Business and Finance news

Hawaii’s hotel occupancy rates grew 10.9 percentage points last week compared to the same week a year ago, according to an industry report out Friday.

The Hawaii Hotel Industry Snapshot, conducted by Smith Travel Research and Honolulu-based Hospitality Advisors, showed that hotel occupancy for the week ending July 10 was 79.4 percent, up from 68.5 percent a year ago.

Statewide hotel occupancy — which came in 16.9 percentage points ahead of the national average of 62.5 percent for the week — was up year-over-year on all the major islands.

Oahu maintained the highest occupancy rate at 86.7 percent, up 8.8 percentage points from a year ago.

It was followed by Maui with 76 percent, up 16.8 percentage points from a year ago. Kauai recorded 69.6 percent occupancy, up 5.4 percentage points, and the Big Island recorded 66.6 percent occupancy, up 11.5 percentage points.

Statewide hotel room rates, which were heavily discounted throughout the economic downturn, are on the rise again, up 4 paperless payday loans.2 percent for the week to $183.27 a night.

Oahu saw room rates climb 8.2 percent since last year to $162.55.

Maui maintained the state’s highest room rates at $235.10 a night, up a slight .9 percent from a year ago.

The Big Island saw room rates dip 1.2 percent from last year to $176.81 while Kauai saw a steeper decline since this week last year, by 8.8 percent to $185.46.

Hospitality Advisors’ weekly hotel report is based on a daily hotel survey of approximately 100 properties representing 39,364 rooms, which account for 68.6 percent of the state’s total hotel rooms for properties with 20 units or more.

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Rollins Inc. plans to buy New England pest control company Waltham Services Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

Atlanta-based Rollins (NYSE: ROL) said the deal will close by the end of July.

Waltham, Mass.-based Waltham Services operates in New England and New York, generating more than $17 million in annual revenue. It joins a stable of pest control companies Rollins runs, including Orkin LLC, PCO Services, HomeTeam Pest Defense, Western Pest Services, The Industrial Fumigant Co. and Crane Pest Control

"They have an outstanding management team and the company has, in fact, worked with Western Pest Services for over 40 years,” said Glen Rollins, executive vice president of Rollins, in a statement payday loans. “This week, along with Waltham's leadership, I will visit with their team and personally meet many of the fine individuals who are contributing to the company's success. We feel fortunate to be joining with the oldest and finest pest control company in New England, whose talented associates will greatly enhance our service network."

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Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio and former U. S. Congressman Jim Davis will discuss transportation initiatives for the University of South Florida area July 14 as part of wider campaign to improve Tampa Bay-area transit.

The “University Area Transportation Summit” is free and open to the public, but expected to draw heavily from the university, Temple Terrace and New Tampa communities. A question and answer period will follow the presentations about building a light rail system, expanding bus service and other transportation initiatives.

“The mayor will be speaking more big picture about what a game-changer this is for Hillsborough County,” said coalition spokeswoman Margie Martin electronic check payday advance.

Moving Hillsborough Forward, a coalition of business and civic groups that support a proposed penny sales tax for transportation projects, is sponsoring the event. Hillsborough voters will decide on the tax on Nov. 2.

The event is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in the Galleria at the University Research Park building, 3720 Spectrum Blvd.

Participants are encouraged to enter USF through the main campus entrance on Fowler Avenue.

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This is a weekly roundup of promotions, appointments and employee accomplishments in the Birmingham metro area. For more People on the Move, check out the Birmingham Business Journal’s print edition each week. Send announcements to ccrawford@bizjournals.com.

ACCOUNTING

Kyle Melvin of Pearce Bevill Leesburg Moore PC of Birmingham has completed the Certified Public Accountant examination.

GOVERNMENT

The Alabama Department of Revenue named Joe Walls to the post of taxpayer advocate. Prior to this appointment, Walls, a career revenue employee, served as manager of the department’s Sales, Use and Business Tax Administration Section. He brings more than 34 years of experience in the tax administration field. Walls began his career with the ADOR in 1976 as an account clerk and has held various supervisory and management positions throughout his career. As taxpayer advocate, Walls will serve as an independent channel of assistance for those taxpayers who have followed standard procedures, but find their tax matters still unsatisfactorily resolved. Walls replaces Voncile Catledge, who was named director of the department’s Collection Services Division. Catledge, a career employee, brings to the director position more than 31 years of experience in the audit and management areas of income and business taxes. Catledge began her career with the ADOR in 1979 as a tax auditor and has held various audit supervisory and management positions throughout her tenure with the department. In March 2009, she was named to the post of taxpayer advocate. As director, Catledge oversees the collection of final tax assessments for all ADOR tax divisions, excluding the Property Tax Division. Catledge replaced Dwight Pridgen, who retired in May.

