me nine kinds of a Commie rat were people who had never worn a uniform, would not send their children to fight in the wars they championed and really were so unread in history as to be unqualified to say a damn word."

But of the military folks who have appreciated his support, whether with the written word or words delivered at various military events, Galloway recalled a conversation "a few years ago with a good friend, the late Lt. Gen. Bill McCaffrey. He looked at me sadly and told me: 'You know, Joe, you can never retire. We won't let you. We need you telling the soldiers' story right to the day you die.'"

It was clear he was more pleased by soldiers' praise than by the praise for his book. When I asked him about his reaction to the celebrity, Galloway replied: "I am at heart a country boy and still a bit bashful about it. I learned when they released the movie that a very little bit of celebrity goes a long damn way with me. I left Washington, D.C., four years ago and moved to my home in a village of 400 good souls on the south Texas coast because I am more comfortable here."

I suggested, in one question, that he didn't really need to be doing a column over the past seven years since his earnings from the book and the movie must have been substantial.

"Your idea that somehow I was floating on a sea of book and movie money is laughable," he replied. "Book money comes in dribs and drabs, twice a year, and leaves much the same way. Movie money for an author is simply a myth. Hollywood accounting sees to that on your first movie. They consider what they extract from the fine print to be tuition you pay for lessons learned."

He recalled his first fierce combat experience in October of 1965 inside Plei Me Special Forces camp, which was under siege by a regiment of North Vietnamese regulars.

"The commander was Maj. Charlie Beckwith, who later founded the Delta counter-terror forces," Galloway recalled. "He informed me that he had no vacancies for a reporter but was in great need of someone to man an air-cooled .30 caliber machine gun, and I was it."

Galloway remembers that he left that battle "with an M16 rifle and a thousand rounds of ammo, the rifle a gift of Major Beckwith, as a reward for my services as his machine gunner.

"I tried to turn it away, telling him that technically speaking I was a civilian non-combatant. He grinned and said: 'No such thing in these mountains, boy. Take the rifle!' I took it," he said.

It was three weeks later, happy to be armed with the rifle and ammo, that he found himself in the Ia Drang Valley. It was a place dubbed Landing Zone XRAY in the battle that he made famous with his reporting and later the book co-written with Lt. Gen. Harold Moore, the then-lieutenant colonel who commanded the Seventh Cavalry unit that engaged the North Vietnamese there.

"In three days and two nights there, and another day and night in a landing zone called Albany two miles away, 234 American soldiers were killed and nearly 300 wounded. The North Vietnamese left behind the bodies of somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 dead," he recalled. "No one in their right mind stakes a claim to victory in the middle of that kind of carnage. Funny but both sides did just that."

Galloway upset many in the Bush Administration with his withering ciriticism of their decisions relating to Iraq and Afghanistan and now he's been doing the same with the Obama Administration.

Referring to those who have been upset at his criticisms, Galloway said in his e-mail to me: "I'm happy to listen to anyone I've offended, if the guy can prove to me that he has ever held a dying soldier in his arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while you beg him to hang on."

Galloway has written "30" on his weekly column. But the chances are remote that he won't be heard from again, either in books to come, speeches before soldiers and veterans groups or in op-ed pieces.

Although his homebuilders organization had what amounted to its “worst of times” during its Centennial year in 2009, Sam Anderson says conversations with his peers from around the country at a national gathering in Las Vegas last week “made me feel like my life is great.”

That a slight overstatement, perhaps, as Anderson guides his Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties (MBA) into its second century with a cautious sense that the economy is on an upward trend.

Just back from the International Builders Show in Las Vegas, the MBAs executive officer says he agrees with speakers who suggested that a slow turnaround is beginning.“It won’t be a strong recovery but it’ll be a recovery,” Anderson said. “But until the credit markets loosen up, we’re not going to see much homebuilding.”

I asked Anderson to give me a sense of how bad a Centennial year it was for the nation’s oldest and largest homebuilders organization, and he candidly ticked off the facts: the economic crisis has cost the MBA 800 members, forcing a 26 percent cut in what was a $10.5 million budget. He cut eight employees and restructured three departments.

