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Sen. Maria Cantwell says there has been likewise much secrecy, too little planning and too little oversight surrounding the infusion of billions of federal dollars into the U.S. banking system.

“Transparency is critically of moment,” said. Cantwell, D-Wash. “We need to know where the currency is going, and how it is actuality exhausted.”

In the fall, Cantwell voted against the initial release of $350 billion to the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Earlier this month, Cantwell was common of nine Senate Democrats who voted against the remit of another $350 billion. That money had been requested by then President-elect Obama, who seeks to funnel more financial aid to homeowners, consumers and students seeking loans.

Obama’s lance was enough to bring most senators over to his edge, including Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

But Cantwell says she is uneasy through the role that the government has played in picking winners and losers in the banking industry. Before approving the supporter $350 billion, she wanted to see guidelines established that lay out the public-policy goals behind the distributions.

“There’s been basically not one aim,” Cantwell said.

Cantwell said she does not long for to see the banks pressured into making bad loans with the treaty funds. But Cantwell also is troubled by some complaints she has received about viable businesses struggling to obtain financing from banks that have current money from TARP.

This month, she has been fielding complaints from businesses caught up in the Jan. 16 failure of Bank of Clark County in Vancouver. These businesses hoped to be seized of their credit lines picked up by Umpqua Bank, based in Oregon, which had received $214 million in TARP funds and took over the ensured deposits of the Bank of Clark County.

But there has been in no degree quick abalienate of lines of credit. It will be weeks before Umpqua sorts through the Bank of Clark County loan portfolio, and finalizes decisions on the sort of customers to take from the failed bank. In the meantime, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has stepped in to thrust what’s left of the Bank of Clark County, and suspended home-equity lines of evidence of debt.

“We had these businesses complain that their lines of power were shut down,” Cantwell said.

Dan Sullivan, some Umpqua executive vice president, said there are several hundred loans left behind by the failed bank and it will take weeks to review them. He said scrutiny is needed.

“There’s a pretty hard process you go through, especially in these relating to housekeeping times,” Sullivan said.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com

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This year’s Sundance Film Festival marked a watershed for Seattle’session film diligence, with three movies made in the city premiering at the nation’session largest venue for bold pellicle.

The festival ends today in Park City, Utah, prompting the question: What happens next?

For Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton, it’s basking in the zeal of a festival success across her wildest imagination. The movie she wrote and directed, “Humpday,” premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition and became one of the most talked-about movies at the festival.

The “bromantic comedy” about two heterosexual male friends who give a decision to esteem a porn film starring themselves was also one of the first to attract buyers’ application. It quickly became the subject of an intense multiday bidding war, an atypical event in a year of tightened distribution budgets.

Magnolia Pictures emerged victorious and will release the movie first via video-on-demand and then in August in theaters in at smallest 15 cities.

“They won us covering immediately. They seemed passionate about the film and thought with the right marketing, it could get to a wider audience than you would normally get for a small film like this,” said Shelton on Tuesday, exhausted after five days of praise and negotiation.

At minutest 60 percent of sale proceeds will go to the film’s largely Seattle-based cast and mob, many of whom worked for none pay in exchange for a cut of the back-end profits.

“I’mish-mash looking head to feeling like Santa Claus,” Shelton said. “These are the most deserving people in the world, as far as I’m concerned.”

Shelton won over audiences and critics with the way she handled the movie’s premise, to the degree that the men’s plan ultimately forces them to examine deeper issues about their identities and relationships.

Judging by audience reverse action, “I think we really get let us go. with it,” Shelton before-mentioned. “They’re fully fleshed out and they’re believable. You really be of opinion these guys might go through with this.”

The film gave Alycia Delmore, a lifelong Seattle resident and stage actor, her first starring movie role in the same proportion that the wife of one of the men. Like the rest of the cast, Delmore was paid in shares of the movie, that appliance she wasn’t positive of getting a paycheck until the movie found a distributor.

Though the arc of the plot was carefully planned, there was nay written script, which allowed the actors to largely behave themselves on veil.

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Stevens Pass ski area would get the goodwill of new ski trails and lifts and an entire new season of recreation for mount bikers under any expansion plan now for that that is less than consideration.

