There are rum­blings of a recall effort form­ing to remove Coos County Asses­sor, Adam Colby from office. Too early to release details but of con­cern will be tim­ing. Should a recall be suc­cess­ful, and unlike dur­ing the Stuffle­bean recall, The World has called for a recall at least twice, then a replace­ment will be nec­es­sary. If my infor­ma­tion is cor­rect, the Coos County Com­mis­sion will choose an interim asses­sor to com­plete Colby’s term.

Given we are in July already, assum­ing a recall com­mit­tee can be mobi­lized quickly to gather sig­na­tures, it is pos­si­ble, though improb­a­ble, Colby could be voted out before the end of the year. Con­sid­er­a­tion should be given to tim­ing the recall elec­tion to allow a new BOC in Jan­u­ary to pick the interim asses­sor, unless the recall group is com­fort­able with Nikki Whitty and Kevin Stuffle­bean hav­ing a hand in the choice.

Stuffle­bean has made chal­lenger Andy Jackson’s job pretty easy with his erratic behav­ior and poor pub­lic safety deci­sions and ter­ri­ble employee han­dling. There seems lit­tle doubt Sher­iff Jack­son will be Com­mis­sioner Jack­son come this November.

Whitty’s chal­lenger, Larry Van Els­berg, sug­gested ear­lier this spring how he would han­dle the Colby mat­ter in a response to ques­tions from The World.

The Board of Com­mis­sion­ers needs to look at these costs and see if they can be reduced through pol­icy, train­ing or bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tions with employ­ees and man­agers. I would rather see these funds spent towards county ser­vices than expen­sive out­side attor­ney fees.

Until recently, due to news media and employee union con­cerns, the cur­rent Board of Com­mis­sion­ers seemed reluc­tant or silent in deal­ing with the exces­sive turnover of employ­ees in the Assessor’s office. I real­ize they can­not dis­cuss those issues pub­li­cally, but from an outsider’s per­spec­tive, it seems they were slow to react or pos­si­bly con­doned such actions.

In a June 29, 2010 let­ter from the BOC to Colby, expec­ta­tions listed include ‘train­ing’ and ‘com­mu­ni­ca­tion’. Why the present BOC dynamic allowed the prob­lems at the Asses­sor to con­tinue for so long before tak­ing this type of action isn’t clear. What is clear is that Whitty has repeat­edly relied upon Stuffle­bean and his rep­re­sen­ta­tions with­out doing her own research or pulling upon her oft touted expe­ri­ence. Two days after the lay off of twenty two road work­ers, Whitty couldn’t state why she voted to fire them.

So far, all efforts to obtain a copy of the analy­sis that maps out how this can be done as Whitty claims have failed and was not made a part of the county press release. Nor could Whitty under per­sis­tent grilling by road crew work­ers, Fri­day, explain her own deci­sion instead defer­ring ques­tions repeat­edly to Kevin who is out of the office until Wednes­day.
Many road work­ers ques­tioned the com­mis­sion­ers deci­sion to vote on this mat­ter in advance of newly elected Bob Main tak­ing office. Whitty claimed respon­si­bil­ity fear­ing Main, not hav­ing enough back­ground infor­ma­tion, would vote NO.

After days, if not weeks, of requests it was finally admit­ted the ‘analy­sis’ did not exist on paper but that didn’t stop Whitty from eschew­ing pub­lic safety and ter­mi­nat­ing twenty two fam­ily wage jobs despite an approved bud­get cov­er­ing their employ­ment and, like Stuffle­bean, not both­er­ing to attend the swear­ing in of Com­mis­sioner Bob Main.

Notwith­stand­ing that Whitty her­self appears to have had no more infor­ma­tion than was released to the press, her uni­lat­eral choice to exclude Main is even more con­fus­ing because she claims the interim road­mas­ter did not require board approval to ter­mi­nate employ­ment.
“Kevin didn’t have to bring that to the board of com­mis­sion­ers because the depart­ment head, which he tech­ni­cally is, has the author­ity to do that. But I was glad that he kept us in the loop,” said Whitty.
Nev­er­the­less there was a rush for an unnec­es­sary vote, in closed ses­sion, to ter­mi­nate 22 employ­ees and avoid putting the deci­sion, “on Bob’s back”. Bob Main does not appre­ci­ate being excluded from the deci­sion no mat­ter the rea­sons, and does not believe the infor­ma­tion pro­vided to the board was ade­quate to make such a sweep­ing decision.

