Skip to main content

Tom Banse

Regional Correspondent

About

Tom Banse covers national news, business, science, public policy, Olympic sports, and human interest stories across Washington state. Now semi-retired, Banse is an Olympia-based reporter with more than three decades of experience covering the Pacific Northwest. Most of his career was spent with public radio's Northwest News Network, but now in semi-retirement his work appears on multiple nonprofit news outlets including KUOW. His recent areas of focus range from transportation, U.S.-Canada borderlands, the Northwest region's planned hydrogen hub, and emergency preparedness.

Previously, Tom covered state government and the Washington Legislature for 12 years. He got his start in radio at WCAL-FM, a public station in southern Minnesota. Reared in Seattle, Tom graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota with a degree in American Studies.

Location: Olympia

Languages: English, German

Stories

  • caption: The factory doors opened to display the last 747 to thousands of guests who had gathered for the celebration on Tuesday, January 31, 2023, at Boeing’s factory in Everett.

    Before enormous, emotional crowd, Boeing delivers final 747

    Thousands of former and current Boeing workers joined customers and other guests to bid farewell to the company's final 747 jumbo jet. The hours-long celebration for the so-called “Queen of the Skies" took place in the giant building that once housed the 747 production line.
  • caption: An officer works in a speed enforcement van along I-5 in Medford during construction in 2018. The effort to slow drivers nabbed one driver going 91 mph in the 40 mph work zone.

    Roadway carnage has lawmakers pitching everything from more photo radar to fewer right turns on red

    State lawmakers in Olympia are debating a suite of possible new responses to surging traffic fatalities. Those include authorizing photo radar in highway work zones, prohibiting right turns at many red lights, and lowering the breathalyzer limit to convict for drunk driving. Some of these ideas have corollaries in Oregon, where the legislative machinery is getting revved up too.
  • caption: Voting in federal elections has been compulsory in Australia for the past 99 years. Australia is frequently held up as a model by supporters of universal voting.

    What if voting were not just a right, but a legally required duty?

    Numerous Democrats in the Washington Legislature are backing a new proposal to make voting in elections compulsory. Citizens are required by law to cast ballots in about 25 counties, but in no other U.S. states. Republicans in Olympia described the idea as "un-American."
  • Untitled

    Pacific NW 'hydrogen hub' pitch to federal government treated as top secret

    The states of Washington and Oregon have submitted a joint bid to the U.S. Department of Energy to get a share of $8 billion that Congress set aside to launch "Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs" around the nation. But good luck trying to learn what exactly the bi-state bid entails, other than the safe presumption that at least one industrial hydrogen production facility would be subsidized.
  • caption: Northwest scientists are looking into the possible impacts that offshore wind farms might have on marine wildlife.

    Lots of whales spotted around offshore wind farm zones along West Coast

    The federal government has commissioned Oregon State University to look into the possible impacts of offshore wind farms on marine wildlife. In the first year of this four-year project, the researchers spotted sizable numbers of seabirds and whales – including the largest animal on Earth – in the Oregon and Northern California areas that could one day host floating wind farms.
  • caption: Workers harvest kelp in Hood Canal at Washington's first commercial seaweed farm, Blue Dot Sea Farms.

    Swelling school of seaweed farmers looking to anchor in somewhat choppy Northwest waters

    Prospective kelp growers who want to join the handful of existing commercial seaweed farms in the Pacific Northwest are having to contend with a lengthy permitting process. It's gotten contentious in a few cases, but even so, at least a couple of new seaweed farms stand on the cusp of approval. Their harvests could be sold for human food, animal feed or fertilizer.