Season of reckoning – State Street shops at risk as sales take a nosedive
After suffering a 50 percent drop in sales since last spring, Barbara Bartolomé doesn’t know how much longer she can keep her small business alive. For five years, Santa Barbara Scrapbooks, which she founded in 2003, had been chugging along in its downtown location a block away from the Paseo Nuevo shopping hub on Chapala Read More →
Wood & Bender merges with niche firm from the Big Apple
The “merge urge” has struck the Ventura County legal scene again. Wood & Bender, a 14-attorney firm based in Ventura, has merged with New York-based Anderson Kill & Olick, a 79-attorney firm. The Jan. 1 deal gives Northeast-based Anderson Kill, a former competitor to Wood & Bender, a California presence. The new California firm is Read More →
Mental Health Association builds hope, homes in Santa Barbara
Just in time for the holidays, the Mental Health Association in Santa Barbara opened a new 113,000-square-foot living facility for people with mental disabilities. Through the persistence and generosity of numerous community members and organizations, MHA’s “Building Hope” program opened its doors in early December, offering what MHA Executive Director Annmarie Cameron calls “a comprehensive Read More →
Business Times wins award, adds new special reports
Pacific Coast Business Times is heading into 2009 with special recognition, new editorial projects and preview of what lies ahead as we enter our 10th year of publication. First, the recognition. It was pretty stunning to receive an e-mail shortly before New Year’s announcing that I would be joining legendary entrepreneur Paul Orfalea, Clipper Windpower Read More →
Wanted: a way to stop the hemorrhage of jobs
Jobs are becoming the No. 1 economic issue in the Tri-Counties. As Stephen Nellis reports in the current issue of Pacific Coast Business Times, bigger employers have eliminated at least 1,700 jobs in recent months. Add to that any number of jobs cut at government agencies and nonprofits and you have the ingredients for an Read More →
Zaragoza in the middle
With the seating of John Zaragoza as its newest supervisor, Ventura County is launching into a new era. Gone is the contentious and uncooperative John Flynn, whose last term was marked by infighting and a mean-spirited effort to derail progress on a number of fronts. The region’s largest county — and its most fiscally sound Read More →
Select drops to B minus
Santa Barbara-based staffing giant Koosharem Corp., also known as Select Staffing, lost one notch on its Standard & Poor’s rating when the corporate credit slipped one level Dec. 29 to B minus. S&P pointed to the “recession’s effect” plus “high debt leverage” and thin covenant compliance. The $100 million second-lien term loan rating for the Read More →
