The most recent company is called McKinstry Reklaim: http://www.mckinstryreklaim.com/

We have a plant in Oregon that recovers materials and energy from discarded automobile tires. This is exciting because today discarded tires are mostly burned or buried. A small percentage are used for playgrounds, mulch, and other uses but the true value of the tire is in the raw materials from which the tire is made. And, we have a process to recover those raw materials without burning the tire and releasing harmful gases into the air. As you can imagine, this is both fun but also not something that I can blog about because of the confidentiality of the process that has been developed. Therefore, I have been quiet about this for some time. There will be more to talk about later but this is a great story, really smart folks with a vision who created a process that works better than anyone realized. I was brought into this after the plant was built so it is especially fun for me to be involved in the fine-tuning of the process, the marketing of the end products, and the expansion of the business.

The second company  is called Pacific Coast Canola: http://www.pacificcoastcanola.com/

We have designed and permitted the construction of a canola processing plant in eastern Washington. Washington state can become a major producer of one of the world’s healthiest, most versatile, and fastest growing oils: Canola oil. We are in the final stages of putting together the financing for the plant, so again it is difficult to say too much right now. This project has many exciting parts to it: first, it will create tremendous economic opportunity for Washington state, not only because of the new jobs but also because of the new canola crop that can be grown by Washington state farmers. Below is a photo from last month of canola growing in Eastern Washington. Second, there are no large scale canola processors on the west coast of the United States so we will have great access to Washington, Oregon, and California who all care about healthier lifestyles, healthier foods, and therefore healthier oils like canola oil. And third and by no means last, canola oil makes the best quality biodiesel. At the moment the market for biodiesel is not in good shape. But when that market rebounds we will be ready with a locally produced biodiesel feedstock that can help our state, our economy, and our environment in many ways. We are lucky that canola oil is a fantastic edible oil as well as the best biodiesel feedstock because we will have many options to create value for Washington state and its farming community regardless of the timing and direction of these two markets. If all goes well we hope to start construction on this plant in late 2009.

Canola Field

From Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the signing of the Declaration of Independence to Abraham Lincoln’s fighting for the Emancipation Proclamation and the battlefields where American soldiers have died in defense of other people’s freedoms, our country has held true to the principle that everyone has the right to a life free of injustice. More than anything else we stand for, this freedom is the American dream and is recognized as such around the world.

We have struggled with ourselves to protect this dream; in fact, our country’s history can be seen as an ongoing internal battle against intolerance, greed, hatred, and bigotry. Our progress has not been smooth and gradual – or even continuous – but with giant steps forward, homeostasis punctuated by volcanic changes. In 1870 a major triumph – the 15th Amendment – extended voting rights to men of all race and color, but not to women. It took us another 50 years to take that step. And despite the 15th Amendment, the battle to vote regardless of race or color wasn’t assured until passage of the National Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even now, women do not get equal pay for equal work.

We have fought hard to hang on to our dream. Americans have shed tears, lost lives, and suffered to bring about these changes.

Next Tuesday we have the chance to step forward again. People of every political stripe share an almost palpable national excitement, even angst, as the nation undergoes something akin to birthing pains. Regardless of political party, we should be proud and mark the moment when we elect our first black President. It is a milestone in our journey to be the country we aspire to and a reminder to our friends – and our enemies – abroad why we are such a great country.

Joel Horn

Joel Horn to head up Seattle Monorail…if. (11/17/02)
Seattle, Washington. Elevated Transportation Company (ETC) board members announced that Joel Horn, who worked for the ETC for the last year, will lead the project of building the14-mile Green Line monorail linking Ballard, downtown and West Seattle. One major hurdle remains before the project can officially get started, the vote count from the November 5th election must be completed and Monorail Yes must be the winner! Certification of the results are due Wednesday, November 20th. If the monorail gets voter approval, a new Seattle Popular Monorail Authority will be established to construct the monorail. Among many accomplishments, Horn worked for developer Wright Runstad and put together a deal that relocated Amazon.com into the high-profile PacMed building on Beacon Hill. ETC board members lauded Horn at the Friday ETC meeting, although they won’t take a vote to promote him to the position until a yes vote has been certified. Board member Harolynne Bobis said “I firmly believe we would not have had the plan available for voters were it not for Joel’s tireless tenacity in making it happen.