While Anderson’s organization, which is a trade association of homebuilders, remodelers and associated businesses, is dramatically impacted by what the recession has done to homebuilding, he says those conversations with his peers in Las Vegas put a different spin on how we’re doing compared with other regions.

“Take one example: we went from 18,000 permits a year to 5,000 in our two counties,” Anderson said. “Atlanta metro went from 60,000 permits to 6,000. And that’s mirrored in Las Vegas, Southern California and Florida.”

Despite the gloom surrounding their homebuilding business, the Master Builders carried out an array of Centennial-related events last year, fulfilling the mission Anderson carved out for the group when he assumed the leadership of MBA just over a decade ago. That mission has been putting a focus on good-citizenship for the organization and its activities.

Thus the MBA last spring undertook 100 community services projects, one for each year of its existence, and in addition built a wet lab at the Mercer Slough Environmental Learning Center. That project will be certified as Built Green pilot for light commercial construction and the MBA is donating it to the learning center “to help current and future students foster a connection with the natural world.”

Looking ahead, Anderson sees one near-term concern looming. “The first-time buyer tax credit has been a boon, but nobody thinks that will be re-upped.”

Anderson describes himself as “a  very upbeat person” and he’s cautiously upbeat about one small package of possible relief forthcoming from the Washington Legislature, which is considering a bill that would change the time when builders pay impact fees from the start of the permitting process to when the home is sold. It would be a big thing for smaller homebuilders.

To help the average person understand what that means to builders, Anderson uses the example of one builder facing impact fees of $16,000 on each of 10 lots on which homes will be built.

“Most builders aren’t big enough to have $160,000 of ready cash, especially when banks can’t loan on the impact fees,” Anderson says, suggesting that the proposed relief could be the difference between survival and not for some builders.

Hearings are beginning on the proposed legislation, but while it’s difficult to see how lawmakers could have anything but a positive attitude about a move that could be at least a small boost for homebuilding, there’s apparently some opposition looming from school officials.

One of the possible challenges facing would-be homebuyers, if homebuilding doesn’t resume, is that “there’s zero in the pipeline,” Anderson noted. “Most cities have laid off their planning staffs, for example, and if demand starts to pick up, we won’t have enough supply. There’s not an oversupply of houses.”

“There has to be a concern that if demand starts to pick up, and we again get into multiple bids on houses because the demand is exceeding supply, the prices are going to climb quickly,” he added. That would be an incentive for people who can to get back into real estate to do so now, but not very good for buyers who will be looking during another price run-up.

In the decade since Anderson was lured away from the National Ski Areas Association where he was general counsel, chief lobbyist and second in command, he has created a “kinder, gentler” image for his two-county builders group and an image for himself as a housing proponent respected by local elected officials of both parties.

Meanwhile, Anderson grew the organization from an operating budget of $1.5 million to almost $12 million. Then the downturn began to take its toll.

He is going to have occasion to invest his stored up goodwill with elected officials in the coming months to ensure that legislative and governmental steps necessary to help restore the health of the collective homebuilding industry are kept in the forefront as decisions are made in Olympia and at the local level.

As Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire struggles to find ways to plug a $2.6 billion shortfall in the state’s general fund, one who can truly empathize with her is former Gov. Mike Lowry, who found himself in a similar deficit crisis in 1993.

There are obvious differences between the situation Lowry faced, looking ahead to a $1.6 billion shortfall in a biennium whose start was then six-months away, and Gregoire’s gaping revenue hole in a biennium already six-months under way. But in each of their cases the quest to close tax loopholes was, and is, part of the perceived solution.

And like Gregoire, who thinks one way to make up some of the shortfall is by bringing more equity to the state’s business-and-occupation tax, Lowry sought to generate more dollars by creating more tax equity through extending the sales tax to services like law and accounting.

Gregoire wants to extend the b&o tax, which is imposed at different rates for different types of businesses, to out-of-state companies on the portion of their business revenue derived in Washington State.

In focusing on the b&o tax, based on a business’s gross receipts rather than profits, Gregoire may be about to open a longer-term process of looking at the array of rates at which that tax is imposed. The rates range from .0013 percent (13 cents on $100 of gross revenue) to 1.5 percent for services ($1.50 for every $100 of revenue).

