December 2019
Volume 7 • Issue 11
Downtown changes coming with sale of Herald building BY JEFF MORROW for Senior Times
Tri-City hotel mogul buys mansion for $3.5M
Page 7
Holiday bazaar calendar Page 8
’Tis the season to deck the halls Page 9
MONTHLY QUIZ 2019 marks the 65th anniversary of the dedication of what iconic bridge that connects Benton and Franklin counties? Answer, Page 13
It took almost eight years and a lot of on-again, off-again negotiations with different prospective buyers, but the TriCity Herald building in downtown Kennewick has new owners. Pasco investors Mike Detrick Sr., his son Mike Detrick Jr. and their wives bought the building at 333 W. Canal Drive for $3.9 million in October with plans to transform it into multi-tenant office space. The Tri-City Herald will remain a tenant—for now—but it has plans to move elsewhere after spending 71 years there. “I think it’s a good thing for us,” said Jerry Hug, the Herald’s general manager. “We’ve been trying to sell the building on and off since 2011.” Hug said when the building went on the market, they expected it could take a few years to find the right buyer. “We’ve been close a couple of times, but then it fell apart. That’s the way these large sales happen,” Hug said. The Herald no longer needs such a big building. It has 45,000 square feet of office and 57,000 square feet of industrial space. The McClatchy Co., the Herald’s California-based parent company, invested more than $9 million to build the new building and renovate the production facilities in 2004. The Detrick family has the experience to develop the property. It already owns smaller apartment complexes in Kennewick and Richland and a multitenant office building in Kennewick, and is building an office in an industrial uHERALD BUILDING, Page 15
Photo by Kristina Lord Mike Neely prepares a tray of ranger cookies for the oven at the Meals on Wheels kitchen in Richland. He volunteers once a week. More than 500 volunteers are expected to donate 30,000 hours of labor and record nearly 100,000 miles delivering hot meals to seniors by year’s end.
Demand for senior meals growing along with need for volunteers BY KRISTINA LORD editor@tcjournal.biz
An agency that prides itself on “delivering kindness” is on track to serve 220,000 meals to 2,400 seniors by year’s end. That’s a 5 percent increase over the previous year. The volunteer drivers for Mid-Columbia Meals on Wheels distribute about 450 meals to homebound seniors each day along 45 routes in Benton and Franklin counties. More than 500 volunteers are expected
to log 30,000 hours of labor and record nearly 100,000 miles by the end of the year. Each year the number of seniors needing hot meals grows. “In 2009, we were serving 132,000 meals. That’s 90,000 less than what we’ll serve this year,” said Kristi Thien, nutrition services director for Senior Life Resources Northwest, the parent organization of Meals on Wheels. From 2017-18, the agency saw 16 percent growth in the number of meals deliv-
uSENIOR MEALS, Page 6
Minimum wage increase likely means higher costs for consumers BY ROBIN WOJTANIK for Senior Times
Tri-City fast food restaurant owners say there’s no way to avoid raising prices when the latest minimum wage increases kick in at the start of 2020, requiring workers be paid at least $13.50 an hour. “Anybody who thinks that prices aren’t going to go up, you’re fooling yourself,” said Tom Tierney, owner of the Tri-Cities’ DQ Grill & Chill restaurants. After 40 years of restaurant ownership, Tierney said, “You can only absorb so many costs. You can control the cost of food, what we pay for it, and we can control our cost of labor. When either of those goes up precipitously, we can staff less people, but we don’t necessarily want
to do that because we’re in the service business, so you don’t want to give less service. So ultimately, we’re all going to have to raise prices.” The owner of Tumbleweeds Mexican Flair in Richland said a 2 percent increase across the board is “almost mandatory.” “If the average person is buying two to three items, it could be $1 more a visit. For the people who come every day, that’s a concern of mine: Are they going to pay?” asked owner Keith Moon. A voter-approved initiative in 2016 hoisted the minimum wage from $9.47 an hour to $11 an hour beginning in 2017, and then increasing by 50 cents each year through 2020, when it will jump $1.50 an hour—from $12 an
uMINIMUM WAGE, Page 2
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