Whitty has voted pretty much in lock­step with Stuffle­bean all along. Stuffle­bean has pub­licly revealed his incom­pe­tence and lack of sta­bil­ity again and again which may be why she has been so silent of late. It seems that a word of sup­port for exon­er­ated Andy Jack­son would be in order.

Regard­less of Whitty’s poor judg­ment and will­ing depen­dence on a char­ac­ter like Stuffle­bean, Van Els­berg has his work cut out for him to oust the social but­ter­fly this Novem­ber. How­ever, despite Stufflebean’s resent­ment for Van Els­berg for head­ing the recall attempt, the com­mis­sioner has done more to win Van Els­berg votes and has cer­tainly cost Whitty votes, (remem­ber his ref­er­ence to the ‘pipeline fiasco’? Thank you, Kevin!)

In an email to The World (which the paper has not released) Com­mis­sioner Kevin Stuffle­bean, per­haps aware his days in office are wan­ing, lev­els accu­sa­tions of cor­rup­tion and depart­ment mis­man­age­ment at Sher­iff Andy Jack­son, for­mer road mas­ter, Larry Van Els­berg and threw barbs at Com­mis­sioner Bob Main. The World fol­lowed up by call­ing Jack­son and Van Els­berg, both can­di­dates for com­mis­sioner posi­tions 2 and 3 respec­tively, and reported on their responses to some of the charges today. Accord­ing to Van Els­berg, The World reporter, Meghan Walsh, will publilsh another arti­cle spe­cific to Stufflebean’s charges relat­ing to the 12″ pipeline fiasco, tomorrow.

In many ways the email and sub­se­quent arti­cle is another golden oppor­tu­nity to call into ques­tion Stufflebean’s already ques­tion­able integrity and revisit, thanks to him, the less than ade­quately cov­ered pipeline issue. As a cam­paign strat­egy, I sus­pect the email will cause more harm than good and cause Com­mis­sioner Nikki Whitty some grief as well. Unfor­tu­nately, the arti­cle mis­rep­re­sents some infor­ma­tion relat­ing to events that occurred at the road depart­ment before Van Els­berg was road mas­ter as hav­ing occurred under his watch.

’He had no man­age­ment of his staff,” said Barry Austin, the cur­rent fore­man, who has been with the depart­ment almost 15 years.

Austin said he and other work­ers some­times played black­jack for hours a day. Oth­ers were known to use county mate­ri­als for per­sonal use.

‘Maybe some of this Larry didn’t know, but if he had been doing his job he would have known,” Austin said. ‘That stuff doesn’t hap­pen anymore.”

First, why is The World print­ing the com­ments of an admit­ted bad pub­lic employee whom Stuffle­bean lifted to man­age­ment sta­tus after Van Els­berg retired and remains with the road depar­ment, any­way? Austen applied for the foreman’s posi­tion but was passed over by Van Els­berg when he was road mas­ter. Sec­ond, accord­ing to Van Els­berg, he brought the mat­ter to the atten­tion of then road mas­ter Bits Klemm who brought the prac­tice of play­ing black­jack to an end.

Austen is not the only ques­tion­able employee Stuffle­bean raised to man­age­ment level. Shawn Migas was found to have defrauded worker’s com­pen­sa­tion over an inci­dent that occurred at a rock crusher that broke his leg. Stuffle­bean, act­ing as interim road mas­ter, cre­ated a spe­cial man­age­ment posi­tion for Migas and gave him a raise. The inci­dent became known after the statute of lim­i­ta­tions had expired. Migas was placed on tem­po­rary leave, but retained his man­age­ment posi­tion and raise. Shortly there­after, the infa­mous New Year’s Eve lay­offs included the employ­ees who brought the inci­dent to light. Migas has since left the road department.

A let­ter to Meghan Walsh, author of the arti­cle quoted above request­ing a cor­rec­tion has so far gone unanswered.

