Pullman, Spokane and Walla Walla will each receive state grants worth about $1 million under the state's Innovation Zone program.

The three Eastern Washington cities are among five statewide to get the funding. Six more regions, including the Tri-Cities, got official innovation zone designation - but no funding.

The program is designed to mimick North Carolina's larger Research Triangle Park, bringing together researchers, universities and businesses to generate new commercial ideas.

Walla Walla plans to use its grant to study both water and wine, my friends at the Union-Bulletin reported. Walla Walla Community College will partner with two private companies, including Nelson Irrigation of Walla Walla, to do the research.

In Pullman, a partnership headed by the Port of Whitman County plans to use its funding to study ways to make data centers more energy-efficient - and thus more eco-friendly. Money also is earmarked for expanding and marketing a research park.

And computers are part of the program in Spokane, too. The plan is to buy a supercomputer to be used by the school's in Spokane's University District, and to link it to others, including another supercomputer recently installed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories at Hanford.

OUT ON THE COAST it will seem hard to believe, but this summer was one of the driest on record in Central Washington, the Yakima Herald-Republic reported.

Only 18.9 inches of rain - 43 percent of average - was recorded at the Yakima Irrigation Project's five reservoirs, according to the Associated Press's version of the Herald-Republic report. The previous low was 20.7 inches in 1939.

The good news? There was plenty of irrigation water for farmers, and the region by and large escaped major wildfires.

IN SPOKANE, a manufacturer of Blu-Ray video discs is being sued by low-income housing advocates who say the company violated federal housing laws.

Advocates say BlueRay Technologies Inc. didn't give the required one-year's notice before evicting low-income tenants from a downtown Spokane building it has purchased. The one-year notice was required from the previous owners, who were accepting federal subsidies for providing low-income housing.

BlueRay ousted 47 tenants as it moved to install disc manufacturing equipment in the building's basement while remodeling upper floors, the Spokesman-Review reported. (You'll probably have to register to read the story) A BlueRay attorney told the Spokesman that the suit is frivolous.

Spokane's redevelopment is displacing low-income people who used to live in now-desirable buildings downtown, advocates say.

Elsewhere in Spokane, over at Sterling Savings, new CEO Heidi Stanley is commanding attention, having just been named the 14th most-powerful woman in American banking by US Banker magazine.

IN YAKIMA, weekly newspaper publishers are meeting to talk about their futures. As most of you have heard, a lot of people are getting their news and information from this thing called the Internet, instead of reading good ol' ink-on-paper newspapers. In response, some community papers are trying new things: Seattle-based Pioneer Newspapers, for example, has launched social networking web sites connected to its Idaho papers.

Change is a tall order. I started out at some small-town weeklies and we were chronically understaffed, under-funded and over-worked. It was all we could do to get the paper out the door each week, let alone figure out how to meet a paradigm-changing challenge from a disruptive technology.

"I think when people hear the message change or die, they're going to change," Bill Will, the general manager of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, told the Yakima Herald-Republic. "They'll carve out the necessary time and start changing because the alternative is extinction."

One strategic move to report: Yakima Valley Newspapers has purchased Shields Family Shoppers, the Yakima-based publisher of shoppers like the Thrifty Nickel.  Yakima Valley publishes the weeklies  in Toppenish and Selah, a Spanish-language weekly and the monthly Yakima Valley Business Journal.

FINALLY, TWO THINGS jump out at me about this story about the sky-high prices of wheat.

One: banks started calling in notes when prices hit $4.50 and $5 a bushel last spring, and that meant a lot of growers had to forward-sell their crop then. That means most of them don't have wheat to sell now that soft white futures prices are up over TEN DOLLARS A BUSHEL.

But even so, after years of $3 wheat, growers now have cash to pay down debt, boost savings and invest in new equipment. That's money that won't go into the pockets of Eastern Washington retailers this fall, but in the long run, it's the smart move. Prices aren't likely to stay this high; while the growth of biofuels will increase demand somewhat, you just can't count on good weather here and drought everywhere else two years in a row. So using this year's windfall to clean up the balance sheet and upgrade production capacity - that's right, you Huskies, agriculture is a business just like manufacturing - makes abundant business sense.