HEALTH CARE

Alacare Home Health & Hospice hired Dr. Brian E. Rogers as Home Health medical director of the Auburn branch. Rogers is a graduate of Auburn University and received his medical degree from the University of Alabama School of Medicine in 1993 pay day loans. He served in the Family Practice Residency Program at the University of Alabama in Huntsville from 1993 to 1996. While he completed his residency, Rogers also worked on the house staff at Huntsville Hospital. Since August 1996, he has been affiliated with the East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika, where he currently lives.

Jeannine McCormick, a nurse practitioner in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Continence Clinic, has received the Shining Star Award from the National Association for Continence. McCormick is the inaugural recipient of NAFC’s Shining Star Award. After completing her master’s degree in nursing as a family nurse practitioner, McCormick worked for Nursing Solutions as the sole provider of continence care for residents of rural nursing homes in Alabama, working with family members and staff to formulate individual plans of care.

LEGAL

James P. Curtis was admitted to the Alabama Bar on June 15. Curtis is employed with Empire American Realty LLC, headquartered in Montvale, N.J., serving as general counsel and chief compliance officer and in addition, serves as the director of due diligence for Empire American Holding LLC.

MEDIA

Alabama Public Television earned three Emmy awards in the 2010 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Southeast competition. Individual winners include Matt Whitson of APT and Kyle Farmer and Brad Lightfoot of BottleTree for the “We Have Signal” award in the Live and Post-production Audio category; APT’s Stephen Dubberley for the Non-News Program Editor category for “Alabama the Beautiful: State Parks” award; and Rhonda Colvin, APT producer/editor, for “Honor Flight” in the Historic/Cultural News and Program Specialty category.

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On a wind-beaten drilling rig a few miles off Louisiana’s coast, things are getting dicey.

"We have real rough conditions this morning," rig boss Greg Bramlett — aka Mountain Man — tells his crew during a shift change. "Seas are running eight to 10 foot swells."

With Hurricane Alex churning up the Gulf of Mexico, Bramlett is talking about the weather. He might as well be speaking of his livelihood.

Kissing that paycheck goodbye: Of all the people employed in the Gulf with lots to lose from the BP spill, oil workers are at the top of the list.

The oil industry is a $150 billion-a-year business in the Gulf, slightly bigger than tourism and dwarfing the $1 billion fishing industry.

With a government-imposed temporary ban on deep water drilling and permits for new shallow water wells stuck in limbo, roughnecks, roustabouts, and others in this field are nervous.

Their fear: When the wells they are currently drilling are finished, their jobs will disappear.

"We’ve been lucky so far, but other members of my family haven’t been so lucky," said Michael Broom, a 28-year old roughneck on Bramlett’s rig, which is owned by Hercules Offshore and is drilling a well for Chevron.

Like many young people that work on drilling rigs, Broom was attracted to the industry by the high pay and the generous time off.

Shallow water drillers work 14 days in a row and then have 14 days off. When they’re on, they work 12 hours at a time, and have 12 hours free. They sleep in bunk beds, six to a room.

Downtime on the rig is usually spent on the basics — sleeping, showering, eating and calling home. If there’s time, they’ll watch TV in the lounge.

"I love my job; it’s like a second family out here," Broom said. "And when I’m home, I have plenty of time with my own family, and time to hunt and fish."

Salaries for rig workers start at $40,000 a year, Broom said. The newbies, or roustabouts, usually perform relatively unskilled jobs — transferring freight from the boats, cleaning equipment and other odd jobs.

One step up from that is a roughneck like Broom. Roughnecks work right next to the spinning drill. They attach the drill pipe, clean mud from the hole and maintain the equipment. He says he makes over $60,000 a year.

"I wasn’t a college kid, and I had to do something to support a family," Broom said. "We make more than most college graduates."