“Looking for additional revenue through tax equity was the reason we sought to extend the sales tax to services,” Lowry recalled in a telephone conversation. “And tax equity is what Gregoire is seeking to achieve with her proposal to extend the b&o tax to out-of-state companies.”

Lowry’s  proposal by then made it through the Democrat-controlled House but bogged down in the Senate as attorneys,  in particular, successfully made the case that coming under the sales tax represented too many costly administrative challenges. Lowry recalls that the professions were more open to a b&o tax hike than to being brought under the sales tax.

In the end that 1993 Legislature closed its budget imbalance by increasing the b&o tax paid by those service businesses from 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent, with a provision that the increase would sunset after four years.

Lowry says he frankly doesn’t like the b&o tax “because a tax on gross receives has a lot of problems, like the impact on start-up businesses. And the disparity in rates among industries creates some real irritations about government and taxes.”

Lowry pointed up the challenge of the b&o tax, instituted in 1933 and the nation’s oldest gross-receipts tax, by noting “it’s an income tax, basically, because its rate is based on the assumed profit margins of various industries.”

“It seems to me that a corporate income tax would obviously be preferable, and more equitable to all businesses,” Lowry added.

But failure has met every effort to bring about an income tax, which would require voter approval because the conventional wisdom (not longer agreed to by all) holds that it would require a change in the constitution.

The service industry represents the perfect example of what Lowry is referring to. Firms in that industry pay 1.5 percent of their gross revenue because that industry basically has the highest profit margins, on average. Although it’s anyone’s guess as to why gambling (for those whose annual winnings total $50,000 or less) is specifically singled out for the same rate as the leal, accounting and consulting businesses.

Anyone looking for absurdity in the b&o tax need look no further than its placing escort services in the retailing category, which means the tax is about half of the rate on services. A wag might suggest that the state should not be promoting escort services as retail activity, in which sales occur

Referring to the disparity of b&o-tax rates, Don Brunell, president of the Association of Washington Business, points out that many of the variations in the rates relate to incentives provided to various industries at one time or another.

Thus production of biodiesel fuel was put in the lowest-rate category of .0013, which had been created for “wholesale meat processors.”

And the most high-visibility example was, perhaps, the 2005 change that made “manufacture and sale of commercial aircraft” beneficiary of a reduction from .0042 to .0029, a clear part of the incentive package for Boeing.

Brunell, whose statewide business association is also the state chamber of commerce, suggests that just looking to remove a tax incentive, as Gregoire is basically suggesting, isn’t necessarily the answer. Why change an incentive that is doing what the legislature intended it to do?

“The duty of any industry that gets an incentive such as b&o-tax reduction, is to produce jobs to offset the tax revenue the state is losing from the tax incentive,” said Brunell. “The legislature should be constantly looking at the whole array of incentives and if the incentive isn’t paying off for the state, the legislature should look to change it.”

Incidentally, the additional 1 percent b&o tax hike service industries were hit with in 1993 was eliminated three years later as what was becoming the state’s dot-com surge brought a budget surplus of more than $600 million.

Gregoire and the legislators considering the painful combination of cuts and tax hikes necessary to balance the budget, as well as businesses and individuals who will feel the pain, can only hope that a similar comeback for the economy is in the not-too-distant future.

This is a story about a pair of Seattle physicians, one just retired from his non-profit role and the other engaged in what he describes as his last campaign. They weren’t known to each other and were unrelated in their practices, but they were united in their respective focuses on commitments to children and left enduring imprints, one across this country and the other to the far corners of the globe.

Abe Bergman once described the rewards of his half century as a pediatrician as satisfying “the passions of my bleeding heart by practicing ‘political medicine’ on behalf of underserved kids.”

What Abraham Bergman, M.D., age 77, describes as “practicing political medicine” means that over much of his five decades of practice, he spent his time twisting the arms of a variety of powerful Washington State lawmakers on behalf of children’s issues that required federal legislation or attention.

