Cascade Financial

Cascade Financial Corp., the holding company for Cascade Bank, has resolved a dispute with a shareholders' group short of having to wage a proxy contest.

The group announced on Thursday, April 29, that it will expand the size of its board of directors. This is a fairly common way of adding some of the discontented group's representatives without having to boot any of the incumbents. But it raises the question: don't boards have an optimal size? There must logically be a trade-off involved between hearing the various points of view that ought to be represented in the board room on the one hand, and having unwieldy too-many-cooks meetings on the other? And if there is such an optimal number, this sort of resolution would tend to cause firms to overshoot it. Thus there would be a sacrifice for the immediate good of peace.

Anyway, Proxy Partisans extends its congratulations to the new directors of Cascade: Arnold Hofmann, Christian Sievers, and Thomas Rainville. Here's a bit of bio about each of them:

* Christian Sievers is an executive officer of H&H Properties, which grandly calls itself "the real estate company that gets results.

* Thomas Rainville is an elected Commissioner of the Mukilteo [Washington] Water and Wastewater District, which looks like a small town within broadcasting distance of Frasier Crane's radio station.

* Arnold Hofmann is the owner and developer of various multi-family and commercial properties in the Pacific Northwest.