Mountain bikers are stoked about a plan to add about five miles of downhill trails, reached by the Hogsback chairlift, for summer use. The trails would include jumps, drops, and other adrenaline pumpers — all with elective bypasses — to rival the trails at Whistler, B.C.

No such weight rush by chairlift is currently beneficial to mountain bikers in Washington.

“There is a definitely a pregnant market for that kind of thing, and it’s growing faster than there are places to ride,” before-mentioned Adam Schaeffer, service manager at the Downhill Zone mountain-bike workshop in Seattle.

A mountain biker himself, Schaeffer sees great potential for the trails planned for Stevens, especially with the benefit of chairlift access. The location, just an hour and a half from Seattle, is a different greater drawing, Schaeffer said.

“You are up and back in a epoch. What is not to like?”

The mountain-bike trails are in phase one of a manager plan for the ski area envisioned to be built over the next 10 to 15 years by the resort owner, Harbor Properties of Seattle.

The bike trails are planned for use by summer 2010.

Phase two of the overcome plan includes a new chairlift and additional ski trails east of the vertex. It is envisioned for conversion to an act by the winter of 2011. A new mountain lodge at the top of the Skyline lift is proposed, with hot nutriment and year-round increase to arrange vast eminence bikers considered in the state of adequately as skiers.

All of the phase one and two improvements for skiers and bikers are in the compass of the current permit superficial contents for the company, which is entirely on public country managed by the U.S. Forest Service.

The ski area, as part of its master plan, would also like to add about 136 acres to the resort, to tidy up boundaries and for better avalanche control. No new unfolding is planned there.

Under the long-term master digest, the number of chairlifts would increase to 15 from 12; the number of trails would grow to 237 trails in continuance 938 acres from 130 on 588 acres. Restaurant seating would be increased, and parking added.

“We definitely could appliance some more lifts and lodge capacity,” said Bob Burton, of Seattle, president of the board of directors of the Stevens Pass Alpine Club. With both best fruits originator runs as well as steep and open runs, Burton sees great new potential in spite of Stevens — his favorite venue in the Northwest towards 40 years.

“It’s very crowded on the weekend, and we would look forward to some new lifts and trails, to accord. us other thing additional ski areas.”

Permit method questioned

But the permitting method elected by the Forest Service to review the developer’s proposal is creating controversy.

Stevens Pass is the last of the major ski areas in the Seattle domain to propose expansion — and the first the feds and developer propose to handle with a phased environmental analysis.

With the couple Crystal Mountain and the Summit at Snoqualmie, the Forest Service approved expansions and enhancements only after a full-blown environmental impact statement (EIS) of the complete master plan for the projects.

The analyses included a look at cumulative effects, alternatives to the proposed plans and mitigation to offset disadvantage to the environment.

But under an approach new in the Northwest, the Forest Service this duration of one’s life wants to examine the master plan for Stevens under an abbreviated environmental tax of only the first phase of the project. Other steps in the expansion would be examined of the same kind with phases of the project advancement.

The so-called phased approach has been used elsewhere in the rural but not here — and so far, it’s not going over for one’s advantage with conservation groups.

Just looking at phase one — which includes upgrades to the water system — doesn’t provide a complete picture of what the ski area could become to boot time, declared Charlie Raines, of the Cascade Chapter of the Sierra Club, which is fighting a phased review.

“I am flabbergasted the Forest Service thinks they can slice this up into little pieces so they can escape distress any overall look. The Forest Service of necessity to be making decisions end for end the entire landscape, not taking these things one at a time,” Raines aforesaid.

A comprehensive effects analysis promised as part of the phased approach also falls short, Raines argued, because mitigation, if somewhat, would have existence ordered at this stage for only aspect one of the project — not the whole master plan.

The Sierra Club was instrumental in the recently approved enlargement of the Summit at Snoqualmie in that significant mitigation, including purchase of forest lands to make up for new development at the ski area, was part of the deal.

But John Meriwether, director of planning for Stevens Pass resort, said because of uncertainties about future development, from financing to climate change, it doesn’t make vocation sensation to sell a mitigation plan up front for portions of the master plan that puissance never be built.

“Why waste money on analysis of all this stuff we may never bring about?” Meriwether said.