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20021230&slug=monohorn30m

Green Line’s chief has schedule to keep

Monorail planning at warp speed

In the 40 days since the monorail campaign declared victory by 877 votes, the new Seattle Popular Monorail Authority:

• Confirmed Joel Horn as executive director.

• Approved a $58.3 million budget for next year.

• Hired several key staffers, including finance director Daniel Malarkey, who assembled the Green Line revenue plan last summer, and community outreach director Ven Knox, who will leave her post as Seattle human-services director.

• Moved into the Securities Building at Fourth Avenue and Stewart Street.

• Picked VIA Suzuki Architects, designers of the Vancouver SkyTrain elevated rail system, to be lead designer for Seattle monorail.

• Began work on a “peace plan” with Sound Transit, including a coffeehouse meeting between Horn and Sound Transit Executive Director Joni Earl.

• Took a 14-mile bus tour of the route from Ballard to West Seattle to consider column and station locations.

• Selected Preston Gates & Ellis, Foster Pepper & Shefelman, and Nossaman Guthner Knox & Elliott as legal advisers.

• Picked Seattle-Northwest Securities as bond adviser, and Salomon Smith Barney and Goldman Sachs to market about $1 billion in bonds in the first half of 2003.

• Hired Parametrix to compile the environmental-impact statement.

• Selected Norton-Arnold & Co. to organize six neighborhood forums in January.

• Received at least 140 rsums for job openings, including six “monorail representatives” to work with neighborhoods along the route.

• Settled on a contracting process in which the builders also will operate the trains.

• Accelerated the timetable six months so construction is to start in mid-2004.

A few weeks before the Seattle monorail plan squeaked to its 877-vote win, Joel Horn was glad to explain how he would benefit from the project.

“This is my favorite stop on the entire route,” Horn said at Ballard Market, where he dropped in for coffee and a pastry. On a driving tour with monorail project chairman Tom Weeks, he predicted that nearly every boarding platform will be perched atop a cafe, grocery or restaurant where he and thousands of passengers can refuel on snacks and caffeine.

Again at the Interbay QFC and at the pro-monorail Jackrabbit restaurant at Second and Madison, Horn declared, “Now this is my favorite stop.”

He will need that sort of giddy enthusiasm to attempt a project as bold as the $1.75 billion Green Line from Ballard to West Seattle, the first leg of what would be the first citywide monorail on the continent.

Without Horn’s effort during 12 months as technical program coordinator for the Elevated Transportation Co. — his visits to the Tokyo monorail, the meetings with potential builders, his work to write a cost plan — the Green Line wouldn’t have reached the ballot. He has been rewarded with a promotion to executive director of the new Seattle Popular Monorail Authority and a salary now expected to match that of his counterpart at Sound Transit, Joni Earl, who makes $172,000 a year.

Despite his talents, some critics worry that Horn’s ties to business and political elites will turn the project into a boon for them instead of preserving the dream of The People’s Monorail.

Horn has made enemies over the years in two controversial, high-profile development projects. In 1998 as an agent for Wright Runstad, he arranged for Amazon.com to move into the PacMed public-hospital building on Beacon Hill over the objections of neighbors and activists who wanted the building used for social services. Horn also led the Seattle Commons campaign to build a park south of Lake Union, which could have displaced warehouses and low-cost apartments if voters hadn’t rejected it.

But Horn’s political pedigree isn’t quite that simple.

He coordinated the 1995 “Schools First” campaign, in which voters approved $320 million to rebuild Ballard and West Seattle high schools and renovate 13 other schools. He worked on statewide Initiative 728 to reduce class sizes, and he co-chaired an affordable-housing task force for former Mayor Paul Schell.

Horn was also Schell’s campaign treasurer, and his fund-raising savvy is one reason the monorail campaign attracted more than $400,000, including donations from Paul Allen’s Vulcan, Inc., the Westin Hotel, Samis Land Co. and construction firms.

Cleve Stockmeyer, an attorney and monorail activist, said, “What the monorail proponents should understand is it’s OK to have some of the movers and shakers with you. It’s OK to have power; it’s OK to win; it’s OK to build something. You can’t get there with grass roots alone. You need sharp financial minds. You need engineers. You need contractors.”