Shallow water drilling mired in red tape: New permits to drill in waters less than 500 feet deep are hard to come by these days cash advance in one hour. The Deepwater Horizon disaster and tough new safety standards for shallow water drilling have seen to that.

Drilling industry executives have been lobbying hard to get the permits reinstated. They say their operations are much safer than the deep water rigs like BP’s.

They’ve been drilling these waters for a long time, so they know how much pressure to expect out of each well. The equipment that cuts off the well in case of a blow out is mounted right under the rig, making it easier to maintain and fix. And a major spill due to drilling hasn’t happened in the shallow water parts of the U.S. Gulf.

The executives say that if new permits aren’t issued soon, the rigs will go elsewhere, leaving workers out of a job and the country even more dependent on imported energy.

But environmentalists and others argue that spills have occurred in shallow water before, pointing to the Santa Barbara blow out in 1969, a spill in Mexican waters in the late 1970s, and a recent one off the coast of Australia. They say the permits should be put on hold until new rules are implemented and the federal agency overseeing drilling is reformed.

Not much sympathy: Others that depend on the Gulf for their livelihood have mixed feelings about whether drillers should be given the green light right away.

"There’s an awful lot of people employed in the oil industry down here, and they’re having a hard time," said Richard Forester, executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau. "If you continue to decimate jobs, it’s going to have a hit on the economy."

To states to the east, where oil doesn’t dominate the economy, the story is different. In Florida, it’s about tourism, which brings the state $60 billion a year.

Jesse Brown runs the Native Cafe, a family-style restaurant on Pensacola Beach.

Brown feels bad for the workers, and wants them to continue drilling as soon as possible.

But he also thinks another BP-type spill can never happen again. He thinks the government should have the time to get things right, even if that means months of no drilling and the associated job losses.

"Yeah, it sucks, they can’t drill," he said. "But they can get in the BP claims line or get in the unemployment line, just like the rest of us."  

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Digital publishing software maker LibreDigital Inc. has acquired the Symtio e-commerce platform from a division of investor HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Austin-based LibreDigital bought the 2-year-old Symtio— a multi-channel platform designed by HarperCollins’s Zondervan division — to enable customers to buy digital media, including electronic books, audiobooks music and video. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As a result of the acquisition, LibreDigital will hire Symtio’s 15 employees as it takes over operations of its office in Illinois.

LibreDigital, founded in 1999 as NewsStand Inc., employed about 125 workers before the acquisition.

The deal comes one month after LibreDigital closed on an $8.1 million round of funding, increasing the total amount of venture capital it has received to $31 empire payday loans.1 million, company officials said.

LibreDigital Investors include Austin-based S3 Ventures, Pennsylvania-based Adams Capital Management, Triangle Peak Partners LP, which operates offices in Houston and California, HarperCollins, The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) and Atlanta-based Noro-Moseley Partners.

In April, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) selected LibreDigital’s publishing platform to power the content on Apple’s hugely popular iPad. In March, Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) tapped LibreDigital to load content onto Sony’s digital reader.

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Once upon a time, there was job security in a government job.

That’s no longer the case. The layoff ax has hit public sector payrolls with force as states wrestle with massive budget shortfalls. Since August 2008, some 231,000 state and local government jobs have disappeared — 22,000 last month alone, according to federal data.

The majority of the cuts are on the local level, which at 14.4 million workers is nearly three times the size of the state workforce. Plus, unlike at the federal level, most of these cuts come from the ranks of teachers, cops, firefighters and social service workers.

And more pain is coming down the pike. Some 19 states say they plan to implement layoffs to narrow budget gaps, according to a recent survey.

The cuts will be even deeper if Congress doesn’t give $24 billion to the states to help cover Medicaid costs. This legislation, along with a $23 billion bill to fund teachers’ salaries, is bogged down in political posturing on Capitol Hill.

Even President Obama is voicing concerns about the impending wave of job cuts. He wrote a letter to the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate on Saturday urging them to increase federal aid to the states. Otherwise, the country faces "a mounting employment crisis at the state and local level that could set back the pace of our economic recovery."

To be sure, the private sector has suffered more carnage during the Great Recession. But government jobs are generally considered more secure, even during economic downturns. The last time local government payrolls were smaller than the year before was in March 1984.