“This phasing process is new to the Pacific Northwest. The way it’s been done in Washington is you submit a master project and do an EIS on the whole circumstance. But it is much more economical and adapted to practice to cozen it in phases, for it focuses on the actual impact of what is going to happen in the foreseeable future.”

Sean Wetterberg, winter-sports specialist for the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, furthermore favors the phased approach.

“This does represent a change in the transaction from the way we have done overseer plans at other ski areas in the forest,” Wetterberg declared. “We’ve learned a parcel.”

“We want to do meaningful environmental analytics on a realistic proffer, in a reasonable substance of time.”

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com

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Another big frank of layoffs is expected at Starbucks, possibly 1,000 people

“The cuts efficiency have existence next week or in February,” wrote Diane Daggatt, a managing director at McAdams Wright Ragen in Seattle.

Starbucks declined to comment on possible layoffs. The Seattle coffee partnership releases its first-quarter results on Wednesday.

No barista jobs are in jeopardy, Daggatt wrote.

That will be a relief to dispirited workers who have begun to motion changes at the furnish direct since Howard Schultz reclaimed the CEO spot one year ago this month.

At first inspired by Schultz’s return to the helm, they wonder now where Starbucks is headed. Many fear for their jobs as the coffee trammel’sitting sales continue to slide, forcing Starbucks to close 616 U.S. supplies and trim employees’ hours.

The Seattle coffee guests slashed more than 2,000 jobs last year, including 1,000 in July that included 180 positions in Seattle. At that time, about 3,500 people worked at its headquarters.

It did not disclose how great number people lost jobs when it closed the U.S. stores, except to assert that 300 workers from the first 50 closures were not reassigned to other locations.

“They have us cornered,” said one East Coast store manager who asked not to be named. “They know the economy is disingenuous right now, and we can’familiarily afford to walk out.”

He ticked off a list of disappointments, from changes that make it harder for managers to earn bonuses, to a divide in hours that makes it harder to train baristas and keep stores clean-minded.

Then there are the joined messages from corporate, which leaves more abundance workers feeling whipsawed:

Laid off and looking? A manager tasked through downsizing? Here are some things you need to discern

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In 2008, the U.S. economy squandered a net total of 2.6 a thousand thousand jobs, the most since 1945. Navigating and understanding unemployment is an anxious task. The following are resources for managers and employees from BusinessWeek and other sources.

Job-Hunting Realities: What ‘No’ Really Means Don’t be demoralized when an employer turns you from the top to the bottom of. The reasons behind a rejection usually have more to do with the party than with you

Career Advancement in Tough Times Experts say: Focus on helping the concourse, dress in’cheek by jowl attack rivals, and know the pressures on your boss

Tough Times with regard to Managers, Too Many employees are feeling unsure and discouraged. Managers need to help commonalty in their companies arrange to new realities

Downsizing 101 Charged with giving the bad information? Here are your ethical responsibilities

Recession-Proof Jobs A 2008 report shows that tech-related positions are safe bets equitable now, especially software developer. But sales positions are solid, too

Timing a Layoff to Get Severance If your company hasn’t offered you a bonus to stay until layoffs begin, start looking for a job now

Now Severance Packages Are on the Chopping Block As the management swoons, more companies are cutting workforces—and partition benefits

Video: Retirees Looking for Work With a lot not so much money to draw from in their retirement, multitude retirees are out looking for jobs

How Much Unemployment Pay You Get—and Whether You Qualify The benefits offered to unoccupied workers—and whether your job situation qualifies for benefits at all—vary greatly from state to state

BusinessWeek Topic Exchange: Unemployment This topic tracks the latest news that projects future numbers, identifies repercussions, and looks at private and public fixes

U.S. Labor Dept.: Unemployment Insurance The Labor Dept.’sitting Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs cater unemployment benefits to desirable workers who become unemployed through no fault of their own and who meet certain other eligibility requirements

Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: Unemployment Few economic indicators are of more disturb to Americans than unemployment statistics. Reports that unemployment rates are dropping make us happy; reports to the contrary make us restless. But just what do unemployment figures tell us? Are they reliable measures? What influences joblessness?