For a good laugh down­load the first issue dated, Sep­tem­ber 9, 2009, of The FONSI Report, that’s FONSI as in ‘Friends of Sus­tain­able Indus­try’, not FONSI as in the more com­monly used acronym for ‘find­ing of no sig­nif­i­cant impact’, nor is it to be con­fused with The Fonz or Fonzi from Happy Days. Within the bow­els of this pre­mier pub­li­ca­tion, just past the image of a bloated LNG tanker at sea you find this tidbit

First, a bit about FONSI.
FONSI has been around for more than a dozen years and you may remem­ber its work in advo­cat­ing for the Coos County Pipeline or the for­ma­tion of the Coos County Air­port Dis­trict. When there is a project of sig­nif­i­cance that affects our local econ­omy, FONSI is gen­er­ally pretty close by, often work­ing behind the scenes to make things hap­pen. FONSI’s work
is gen­er­ally done by its board of direc­tors, which is cur­rently about a dozen in num­ber. All are local busi­ness or pro­fes­sional peo­ple with a keen desire to see our com­mu­nity
pros­per and enjoy the qual­ity of life ben­e­fits that come with a sta­ble and sus­tain­able economy.

Can you imag­ine tak­ing credit, actu­ally crow­ing about being instru­men­tal in bring­ing about the Coos County Pipeline? THE PIPELINE, you know, the one that went hor­ri­bly bad and cost the County mil­lions of dol­lars for their share of per­mit vio­la­tions and still leaves us with 15%+ unem­ploy­ment. The one where Nikki Whitty spoke at a pub­lic meet­ing in 2001 assur­ing the cit­i­zens that“We don’t set the tax rate, but believe the Ore­gon Depart­ment of Rev­enue would put NW Nat­ural on the tax roll,” and yet any taxes paid have been passed on to the hand­ful of nat­ural gas users. That dis­as­ter still isn’t set­tled and there is a nice slide show on the FONSI handy work here. How many sus­tained jobs did FONSI bring to Coos County with that $50M fiasco?

Then there is the air­port dis­trict. Surely, they don’t want us to thank them for the $30M+ exec­u­tive jet park­ing lot built solely to ben­e­fit The Ban­don Dunes? Within the same issue you will find this…

Air traf­fic and com­mer­cial pas­sen­gers have declined year over year by 40% due to the reces­sion and the dis­con­tin­u­a­tion of Horizon’s ser­vice to Port­land [in itself a story of com­plete ineptitude]…The coali­tion suc­cess­fully nego­ti­ated a guar­an­teed rev­enue con­tract with Sky-West Air­lines to con­tinue ser­vice to Port­land uti­liz­ing a United Air­lines code share. Through­out the fall, win­ter and spring, the Coos County Air­port Dis­trict paid out nearly $500,000.00 in sub­si­dies to guar­an­tee con­tin­u­a­tion of the Port­land service.

The report goes on to men­tion that your tax dol­lar ‘invest­ment’ has paid off, and that book­ings are up and are no longer sub­si­dized, yet this KCBY report says

Air­port Com­mis­sioner Joe Benetti, says they’ve been work­ing with Sky­West for a while to add these two flights, after the air­line scaled back north­bound ser­vice last fall to just one flight a day.

“Now they’ll be be leav­ing at 5:40 a.m. and get­ting up there approx­i­mately an hour later. Then they’ll also have a 7:35 a.m. flight, which they have now. And then they’ll have one com­ing back from Port­land at 7:30 p.m., get­ting here at 8:30 p.m. Another one leav­ing at 9:30 p.m, get­ting here at 10:30 p.m. And then San Fran­cisco, they’re adding a third flight for the sum­mer also.”

The air­port is also work­ing on improved con­nec­tiv­ity on those north­bound flights.

“We’re in the process of try­ing to get a Con­nect Ore­gon III grant with Kla­math Falls and Salem. By doing that, we’ll get a grant that will help and assist Sky­West to have a reser­va­tion sys­tem. By doing that, then they’ll be able to con­nect, besides just United up in Port­land, with hope­fully Alaska Air­lines and also with Delta, which will make the flights north­bound even more favor­able,” says Benetti.

None of the flights will be subsidized.

A Con­nec­tOre­gon grant is with­out argu­ment a form of sub­sidy and within every ticket is a tax. These peo­ple who take credit for this incred­i­ble eco­nomic dis­as­ter and try to sell it as if it is a suc­cess are the ones now push­ing for LNG and chromite strip min­ing and some other dirty indus­trial jobs no one wants any­where else. Why is Coos County still lis­ten­ing to them and let­ting them hold posi­tions on pub­lic boards? Still elect­ing them to coun­cils and commissions?