And, while the companies have been adding jobs in recent months, the public sector continues to shrink because state and local economic revivals typically lag the national upturn by at least 18 months.

Nowhere else left to cut

Many governors and lawmakers are scrambling to balance their budgets for fiscal 2011, which begins July 1 in 46 states. State officials have already deeply slashed funds for programs and services, so the only place left to look for savings is payroll, said Raymond Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association.

Earlier in the recession, state officials tried to reduce employee expenses by instituting hiring freezes or furloughs. More than half of states proposed or instituted unpaid leaves in fiscal 2010, said Todd Haggerty, policy associate at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

But now that they are into their third year of tax revenue declines, states have little choice but to shed workers.

"In many cases, you are seeing many states going to layoffs now," Haggerty said.

Take Wisconsin, for example. Some 10% of state workforce positions are vacant, the result of layoffs and hiring freezes, said Gov. Jim Doyle. If Congress doesn’t provide additional Medicaid funds to the states, Wisconsin will have to shed another 2% to 3% of its payroll.

"We have cut and cut and cut," he said in a recent conference call with reporters.

Still, it’s not easy — or politically popular — to slash government workers. California’s public payroll, for instance, is 62,000 lighter than it was in the beginning of fiscal 2008. But it should have elminated 130,000 jobs considering the Golden State’s precipitous decline in revenues, according to a UCLA Anderson Forecast that was released Tuesday.

Trickle down

States, of course, aren’t the only ones suffering. Cities and local governments are, too.

Not only do local governments have to contend with their own revenue shortfalls, they also have to deal with reduced state aid. Some 7 in 10 local officials said they had to resort to personnel cuts over the past year to balance their budgets, according to a National League of Cities report released last month.

Financial troubles on the municipal level usually hit teachers and social service workers the hardest. But even police officers are not immune these days.

Slashing public payrolls hurts the greater economy, as well, experts said. Not only does it increase unemployment, but it further drains the state of personal income taxes and of sales taxes when those jobless workers curtail their shopping. And it could put additional stress on government services, such as Medicaid.

"The key to continued economic growth is job creation," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, who advocates more federal aid to the states. Layoffs "put significant stress on an already fragile economic recovery." 

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The Justice Department on Thursday trumpeted its efforts to crack down on mortgage fraud, saying it launched an interagency plan to detect costly scams.

Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Housing and Urban Development Inspector General Kenneth Donohue held a news conference in Washington to introduce "Operation Stolen Dreams," a three-month-long "takedown" of mortgage fraud schemes throughout the nation.

The operation has already netted the arrests of 485 fraud artists. There are 21 agencies involved in the efforts.

They said mortgage fraud has already resulted in losses of about $2.3 billion. "It presents a significant risk to economic stability," Holder said.

Mueller claimed the FBI remains in pursuit of more than 3,000 mortgage fraud cases and more arrests are expected.

"Mortgage fraud ruins lives, destroys families and devastates whole communities, so attacking the problem from every possible direction is vital," said Holder. "We will use every tool available to investigate, prosecute and prevent mortgage fraud, and we will not rest until anyone preying on vulnerable American homeowners is brought to justice." 

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BNC Bancorp, the parent company of Bank of North Carolina, has closed on a deal to raise $35 million in new private equity, according to an announcement.

The Thomasville-based BNC said it will use the money raised from the sale of shares to support its expansion in North Carolina and in neighboring states. The bank recently acquired Beach First National Bank in South Carolina and is also expanding into new markets in North Carolina.

The new private placement is anchored by Aquiline Capital Partners, a private equity firm based in New York. Aquiline's investment represents about 9 easy payday loans.9 percent of all BNC common stock, and all of a new class of non-voting preferred shares issued by the company. Other investors purchased common shares representing about 7.4 percent of outstanding stock.

“We welcome and appreciate Aquiline’s confidence in our management team, our franchise and the significant growth opportunities in the southeastern banking market,” said Swope Montgomery, CEO of BNC Bancorp.

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MARKET PRICING & RETURN AS OF JUNE 1, 2010

Ranked by market capitalization, the total value of outstanding shares. Market cap in millions

* Viasystems began trading in February.

** Market cap is for both A and B series shares. The $1.30 close is A series, $1 .55 close is for B series.

NOTE: Total return is the gain from share price appreciation and stock purchases from reinvested dividends.

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