National Employment Law Project Online forum created after the 2001 recession for the nation’s jobless and underemployed workers

A conversation with the nonprofit about its new letter grades, in what manner the process works, and how to make it work for your small business

By Karen E. Klein

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The Better Business Bureau is handing out report cards to businesses, and acquisition a excellence grade can help differentiate a feeble-minded firm from its competitors. Until this year, the BBB gave companies both a "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" label, says Steve Cox, vice-president of communications for the nonprofit’s general umbrella organization, the Council of Better Business Bureaus. He spoke recently to Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein about by what mode the new system of letter grades can provide consumers with confidence in an opposite direction a small business. Edited excerpts of their conversation follows.

Q: The BBB Reliability Report now goes beyond the make a pass/fail system in quest of its assembly integrity ratings to contain a epistle grade, from A+ into a denser consistence to each F. Why make that make different?

A: We felt like our ratings weren’t giving enough accusation. We decided to change with the times so we could give consumers a better snapshot of a trustworthy business. Consumers want greater degree of than marketing spin or a few comments about a business posted on the Internet. And rightly so, because given tough economic conditions, they literally can’t afford to make bad buying decisions.

Q: Why should a small-business owner go through the process of acquirement rated by the BBB?

A: Getting the letter grade helps differentiate a business and it helps consumers find a trustworthy business more easily. There are so multitude sites online these days that consumers are using to make their purchasing decisions. If you’re not rated, it’s almost like you slip on’t exist. And small companies penury to do everything they be possible to to differentiate themselves from their competition.

Q: A lot of those consumer review sites include slams on individual businesses that may not be justified, bound can be obliged a big effect on sales.

A: Absolutely. That’s why our grading system is based on a set of objective criteria and standards developed during the 100-year life of the bureau. We be delivered of 16 elements we evaluate, weighted based on importance. It’s a very pretty good, objective ratings method that is standards-based and fact-based, not opinion-based.

Q: How would small-business owners get their companies rated from one side your system?

A: Just go to our main Web site, type in your Zip Code and you’ll get the page for the BBB in your area. Contact them and ask them to get ready a rating for your business. You don’t regard to have being a member to answer the purpose that; We be seized of more than 4 million business ratings in our database. We also let consumers initiate the process of rating a company, or filing a ail.

Q: What’s the process of the ratings system?

A: The business fills away a standard business questionnaire, including questions respecting the kind of business, how long it’s been operating, what kind of licensing it has, and whether that grant authority to has at any time been hanging. There are 16 elements that go into the letter grade that’s produced. The BBB takes that information, assesses it, plugs it into a ratings formula and generates a reliability report through a rank associated with it.

Q: Is the rating based just on self-reported information, or is there confirmation that you do?

A: We establish the truth of the information provided and validate it through cross-checking information we engender from local, state, and federal agencies. We also check through other agencies to find complaints that may have been filed in requital for the business.

Q: How long does it take to beget a business rated?

A: It depends on the mass of requests we get, but typically it’sitting apparently six to eight weeks.

Q: How can small companies that get merciful ratings use them strategically in their marketing and sales efforts?

A: We encourage companies to advertise their alphabetic character grade in their marketing and in their matter. Be over-weening of it! Mention it to your customers and potential customers. Sometimes consumers are more wary of small businesses that they don’t know in the same manner with well as the larger brands. Getting a good grade can really help.

We likewise parallel them to take the next step and become an accredited member of the BBB.

Q: What does that involve?

A: It’s a more thorough evaluation and a more in-depth process. Accredited firms sign a contract that says they agree to adhere to BBB standards, including resolving consumer complaints with BBB. It involves a fee that varies, depending on the size of the business and other factors.

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Lucy traveled across 3.2 million years and thousands of miles to get to Seattle, but officials at the Pacific Science Center say few folks have turned out to see the world’sitting most famous fossil.

Facing up to a half-million-dollar loss adhering the exhibit, the center laid off 8 percent of its staff and froze wages, President and CEO Bryce Seidl said Friday. Workers are taking unpaid days off, and the nonprofit organization pensile matching funds because individual retirement accounts.

It’session a disappointing outcome since an offer that was intended to be a blockbuster despite the Seattle museum and a public-relations coup for Lucy’s homeland of Ethiopia, Seidl said.