The Ban­don Dunes, despite being an ongo­ing and suc­cess­ful busi­ness got a tax­payer funded boost when the Coquille Val­ley Enter­prise Zone was expanded. Accord­ing to Nikki Whitty “In 2004 another bound­ary amend­ment was com­pleted that added the Ban­don Dunes prop­erty.” The Ban­don Dunes cur­rently pays the low­est prop­erty tax rates in the county. How has FONSI, the Coos County Pipeline and the Dunes sup­port­ing air­port dis­trict helped Coos County?

You can read issue num­ber two here, also a howler and num­ber three here.

Issue 3 has many remark­able claims, not only about FONSI but also SCDC and The Inter­na­tional Port of Coos Bay and the ORC.

SCDC also worked coop­er­a­tively with the Port in smooth­ing the way for Ore­gon Resources Cor­po­ra­tion to secure per­mits from the Ore­gon Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­ity and the US Army Corps of Engi­neers. The results were swift and ORC has com­menced work on their pro­cess­ing plant in Eastside.

This is inter­est­ing on sev­eral counts. Num­ber one dur­ing a pub­lic meet­ing of the Port Com­mis­sion­ers and recorded in the Novem­ber 19, 2009 min­utes, it was deter­mined the Port would take a neu­tral posi­tion regard­ing ORC.

Upon a motion by Com­mis­sioner Scott (sec­ond by Com­mis­sioner Smith) the Board of Com­mis­sion­ers autho­rized staff to explore the record sur­round­ing the Ore­gon Resources Project and come back to the Com­mis­sion at a later date con­cern­ing advocacy.

Nev­er­the­less, at a Jan­u­ary 28, 2010 SCDC meet­ing avail­able online ORC COO, Dan Smith is bemoan­ing the strug­gles they have encoun­tered get­ting per­mits to extract min­er­als from within Coos County. Port Direc­tor Jeff Bishop is also present. Only three weeks later dur­ing a pub­lic meet­ing of the Port Com­mis­sion, that can be watched here, Dan Smith of ORC stands to thank Bishop and port staff for their help in secur­ing a per­mit from the US Army Corp of Engi­neers. A review of the min­utes of sub­se­quent port meet­ings yields no men­tion of the Port tak­ing a pro-active or advo­cacy stance on behalf of ORC. Was this deci­sion made with­out ben­e­fit of a pub­lic meet­ing and who made the deci­sion for a pub­licly owned entity like the Port to advo­cate on behalf of a pri­vately held cor­po­ra­tion? Why is an orga­ni­za­tion that receives pub­lic funds such as SCDC lob­by­ing on behalf of a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion? Why are FONSI and SCDC, both with such mis­er­able track records still try­ing to manip­u­late Coos County eco­nom­ics? Is it merely a coin­ci­dence that Port Com­mis­sioner Kro­n­steiner, owner of West Coast Con­trac­tors gets the con­tract to drive pile at the ORC pro­cess­ing plant?

An email to both DEQ and the US Army Corp of Engi­neers ask­ing just exactly how one goes about ‘smooth­ing the way’ has DEQ deny­ing any prior knowl­edge of SCDC and the Army Corp rec­om­mend­ing I file a FOIA request at a link here. So is FONSI just blow­ing more smoke, try­ing to jus­tify their exis­tence when they are really a ‘find­ing of no sig­nif­i­cant impact’? Is SCDC, locally famous for only cre­at­ing two jobs, those within SCDC, mis­rep­re­sent­ing its capa­bil­i­ties to jus­tify its exis­tence? Is Dan Smith grate­ful for ‘smooth­ing’ that port direc­tor Jeff Bishop never did, and if so why gush in pub­lic? Some­thing isn’t right here and hope­fully many will fol­low the FOIA link and ask for all com­mu­ni­ca­tions, every sticky note, every phone call, every let­ter or con­ver­sa­tion to find out.

Back to Ban­don Dunes for a moment. SCDC has referred to the golf resort in their SDAT appli­ca­tion as a ‘remark­able com­mu­nity part­ner’, how­ever, when the Dunes learned ORC was going to be strip min­ing near the resort the Dunes had a very NIMBY moment.

Despite a belief Ore­gon Resources Corp. wouldn’t mine for chromite next to Ban­don Dunes Golf Resort, com­pany offi­cials haven’t erased that plan.