For Don VanNimwegen, guiding surgical teams to far corners of the globe on behalf of Healing the Children brought satisfaction not only for the impact on the lives of youngsters operated on but also for the impact his efforts had on attitudes of populations to whom Americans “are not so welcome.”In a sense, he brought his own form of “political medicine.”

VanNimwegen, 69, who retired from his career as an anesthesiologist at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle about the same time as Bergman retired from his pediatrics role, was feted a few weeks ago by Healing the Children supporters after he announced he was retiring from that involvement.

Through the array of campaigns in which Bergman was involved, he helped bring about Congressional actions that ranged from changes in product-safety oversight to a package of poison-prevention bills to laws governing fire-retardant clothing for children.

 In 2002, as he was stepping down from his role as chief of pediatrics at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center, Bergman says he “began looking around for one last time at bat on behalf of a children’s advocacy project.”

His “last at bat” has been an effort to bring about national legislation designed to improve the lives of children in foster care. He took the idea to Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who created bipartisan legislation that was passed and finally signed into law two years ago as Fostering Connection to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act.

It will  help hundreds of thousands of children and youth in foster care by promoting permanent families for them through relative guardianship and adoption and improving education and health care until age 21, as well as offering American Indian children important federal protections and support.

A provision in the legislation that each state must come up with a plan on how to implement the foster children’s healthcare requirement has taken some time, which Bergman described as a “lonely vigil” of “cajoling state officials to do what they’ve promised to do anyhow but just haven’t gotten around to doing.”

Now a key step toward bringing those state programs about will take place in Seattle Feb. 11-12 when Medicaid and children’s welfare representatives from 10 states gather for a roundtable planning session for strategies to set up statewide health systems for children in foster care. The event is under the co-sponsorship of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and Seattle-based Casey Family Programs.

“The moral issue is transcendent because these are children for whom the state has become the parent,” Bergman explains. “Through no fault of their own, they’ve been taken from their homes after being abused and terribly neglected and become wards of the state.”

I asked him if much of the problem of healthcare for foster kids wouldn’t be resolved if healthcare legislation is approved by Congress in the coming weeks.

“The issue of foster health care is way too small to be considered in the national health legislation,” he replied. “What happens with Medicaid does also affect foster kids, because Medicaid is what funds their health care.” 

But Bergman’s activities on behalf of kids extend way beyond mere political activism. He’s been an outspoken advocate of adoptions by retirees, particularly of special-needs children. He became an advocate of retiree adoptions after he and his wife adopted two youngsters, one in 1997 and the other in 1999, from Siberia.

And his quest for a downtown Seattle “play garden” for kids with disabilities will come about this spring.

In VanNimwegen’s 15-year involvement with the Spokane-based national non-profit Healing the Children, which has chapters in 23 states, he guided as many as four medical-team trips a year while overseeing the medical-supplies warehouse at Group Health that kept the teams supplied.

While VanNimwegen handled the anesthesia role for 800 surgeries and organized more than 1,800 operations in the array of countries to which he guided the medical teams to deal with the surgical needs of the kids, he indicates he was perhaps most struck by the impact on attitudes that were changed by the medical teams.

“We were in Pakistan one year and operated on 50 kids with cleft palates,” VanNimwegen recalls. “The guy we dealt with at the U.S. Embassy told us it was the most positive thing that had happened that year to impact our relations with Pakistan.”

And he recalls working aboard a U.S. Navy ship that was providing aide to Indonesians following the 2004 Tsunami. He says a poll of Indonesians prior to the disastrous Tsunami showed 70 percent had an unfavorable opinion of the U.S.

“After we completed our medical work following the Tsunami, another poll showed it was just reversed,” he says. “It showed 70 percent thought favorably about us.”

I’ve known both Bergman and VanNimwegen since the early ‘70s and asked VanNimwegen if he had heard of Bergman. He said he hadn’t so I told him about Bergman’s activities on behalf of children.

“Sounds like he worked from the top down while I did my work from the bottom up,” VanNimwegen chuckled.

Over the nearly five decades since what’s now the nation’s oldest grassroots political conference was established by Republican leaders in Oregon, GOP fortunes that once flowed in that state have ebbed dramatically in recent years.

