SEQUIM — Business owners hope for a break in the cloudy economic sky over this boomtown — called the Blue Hole by pilots passing over — through the Irrigation Festival and federal economic stimulus payments.
“We’re well into a recession,” Sequim financial adviser Steve Holloway unabashedly said recently.
“The only question now is, how deep and how long?”
He calls this a contracting economy that’s keeping people at home and worried about what’s around the corner.
Rick and Deborah Roberts, owners of Lady Truffles, 157 W. Washington St. in downtown Sequim, are at a kind of ground zero for this downturn.
Their shop is designed as a miniature Nordstrom, offering high-end clothing, jewelry, chocolate and other gifts. With freshly baked cookies laid on the counter, it’s a delicious place to browse.
But “there’s nobody shopping. I’ve never seen it this slow,” Rick said.
“Ricky’s business is niceties,” Holloway said. The outlook for such a shop “is not real pretty.”
Yet Rick and Deborah — married 27 years, moved to Sequim from Hesperia, Calif. — hold out hope for their business and for downtown.
“We’ll know more after the Irrigation Festival, and after the government checks start coming,” Rick said, referring to the federal economic stimulus package.
Beginning this month, the U.S. Treasury will put up to $600 in the wallets of individuals, with another $300 for each child 17 or younger claimed by a parent.