Ore­gon Resources Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer Dan Smith said Tues­day the com­pany never aban­doned its inter­est in what’s known as the Shep­ard site, a sixth min­ing pit in the orig­i­nal plan.

Ban­don Dunes attor­ney Al John­son said it’s news to his client. He first heard about Smith’s com­ments Wednes­day after­noon and imme­di­ately called and left a mes­sage with Ore­gon Resources’ attor­ney Steven Abel, of Stoel Rives in Port­land. As of this morn­ing he hadn’t heard back.

“Obvi­ously it’s of con­cern,” John­son said. “We had no advanced knowl­edge and we’re still in the dark.”

The resort is con­struct­ing a new 18-hole cham­pi­onship golf course at the north­east cor­ner of its hold­ings — the area clos­est to the Shep­ard site…

…In August 2007, the com­pany had announced it no longer was inter­ested in the site, just one day prior to the Coos County Plan­ning Commission’s approval of the company’s conditional-use min­ing per­mit. At that time Ban­don Dunes Gen­eral Man­ager Hank Hickox said there had been dia­log between Ore­gon Resources rep­re­sen­ta­tives and Ban­don Dunes attor­neys for weeks about the site that is located about a mile and a half from the resort. He said then he was relieved the com­pany had lost interest.

“We were con­cerned about the 24-hour activ­ity,” Hickox told The World in August.

Remark­able com­mu­nity part­ner that they are, now that they are no longer threat­ened by the indus­trial strip min­ing the Dunes has left Ban­don Wood­lands Com­mu­nity Asso­ci­a­tion to fend for themselves.

By the way, if any­one really feels sorry for min­ers like Dan Smith or Ore­gon Resources or their Aus­tralian own­ers read up on the Min­ing Act of 1872 and see just how much com­mon pub­lic trea­sure has been scooped up and how many super­fund sites they have left in their wake for work­ing class tax­pay­ers to clean up. Read ‘Silent Theft: The Pri­vate Plun­der of our Com­mon Wealth’ by David Bol­lier, who calls the Min­ing Act of 1872 the ‘grand­daddy of all cor­po­rate give­aways’ and notes min­ing com­pa­nies extract $2B to $3B each year from fed­eral lands with­out pay­ing a cent to the fed­eral government.

The Dan Smith’s and their ‘woe is me’ act as exhib­ited at the SCDC meet­ing isn’t only unmanly it is down­right pathetic and while they aren’t par­tak­ing of the fed­eral act on state and county lands they arise from that 140 year old tra­di­tion of priv­i­leged plun­der and think noth­ing of offer­ing only a hand­ful of jobs and few shekels to a county barely able to keep its schools open or pro­vide ade­quate pub­lic safety.

Bob Main is right, there is no net increase in jobs trad­ing log­ging for min­ing, cer­tainly not enough to jus­tify the risks and the poten­tial dam­age to the fish­ing indus­try and water­ways is irrepara­ble as stud­ies have shown and I have linked to here

We have roughly 30 days to get pub­lic com­ments in on the 1200-A storm water per­mit. The fail­ure of just one per­mit could save the pub­lic from this plunder…

More info com­ing soon

Cur­rently, the County is being wooed by Ore­gon Resources Cor­po­ra­tion to sign away min­eral rights on some 6,000 acres of pub­licly owned tim­ber­land. ORC offers to pay a roy­alty of 3 or 3.5% or approx­i­mately $1.5M annu­ally at some point in the future. ORC talks about pro­vid­ing 70 jobs at some point in the future. ORC expects the County to upgrade a sec­tion of W Beaver Hill Road to indus­trial grade sta­tus at a cost of $450k.

If the County has done an eco­nomic impact analy­sis of enter­ing into the min­eral rights busi­ness it has yet to be pro­vided to the pub­lic. Requests to see the return on invest­ment to the pub­lic for the $450k road improve­ment and the addi­tional costs of other county ser­vices required to main­tain strip min­ing in Coos County, have not been answered. It appears the County is actively con­sid­er­ing invest­ing pub­lic resources in a risky strip min­ing activ­ity with­out any idea if and when the pub­lic will see a return.