Now leading Republicans in this state, where party fortunes have pretty much mirrored Oregon’s, are seeking to emulate the party camaraderie and broad-tent discussion of issues that characterize the Dorchester Conference with their own gathering later this month.

The hope of organizers of the Roanoke Conference, which will take place at Ocean Shores Jan. 29-31, is that an opportunity to gather in a social setting while discussing issues will energize a broad demographic of Republicans.

In fact, at a time when broadened appeal is vital to the future success of the GOP in this state,

The Roanoke Conference, named for the Mercer Island tavern at which all manner of strategy sessions and philosophical discussions have occurred for decades over beer and hamburgers, is the brainchild of Steven Buri, executive director of the Discovery Institute.

Buri, who was an aide to former Sen. Slade Gorton, says he has long felt the need for Republicans in Washington to have a gathering like the Dorchester Conference, which was named for a Lincoln City hotel where the founding 1964 conference was held.

In fact, at a time when broadened appeal may be vital to the future success of the GOP in this state, Buri and others are seeking to attract a diverse group of attendees, including university students and minorities. Part of the hope is that attendees sharing concerns and ideas with Republican legislators and leaders could prompt emergence of some future candidates for elective office.

The GOP in both Northwest states finds its standing at low tide a year after the re-election of Democratic governors and legislatures in which Democratic control of both houses moved toward two-thirds majorities.

Buri’s vision is “the need for a gathering of Republicans of all stripes on the broad themes of free market, limited government and individual liberties, a focus on the core principles that most Republicans agree on.”

Both Washington Atty. Gen. Rob McKenna and Buri’s old boss, Slade Gorton, strongly support Buri’s goal and will be on the program.

Though many Republicans will bemoan the current divisiveness and low point of their political fortunes in the wake of what happened nationally with the election of Barack Obama and the overwhelming success of Democrats in Congressional races, Gorton will be an intriguing reminder of what came out of another Republican debacle.

That debacle was the 1964 presidential campaign in which Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater was caught in a political tsunami by Lyndon Johnson. Republicans in Congress, state legislatures and State Houses were swept out of office by the flood.

Two years later, a carefully choreographed Republican strategy in which new faces were convinced to run for the legislature resulted in a surprise GOP majority in the Washington House and gains in the Senate. Gorton served as House majority leader, a position that provided a launch pad for his later roles as state attorney general, then U.S. senator.

History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself. But opportunity frequently does. And thus it may be in 2010 for Republicans. A number of long-time GOP leaders understands that, but are frustrated by the ideological divisions that haunt the party.

Ralph Munro, who served as Washington’s secretary of state for 20 years  before deciding not to run for a sixth term, is in-your-face with his comment that “the party has to broaden its base if it expects to win in Washington State.”

“Until the party decides it has to go after some mainstream issues, it’s not going to win,” says Munro, who plans to be on hand at the Roanoke Conference gathering.

Perhaps more compelling is the observation of Bill Witt, a transplanted Oregonian who was a Republican leader in that state’s legislature and twice candidate for Congress, losing in his final race by 301 votes in a recount out of 250,000 votes cast.

Witt ended his political career to move to the Seattle area to oversee his Witt Company office products company, which has outlets up and down the West Coast.

Witt, who attended a number of Dorchester Conferences, says he thinks “a similar concept could be beneficial here, provided no one ideological faction tries to control it.”

Witt even has a plan for how a Washington conference could prove beneficial.

“There should be a broadly arranged board (moderates, conservatives, pro-life, pro-gun, fiscal conservatives, etc.) primarily consisting of non-elected individuals,” Witt suggested. “The purpose should be to discuss issues, bring Republican’s together, and promote Republican candidates.

“Certainly there are tremendous opportunities for Republicans in Washington,” Witt added.” However, to succeed, Republicans need active involvement and enthusiastic support from many, many people.”

And beginning that process of appeal to a broader audience is what the Roanoke Conference is intended to achieve, as Buri and other supporters see it.

For those seeking snatches of light amidst the economic gloom, here’s an upbeat update on three of the businesses we wrote about in the year now ending as each of them heads into a new year with initiatives that will bring new opportunity to the businesses and individuals they touch.