Horn is assembling his project team at a pace his friends think will revive the city’s can-do spirit.

“It will be built,” said Blair Butterworth, a political strategist for the monorail campaign who now advises one of the prospective construction teams. “I have no doubt it will be built. I have no doubt it will be done on budget. I have no doubt that if he possibly can do it, he will do it with enough money left over to get to Northgate.”

Long hours, high energy

Horn, a 47-year-old resident of Phinney Ridge, rises at 5 a.m. each weekday in a bedroom that looks west over the northern three miles of the monorail route. He and his wife, environmental writer Susan McGrath, converse over breakfast while their two children, 15-year-old Ruby and 12-year-old Max, are still asleep.

An Ohio native, Horn says he fell in love with Seattle during a motorcycle trip in 1976 while still a student. After graduating from college in Maine, he worked here briefly, earned a master’s degree in business from Stanford and took a job with the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C.

He first noticed Susan while she was jogging near a Washington, D.C., park in May 1983. Horn told his buddies in a carpool, “I want to marry that woman.”

It turned out they had mutual acquaintances and soon were introduced at a volleyball game. “Joel proposed to me the first time I met him, and the second time, and the third time,” McGrath recalls. They have been married 18 years.

Horn works 12 to 16 hours a day on the monorail. His wife says he would be labeled hyperactive if he were a schoolboy.

Matthew Fox, a University District activist who led the anti-Commons campaign but supports the monorail, says Horn seems supernaturally peppy. “Most people would acknowledge that Joel is a pretty good schmoozer. Joel is very persistent.”

During the Commons effort, Horn’s wife remembers seeing the opposition bumper stickers that said Joel Go Home, and thinking they ought to have said Joel, Come Home.

The Commons plan included a local monorail loop, so Horn examined the undersides of monorail trains at Seattle Center. He also met Weeks, then a city councilman from West Seattle. After the measure lost, Horn donated leftover signs to cabbie Dick Falkenbury, who used the plywood to build petition kiosks for the first of three winning monorail initiatives.

On a typical weekday, Horn works over the cellphone or his BlackBerry handheld computer while he rides the No. 5 bus downtown. A staff meeting begins at 7:30 a.m., and latecomers are fined $1 per minute. The lesson he takes from Sound Transit is that quickness means everything.

To reinforce the mindset that the monorail will be built on time and under budget, Horn tracks elapsed time during meetings, saying for instance, “We are now 38 minutes under schedule.” The public Web site, www.elevated.org, declares “1,811 days until Opening Day, December 15, 2007.”

Horn wears unscuffed leather hiking boots and keeps his shirtsleeves rolled up one fold. His black chest hair peeks over a button. He paces the office while tethered to the telephone by a 25-foot extension cord, and he shares his work space with two employees, to eliminate the seconds wasted moving from room to room.

He returns home for dinner around 6:30 p.m. and often reverts to monorail business after the kids go to bed.

“It’s not work,” he says, because the project inspires him.

A technophile, he carried a holstered cellphone during the Commons campaign, years before they were commonplace. In the past year he sent more than 20,000 monorail e-mails. (That led to an accusation of ethical lapses when opponent Henry Aronson discovered that Horn deleted e-mails daily instead of retaining them as public records. Horn says he saves them now.)

He used to read science fiction for an hour a night, but his schedule has cut that to a few paragraphs. He is trading his Subaru Outback for a low-emission Toyota Prius hybrid.

Last month, Susan shared her thoughts on global warming during one of their pre-dawn chats, and afterward, Horn told prospective monorail design firms to consider pollution reduction in their project proposals.

‘A good deal of controversy’

On Nov. 15, the day the monorail board promoted Horn, Falkenbury said:

“I’ve become surprisingly, in my view, fond of Joel. … One thing I’m impressed with is your self-knowledge, and you know you’re bringing a good deal of controversy. And having worked closely with you the last two years, I think it will actually help you, because I think you’re going to want to overcome that.”

Horn’s PacMed deal in 1998 enabled Wright Runstad to pay $8 a square foot for mostly vacant space in the PacMed building, then rent it to Amazon for $26 per square foot. Political allies of Schell’s were involved in the talks, and the lease was approved with minimal city and public oversight.