So I have a sug­ges­tion. Last year, I sub­mit­ted an appro­pri­a­tion request to Con­gress, coura­geously car­ried to com­mit­tee by Peter DeFazio, that would have helped fund a pub­licly owned 5MW renew­able energy micro-grid that would have gen­er­ated $2M in net annual rev­enue for local schools. It was called the West­ern Ore­gon Wind project or WOW and while as an ear­mark, it was not funded in appro­pri­a­tions the model would have cre­ated or saved 196 fam­ily wage jobs and with­out tear­ing up tim­ber prop­erty or wear­ing down roads.

The WOW busi­ness model is not tech­nol­ogy depen­dent. Elec­tric­ity is an essen­tial ser­vice and pro­duc­ing power locally even with fos­sil fuel power gen­er­a­tion would earn rev­enue, how­ever, given Coos County has the equiv­a­lent of bil­lions of bar­rels of oil under the ground in wind resource, it would be wise to start drilling it. More impor­tantly, even with low PUC set rates of .07KWH the ROI can be as quick as four years.

In short, Coos County could earn more money and cre­ate more jobs by import­ing less power than it can by pri­va­tiz­ing our pub­lic resources and sign­ing a deal with ORC and know when to expect a return and how much. Coos County could develop two or three or ten such micro­grids and not only fund all of our schools, law enforce­ment, health and pub­lic ser­vices, cre­ate hun­dreds if not thou­sands of jobs and draw tourists just want­ing to see how it is done.

Ore­gon has enough renew­able energy resources, with geot­her­mal, wind, PV and micro-hydro to gen­er­ate 184% of its power needs. Read this report from Energy Self Reliant States.

Why is Coos County exert­ing so much effort on the hand­ful of jobs promised by LNG and chromite min­ing when the real future is renew­able sus­tain­able energy? We have the resources. We have the tech­nol­ogy, geot­her­mal as a base line, wind, solar and CHP for peaks. The tech­nol­ogy is afford­able, typ­i­cally 40% less cap­i­tal cost than cen­tral­ized power pro­duc­tion and it doesn’t require $1M/mile trans­mis­sion lines. We even have the financ­ing. WOW or its equiv­a­lent earns enough to cover debt ser­vice and still net $2M annu­ally, and never has there been more money avail­able for renew­able energy than right now. We have every­thing we need to be a self sus­tain­ing strong local econ­omy it seems, except the polit­i­cal will.

You decide — Am post­ing this exchange with Stuffle­bean today — it speaks for itself

Ear­lier I posted the fol­low­ing email to Com­mis­sion­ers Whitty, Main and Stuffle­bean along with a copy to The World.

MG — Just won­der­ing has any­one actu­ally done a real eco­nomic analy­sis of sign­ing a min­eral lease with ORC? For exam­ple, has any­one weighed the costs asso­ci­ated with jobs gained some­time in the future, two or three years as ORC ramps up and jobs lost, like the road crew more than a year ago? Are the poten­tial rev­enues from roy­al­ties greater than the
cur­rent tim­ber rev­enues already being earned on a sus­tain­able har­vest yield basis?

What about the con­se­quence of enter­prise zone tax exemp­tions ORC plans to avail itself of? What about poten­tial lost tim­ber sales if ORC mit­i­ga­tion meth­ods aren’t ade­quate? How many years after the county ties up its min­eral rights before the pub­lic see a return? What is the NPV (Net Present Value) for work­ing tim­ber land today? What is the
county’s busi­ness model for enter­ing into the min­eral rights business?

How much water is required for ORC min­ing use?

ORC indi­cates they take all the risk but that sim­ply isn’t true. Core
sam­ples aren’t the only due dili­gence the County needs to undertake.

So far, the only response I have had is from Stuffle­bean and it begins here

KS — There have been no jobs lost in the road depart­ment asso­ci­ated with ORC.

There is cur­rently no prop­erty taxes paid for county for­est land.

There would be no loss of tim­ber rev­enue from ORC.

Water issues are noth­ing related to coos county, that would be CB/NB
water board issues.

To which I reply

MG — Thank you, Kevin, for the reply but you specif­i­cally said the road depart­ment ‘reor­ga­ni­za­tion’ was to allow the county to afford the neces­sity to upgrade W Beaver Hill to indus­trial grade. From the Feb­ru­ary 2009 pub­lic meet­ing you said to ORC…

“there’s been quite a hype about some of the restruc­tur­ing we’ve done in the road depart­ment. One of the rea­sons it was essen­tial we do some of those is every­body who has read the URS report that was pro­vided by Ore­gon Resources Cor­po­ra­tion, Coos County needed to make a $450,000 invest­ment of their share just to deal with main­te­nance of the road depart­ment itself on W Beaver Hill. With the changes we made that was fac­tored into that. We will now have the money to actu­ally make that invest­ment.”