Northwest companies needing turnaround assistance, new and emerging clean-energy companies in need of guidance for growth, and global beneficiaries of a new micro-giving site will see enhanced economic opportunity in 2010 from two Seattle-based firms and a newly minted non-profit.

Principals in the quiet turnaround group Revitalization Partners LLC have formed a $50 million Distressed Opportunities Fund. They are likely to gain much higher visibility as distressed or capital-constrained businesses learn about the pool of dollars ready to be invested. Alan Davis, a partner in the firm, was the subject of an October column (Google Flynn’s Harp: Davis chose turnaround challenges).

At McKinstry, which was described as “the nation’s green-tech central” in a March profile (Google Flynn’s Harp: Seattle firm nation’s “green tech” central), a new Innovation Center is being completed and readied for its first young green-energy technology company. The first occupant will be selected soon, according to Elsa Croonquist, the facility’s project manager.

And SeeYourImpact.org, created by former Microsoft executives Scott Oki and Digvijay Chauhen, is now operating in what Chauhen describes as a “friends and family” preview mode in India, the first country in which the site will be fully operational by the second half of 2010.

Revitalization Partners is already getting inquiries from firms interested in being considered for investment from what Davis describes as “an initial $50 million pledge of capital to be invested in distressed or capital-constrained middle market companies in the Northwest and British Columbia.”

Davis, who has become what might be called a “turnaround expert” over the past decade or more, explained in the original column his interest in taking companies that are on shaky financial ground and bringing them back. “Once you do one turnaround, you want to do others.”

Davis and partner Bill Lawrence will each likely have direct involvement with companies that they decide are candidates for part of the fund, which Davis estimates will be between four and 10 companies at the outset. But he says their funding partners can provide further funds if the initial amount proves there are opportunities awaiting.

Croonquist, McKinstry’s Incubator Project Manager, says the 24,000-square-foot addition to McKinstry’s headquarters will be ready to accept its first small company in April and could house up to five by the end of the year.

When he first announced the center at a Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce gathering in October, McKinstry Executive Vice President David Allen said the Center will act as a commercialization accelerator to bring new and emerging companies together to foster advancement of energy technologies.

In the original interview, Allen noted that then-president hopeful Barack Obama visited McKinstry in the late winter of 2008 to use the company’s offices as a backdrop for a press conference on environmental change and that, as president Obama has repeatedly mentioned the firm as a green-initiatives leader.

The firm’s growth in the past couple of years has been phenomenal with 45 offices now spread across the country, creating what David (whose brother, Dean, is CEO of the firm) describes as a company whose “shadow is longer than our body” because of its impact on clean and green businesses. McKinstry may actually be the Seattle area’s most successful company right now.

The young firms housed in the incubator/accelerator facility may eventually number as many as 20, according to Croonquist. It may be that similar facilities will emerge in other McKinstry locations, particularly Spokane and Portland, though Croonquist isn’t ready to discuss that yet.

And as the column on the Oki-Chauhen micro-giving site, the vision is of eventually thousands of messengers delivering small gifts or donated items to millions of the world’s needy, each delivery recorded via cell-phone photo and sent back to the giver (Google Flynn’s Harp: Oki vision: micro-philanthropy on global scale).

As with the Kiva micro-lending site after which SeeYourImpact.org is modeled, tips (averaging $2 to $3) from those making gifts on the site will be a source of revenue and Chauhen says about 80 percent of those currently trying the site are actually providing tips.

He notes that the push to begin actually driving traffic to the site will begin in the fourth quarter, after ramping up the number of NGOs providing delivery of the gifts. Then it will be expansion into Africa.

To get a sense of the kinds of giving already going on with this innovative non-profit, it’s worth visiting theSeeYourImpact.org website. The business will deserve dramatically more visibility in the months ahead as its full impact begins to unfold.

Other people and businesses that were subjects of Flynn’s Harp during the past 12 months, including Spokane’s Condon brothers and their unique bio-industrial park, are also going to be heard from in the coming year in upbeat news, proving there are bright spots in a continuing troubled economy.