“It’s a commanding story of evolution and culture and history … but that we’re not getting the attendance we need for single in kind exhibit of this scale.”

Lucy had never before been put on public display outside of Ethiopia. The partial skeleton of one of man’s earliest ancestors was unearthed in 1974 in a remote corner of the African state. The disclosure of a species with chimplike features that walked upright overturned preceding notions of humanity’s evolutionary tree.

The exhibit cost about $2.25 million to mount, Seidl estimated. That includes a $500,000 fee to the government of Ethiopia, which plans to appliance the money raised during Lucy’s U.S. excursion for cultural and scientific programs.

The knowledge center had hoped 250,000 canaille would visit during the bring to notice’s five-month passage, which ends March 8. But attendants, so far, is only 60,000.

Seidl blamed the economic downturn, which has divide into arts programs and museum budgets across the country. December’s snowy weather also robbed the science center of a traditionally busy month of parties and family visits.

Other museums around the U.S. have been tracking Lucy’s poor showing in Seattle, and none has yet agreed to be the nearest stop on what was meant to be a six-year, 10-city tour. Chicago’s Field Museum backed out of plans to host the exhibit because of the cost. Controversy above the top whether the irreplaceable fossil should be transported around the globe led the Denver Museum of Nature & Science not to follow through on early discussions.

“Lucy may not be anywhere other than Ethiopia after Seattle,” Seidl said.

But an magistrate at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, that worked with the Ethiopian government to organize the tour, declared she’s confident other museums will progression up.

Donald Johanson, the American anthropologist who discovered Lucy, uttered fascination with the skeleton hasn’t faded. “As I make a tour on every side of the region lecturing, people seem to have a deep interest in their origins, in their roots,” he said.

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For the one-time hulking Garfield High School and University of Washington football defensive end, a diagnosis of stomach cancer was, for example one might expect, devastating.

Lee Brock was out of the limelight of his gridiron years when his illness was diagnosed. Still, surgery and handling necessitated his departure a decade ago as assistant dean of social sciences and humanities at Bremerton’s Olympic College.

Mr. Brock, 61, known to few through his first name, Orble, but to most as simply Lee, was found dead at his SeaTac home last Saturday (Jan 17).

The 1966 Garfield grad and varsity letterman, who attended the UW on a sports scholarship, was a defensive end, No. 87, on the UW’sitting Huskies from 1967 through 1969. That period was marked by a lackluster take down and rocked by racial strife in a state of being liable to coach Jim Owens.

In 1969, Mr. Brock was team co-captain and named Pac-8 All-Conference that year. He was selected for the sake of the 1969 East-West Shrine all-star game in San Francisco, where he received the Spaulding Award for tip defensive performance, and in the Hula Bowl in Honolulu in 1970.

“Lee was a tenacious competitor, and that same competitiveness he took in pursuit of his education,” said Greg Alex, of Seattle, a former Huskies teammate.

“He was a ample captain, and he had the respect of the players, both offense and defense,” said Dr. Ralph Bayard, of Seattle, who also played for the 1969 Huskies.

Mr. Brock had a free-agent tryout by the Oakland Raiders of the National Football League in 1970 and played during the early 1970s with the World Football League’s Portland Storm.

Senior athletes and coaches taught him greater degree than just how to play football, he told a Seattle Times reporter during a 1989 interview. They led him, he said, to other mentors, who eventually led him to a rush outside the game in student-counseling services.

With a sociology station from the UW, and a teacher’session grade in education counseling, he was director of student programs and recruitment at North Seattle Community College, afterward returned to the UW in 1989 to recruit the first students to attend the new Tacoma branch campus.

“He wanted to leave a legacy,” related his daughter, Leanne Rye Brock, of Edmonds. “He wanted his children to know the aggregate of characteristic qualities of become a father to we had.”

Also surviving are a son, Benjamin Jamaal Brock, of Seattle; his former wife, Brenda Rye Brock, of Seattle; two grandsons; a brother, Earl Gene Brock, of Minnesota; and three sisters, Alverna Lee Vallery, of Dallas, and Edna Vale Chapman and Annie Jean Carroll, both of Seattle.

A memorial service will be at 11 a.m. today at Seattle’sitting Mount Zion Baptist Church, 1634 19th Ave.