The County has com­mit­ted itself to spend­ing $450K plus a share of ongo­ing road main­te­nance. The jobs, by your own admis­sion, Kevin, were sac­ri­ficed to afford the county the oppor­tu­nity to ‘make that invest­ment’. What analy­sis has been done on the eco­nomic impact of those lost jobs over a year ago ver­sus promised future jobs includ­ing the lag time between those future jobs and addi­tional cost to the county for ser­vices to acco­mo­date ORC given ORC is in an enter­prise zone? This is not just about the county bud­get, this is about the county econ­omy as a whole.

The county land as it stands does not place an addi­tional bur­den on the tax­payer. Min­ing it will. There­fore, I repeat, what analy­sis have any of you done on the true cost to the county, ESPECIALLY in light of the five year tax exemptions?

There is no guar­an­tee of secure tim­ber receipts. Even IF ORC main­tains ade­quate mit­i­ga­tion and replant­ing on a sched­ule in line with the cur­rent har­vest plan, unfore­seen events can impact the County — for­est fires, dis­eased trees, water­shed and wet­lands impacts, etc… what con­tin­gency plan do you have in the event of unex­pected cir­cum­stances? Again, how many years before the pub­lic sees a return on their investment?

Water affects every­one and exces­sive use in one loca­tion can sig­nif­i­cantly affect other loca­tions miles away.

Are you telling me that no eco­nomic impact study has been done prior to a push to lease away pub­lic min­eral rights? Are you say­ing you don’t know the answer to any of these ques­tions? What is the eco­nomic impact? The pub­lic has a right to know.

Ignor­ing most of my ques­tions Stuffle­bean answers thusly

KS — You should read the report again, it clearly states that even if ORC did not do any­thing, that 450,000.00 would need to be invested to deal with­cur­rent traf­fic over the next 10 years and if ORC was to locate there are other num­bers. We are only going to pay for our cur­rent main­te­nance issues and not ORC’s. If they do mine weyco prop­erty they wi be required to make pay­ments to coos county for their impacts.

To which I parry back

MG — First, the con­di­tional per­mit requires the county to com­mis­sion and pay for the report. That did not hap­pen. ORC com­mis­sioned URS and the county reim­bursed the report cost. This is sig­nif­i­cant because almost with­out fail a report is always slanted in favor of the party com­mis­sion­ing and per­ceived to be pay­ing the report. Fur­ther, I have read the URS report and it is not clear that $450K needs to be spent on that road regard­less of ORC and upgrad­ing it to indus­trial grade. The report states that absent the improve­ment exist­ing traf­fic “is not antic­i­pated to fail the pave­ment sec­tion”. Please read the report again.

Please com­ment on your com­ments regard­ing the road depart­ment lay­offs quoted below?

Please answer the rest of my questions

This is the final non answer answer I have received to date

KS — I have no idea where you get your infor­ma­tion because the county did not pay for anything.

Your inter­pre­ta­tion of every­thing is that, your interpretation.

My final attempt to receive an answer from my elected official

MG — My infor­ma­tion comes from read­ily avail­able pub­lic records, the Trans­porta­tion Impact Analy­sis was to be paid for by the county. Read the con­di­tional per­mit– Shall I take your non answer to my many ques­tions as a refusal to answer or an inabil­ity to answer a county cit­i­zen? You specif­i­cally use the term ‘invest­ment’ when speak­ing about county improve­ments to W Beaver Hill. As an ‘invest­ment’ am I to under­stand you have no idea what the ROI to the tax­payer is going to be?

No won­der he works for the gov­ern­ment because no pri­vate busi­ness would tol­er­ate this. Thank good­ness there is an elec­tion com­ing up!!!

Bob Main was the lone voice of dis­sent express­ing valid con­cerns about wash­ing toxic chem­i­cals both from fer­til­iz­ing the golf course and from a for­mer metham­phet­a­mine lab being washed into the bay. Com­mis­sion­ers Whitty and Stuffle­bean were uncon­cerned about poten­tial dam­age to the bay. The flood­ing is nec­es­sary for Jor­dan Cove to off­set wet­lands lost to the pro­posed LNG terminal.

