Humboldtian

The Environmental Impact Report has to be completed before it can go to the City Council.

Thanks, Heraldo. Why is the EIR taking so long?

I hear through the grapevine they can't reconcile the horrendous traffic problem.

One of many serious defects in the proposal.

True, there are other problems overcome, but traffic is by far the worst. As I heard i from my moles on the inside, Caltrans is insisting that SN pay for some very expensive and difficult mitigation measures (like a third lane on some of Broadway), so there may actually be a connection between the delay and SN's current financial woes.

I can't imagine the traffic nightmares on Broadway a Home Depot on the Ballon Track would cause. I think this one issue alone will sink the project.

Hayduke: Do you hear anything about reviving the attempt to punch Waterfront Drive through the Palco Marsh?

Uh, yes.

The local district office is still supporting it because no matter how bad an idea it might be, it does provide for the diversion of a little traffic off 101 (Broadway). And it still continues to get some support from the City.

But Eureka is going to get a new City Engineer after April. Maybe that will bring some common sense to the table. If Eureka would just say NO, then Caltrans would start looking at something more intelligent, like maybe an expressway around the city.

What does it mean when a loan is "underperforming" and how is it serviced?

that last comment was by anonymous not hayduke

disregard last, I get the layout now

The failure to come up with a tsunami evacuation plan was the latest delay according to my sources. Of all the issues that could shoot down this project, wouldn't that be a hoot?

An underperforming loan is one that is not returning an investment to the lender because the borrower is not keeping up with payments. These loans are often sold to companies that specialize in making these loans perform, either by getting the debtor to get his/her act together or by foreclosing on the property.

Someone please correct me if I didn't get this right.

Thanks Andrew, that’s kind of what I thought. It’s nicer to hear words like “under performing” instead of “got in over their head and can’t make the payment” and “servicing” instead of “turned over to a collection agency or foreclosed on”. Those double speak terms have a much nicer ring to them. I don’t begrudge Arkely his money, but neither do I respect the way he makes it.

Andrew is correct on what an underperforming loan is. For a short time, SN had purchased performing loans. They stopped buying those earlier this year; reason given was that they just didn’t make much money off of them.

Loan servicing has been around for ages and it’s possible for your mortgage to be bought by another company, even if you’ve been paying on it on time for years. There are even lenders of any sort of loan that don’t service them. A servicer is basically someone who collects on the loan.

From what I understand, the company doesn’t make much off foreclosure compared to collecting on it till it matures (paid off). This is probably because of overhead due to legal fees, listing the property, and then the realtor takes their cut. They really do make more money off the interest in the long run. A lot of the subprime loans are going to foreclosure and that is bad news to SN. They are basically a collection agency and registered as such in several states where required.

The company as a whole has scaled back because of losses. Many were laid off earlier this year. People I know who still work there know it has a lot to do with the subprime crisis. They also sold off their Capital Markets subsidiary after about a little over a year of acquiring them. They specialized in trading mortgage backed securities.

Many, myself included, find SN rather mysterious. For me, it's because the industry SN trades in is complex and hard to understand. Thanks Anon 12:28 AM for your detailed comment.

Hayduke-

When do you think the next response from SN regarding the Marina Center schedule will be?

Do they remain quite because the traffic woes are something they want to keep out of the local news?

A.B....."Expressway around Eureka" You think the hippies would go for that?

Local businesses would not like to pull traffic away from downtown. They want the traffic.

Look what a by-pass did to Cloverdale.

Cloverdale is now thriving as a bedroom community for the Santa Rosa area. The bypass made it a better place.

I'd say that the businesses along the main street in Cloverdale are hardly thriving. Many of them are now gone. Does that make it a better place? Not sure... objective question.

The "tsunami evacuation plan" problem is new to me, but could indeed be a new issue.

Not withstanding the tsunami plan, I think if the SN consultants can get Caltrans HQ in Sacramento to buy off on the traffic mitigation, and if SN can still afford what it will cost, the EIR might be out next spring. I don't know how big those "IF's" are however, particularly if SN has needed to tighten their belt as has been discussed

Forgot my nom de plume on the post above.