Afterward, two neighbors who walked onto the property to protest the removal of large trees were arrested and jailed.

Feelings also remain raw from the Commons proposal, which housing advocates said would have threatened 650 to 750 affordable units.

To calm critics, Horn would “make promises to everyone about what the Commons could do for the area, promises that could never in a million years be kept,” claims John Fox, of the Seattle Displacement Coalition. Still, Fox does give Horn credit for protecting The Brewster, a brick apartment house on John Street.

“He found his way into the hearts of the downtown establishment, the corporate liberal establishment,” Fox said. “He has managed to finagle jobs to function on behalf of those interests. So it sends shivers down my spine to see him heading the monorail, which was a grass-roots effort.”

Horn said he is too focused on building a monorail to dwell on old controversies.

“I’m proud of the Commons, proud of my work for the schools, proud of keeping Amazon in the city,” he said.

All of the projects are part of Horn’s vision of “one large urban campus called Seattle,” where people can commute and recreate without a car.

John Fox said he’s troubled that Horn and the monorail campaign have ignored the question of whether the project will cause expensive redevelopment that drives working people away from affordable areas in Ballard.

Horn says he is bothered by the accusation that the Green Line could displace moderate-income residents. He hopes the monorail can save families the expense of owning a car — $6,000 a year, he said, citing a recent estimate. New zoning could allow townhomes without parking garages, cutting their prices significantly, he said. In Interbay, the Northwest Center for the Retarded has suggested building affordable housing at a station.

It was Horn who advocated a monorail tax based on motor-vehicle value, instead of opting for a less-noticeable property tax on housing. “That was a responsive comment, and kind of caring,” says Stockmeyer.

Since the election, Horn’s feverish pace has caused some decisions to be rubber-stamped.

Two Mondays ago the board voted to employ a contracting method in which the construction team also operates the trains — to give an incentive to build it right. Monorail planners had discussed the idea before, but the concept remains a novel one. When board member Marie Groark tried to ask for detailed data on how the “design-build-operate-maintain” system is working elsewhere, Horn reassured the board he hadn’t heard of any problems, and Groark was overwhelmed in an 8-1 vote.

“Joel is drunk with confidence that he is right,” observed Stephen Spoonamore, who seeks appointment by the City Council to the monorail board and has denounced the Green Line segment in West Seattle, favoring a regional park-and-ride station near Boeing Field

Former monorail staffer Michael Taylor, who opposed Horn’s instant promotion, nonetheless says Horn is eager to hear outside opinions. After the election, Horn went out for beer, pizza and a peek under the old monorail trains with members of an online chat group — the movement’s populist wing.

He has shown some independence from political pals. Although his friend Schell was part of the NBBJ architectural firm’s proposed team to design the monorail, the company was bypassed in favor of Vancouver-based VIA Suzuki, which emphasized public participation.

A chat with developers

Two weeks after his promotion, Horn is paying a visit to developers Frank Stagen and Kevin Daniels of Nitze-Stagen, who restored historic Union Station and are the landlords for Starbucks Center.

“I wish you a lot of luck,” the avuncular Stagen says over coffee. “This is a great chance to create a legacy and leave something for the community.”

The developers take a few swipes at Sound Transit and show off their painting, by railroad artist Craig Thorpe of Bellevue, of a monorail soaring over commuter trains at King Street station. Horn sketches potential SoDo routes on a whiteboard while his hosts warn that easements to cross Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad property will not be as forthcoming as Horn thinks.

Then the nitty-gritty.

Horn has been pondering whether the station belongs next to Starbucks Center, or at Third and Lander next to the new school-district headquarters, or in between. Before the meeting, he mentioned that the monorail, as a public project, ought to help educators and parents use their public-school facility and not merely boost land values for developers.

But there is far more traffic around Starbucks Center.

“Just keep in mind that this has 5,000 employees a day and 5,000 to 10,000 people visiting,” Daniels says, “and only 500 over there. The voters voted to move people, not to pacify … .”

As the meeting breaks up, Daniels provides a word of wisdom:

“Just do as well for us the taxpayers as you did for Wright Runstad, and we’ll all do great.”