The com­mis­sion­ers added three con­di­tions to the project to limit costs to the county and dam­age to the envi­ron­ment, but the three-person vote was divided. Com­mis­sioner Bob Main voted no, in light of con­cerns he said he had about pol­lu­tants wash­ing into the bay. Com­mis­sion­ers Nikki Whitty and Kevin Stuffle­bean voted yes.

Jody McCaf­free rec­om­mended an over­sight com­mit­tee to avert a sim­i­lar dis­as­ter as the Mas-Tec pipeline.

The port agreed that there should be a tech­ni­cal advi­sory com­mit­tee, such as the one it already has, includ­ing lead­ers from the South Slough National Estu­ar­ine Research Reserve and Coos Water­shed Association.

The appli­cant gets to be its own advi­sory com­mit­tee. That will be like lis­ten­ing to foxes dis­cuss how to guard the hen house.

Stuffle­bean assured every­one … “Reg­u­la­tory agen­cies tend to pick on gov­ern­ment enti­ties more than pri­vate companies.”

It is anyone’s guess where that pearl of wis­dom came from or what evi­dence there is to sup­port that state­ment but mean­while, Stuffle­bean is once again backpedal­ing on ear­lier state­ments made to the press about his bank­ruptcy. Today, a county cit­i­zen asked him why he hadn’t reported his per­sonal con­tri­bu­tions to his cam­paign that forced him into bank­ruptcy. Fail­ure to report con­tri­bu­tions is a clear vio­la­tion of elec­tion laws.

His expla­na­tion was that there were non-reportable expenses such as gas and mileage to speak­ing events. So given the cam­paign cost less than $6,000 and Coos County is not that large it would seem that it didn’t take much to tip the finan­cial scales for the com­mis­sioner. Now he has also blamed his wife’s job loss and his own, hereto­fore uncon­firmed, claim of a $28,000 a year salary cut when he took on the com­mis­sion­ers seat.

Either way, Stuffle­bean doesn’t appear to have much of a han­dle on his per­sonal finances and was irre­spon­si­ble toward his debtors if he, indeed, did take a lower pay­ing job. So why are we let­ting some­one with such a track record of incon­sis­ten­cies and poor judg­ment make deci­sions for the County?

The County filed an answer to the amended com­plaint lodged by Team­sters 223 with the Employ­ment Rela­tions Board today. In sum­mary, the County denies the claims of fail­ing to bar­gain in good faith. The County fur­ther asserts an attempt on the part of the County to bar­gain as per the Pub­lic Employ­ees Col­lec­tive Bar­gain­ing Act after the ULP was filed by the Union.

Notably the Union com­plaint lists Decem­ber 31, 2008 as the first notice from the County of lay­offs. The County agrees with this state­ment as shown below beg­ging the ques­tion, what was Kevin talk­ing about when he claimed at the IBO lun­cheon recall debate that on Decem­ber 26 ‘indi­vid­u­als had been notified’?

The County is list­ing as part of its defense a fail­ure on the part of the media to cor­rectly inter­pret his state­ments. The com­plaint alleges bar­gain­ing unit work was reported to be given over to non bar­gain­ing unit employ­ees, pri­mar­ily man­age­ment. That count of the com­plaint jives with my notes taken dur­ing a phone call with Kevin wherein he told me his fore­men would take over patrolling roads, etc.

The com­plaint indi­cates the…

Union did not demand to bar­gain over the lay­off because the County’s notice stated that the County was con­duct­ing a lay­off and fol­low­ing the previously-bargained pro­vi­sions of the Agree­ment con­cern­ing a proper lay­off. The County did not pro­vide notice to the Union at any time that the County intended to con­tract out the bar­gain­ing unit work.

Also filed is a motion-to-quash a sub­poena filed to review the tapes and notes exec­u­tive ses­sions relat­ing to the lay­off of twenty two mem­bers of the road department.

An inter­est­ing side note. The min­utes for the Decem­ber 16, 2008 bud­get work ses­sion wherein Kevin famously requested no record­ing be made AND a sub­ject of the sub­poena, were not approved by the Board of Com­mis­sion­ers until May 6, 2009, six days before the motion to quash was filed. (I have been told Bob Main, not a com­mis­sioner Decem­ber 16, was not present on May 6 and so did not get to vote to approve the minutes).