Hard times déjà vu versus 2008-2009

Ramon Hayes has seen it all before.

The three-term Mayor of La Conner and First Street business owner well recalls the economic pain inflicted here by the Great Recession of 2008.

But he says the novel coronavirus threat, which has led to mandated business closures and stay-at-home orders in Washington state and across the nation, is even more impactful than conditions local government officials and merchants dealt with a dozen years ago.

“At least back then,” he told the Weekly News, “you had the opportunity to open your business in hopes of making a sale.”

While those were sometimes faint hopes, geography favored La Conner as it went to work trying to rebound from an economic slump linked to collapses in the American housing and banking industries.

Fortunately, the effects of the Great Recession were milder on Canada than in the U.S. and Europe, Hayes said.

Canadian shoppers continued to visit La Conner and spend money, he said.

“The Canadians really saved our bacon,” Hayes recalled. “If it wasn’t for the Canadians, more businesses would have been shuttered.”

Despite the stream of visitors from British Columbia, the Great Recession hamstrung Town coffers. The Town, as was the case at all government levels, was faced with difficult budget decisions as revenues tumbled at the same time La Conner’s water and sewer rates were due for significant hikes.

“The worst thing we can do,” Town Councilman Jacques Brunisholz said at the time, “is beat people over the head with a rate increase.”

His comment was quoted in the Weekly News, where then-publisher and editor Sandy Stokes and late columnist Jim Smith covered the economic crisis in detail, and from all angles, shoehorning vivid accounts into a newspaper that shrank to six pages per issue due to lagging advertising.

“I mostly remember how Cindy (Vest) and I struggled to keep the paper going,” Stokes said. “For a couple of years we went four weeks at Christmas time without paying ourselves to keep our bills paid.”

Smith lamented a tanking Skagit County budget that targeted the historical museum in La Conner for a 30 per cent cut.

“If this cut is finally agreed upon,” Smith wrote, “staff members will undoubtedly find themselves flipping burgers at Burger King with other unemployed county workers.”

In another column, written a month before the 2008 general election, Smith took note of the $700 billion taxpayer bailout of Wall Street. Smith, who grew up in Woonsocket, South Dakota, wondered who was looking out for Main Street.

“If I had my way,” Smith asserted, “there really would be a Main Street in every town, and every one would be different from the other, defining the identity and filling the needs of each particular community.”

Week by week, Stokes chronicled steps employed by Town officials to wade through the rising tide of financial distress, reporting the “brutal budget squeezing” made necessary by a “tanking economy.”

She also related the desperate measures some took in response to the Great Recession, including a bank robbery at Washington Federal and burglary of Pioneer Market.

The Town, Stokes noted, launched a major print and broadcast promotional campaign as one of its strategies to rebound from the economic downturn.

Fast forward to 2020 and a similar game plan is under way. Only with newer technology.

La Conner has begun a web-based campaign to reach on-line shoppers.

Ever the optimist, Hayes – having survived the Great Recession – is buoyed by the potential on-line marketing can provide the La Conner business community going forward.

“The good news and one of the bright spots,” he said, “is at the end of this maybe we’ve come up with a new revenue stream.”