Last Thursday, I participated in a forum in Salem put on by the US Department of Agriculture related to economic growth in rural America.

The USDA is leading an effort nationwide to listen to Rural America’s thoughts and ideas about what is needed to create jobs and stimulate economic development in rural communities across the country. These forums follow the lead of President Obama’s December 3, 2009, national roundtable discussion. So, plan to attend and share your thoughts and ideas about job creation and economic growth.

In Oregon, the following Community Forums have been scheduled:

> ALBANY, January 21, 9AM-Noon; Linn County Fair & Expo Center, Conference Center Rooms 1 & 2
> REDMOND, January 28, 1-4PM; Central Oregon Community College, Hitchcock Auditorium

Coos County Commissioner Nikki Whitty was there along with Sandy Messerle director of the South Coast Development Council (does anyone know what, if anything, SCDC has successfully developed?).

The forum consisted of two panels, the second putting some focus on energy, hence the reason I was invited. ODOE was represented on the second panel by Bob Repine, Assistant Director, Energy Incentives who began by talking about the opportunities for jobs in Oregon relating to the wind industry. Repine noted that many parts break on big wind turbines and while, “…Oregon will never compete with Europe”, Oregon can manufacture the replacement parts and create jobs.

Oregon could manufacture the generators. The Shepherd’s Flat wind farm awarded a $1.4B contract to GE to ‘assemble’ the turbines with China being the primary manufacturer of components. Shepherd’s Flat like all big wind farms is heavily subsidized with US taxpayer money, so why are we providing jobs for China?

State Senator Chris Edwards, representing part of Lane County, also on the panel, proudly advised that Oregon can trade with China producing fine wood products and other sundries. Now that China has all the jobs, it is no wonder they can afford to import our turned bowls our trinkets.

Naturally, I saw red and leaped up to give my opinion about what the government can do to help with jobs creation, such as insisting taxpayer funded projects be manufactured in the US. Oregon has the manufacturing infrastructure and the technology in place all it appears to lack is the political will.

Neither Messerle or Whitty contributed anything to the forum conversation but when I spoke to Whitty she told me she thought everything “was so interesting”.

Larry called me yesterday to let me know that he is throwing his hat into the ring to run against Nikki Whitty as a county commissioner. More on this as I learn more about Larry’s platform, part of which I know, will be transparency… amen to that!

Several people, particularly Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean, believe the circumstances of his bankruptcy are a personal matter and not a news item. Stufflebean made his bankruptcy a public issue when he repeated apparently false claims to the news media. Previously, I criticized The World for not reporting on the glaring factual discrepancies from Stufflebean’s own mouth with respect to the bankruptcy (and the firing of 22 county road workers). The news is not Stufflebean’s bankruptcy, the news is that an elected official may have lied to the public he serves. That is news. That is big news!!!

Today, The World has done some fine investigative reporting and correctly informed the public that an elected official may be playing fast and loose with the truth.

Coos County Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean’s public explanation of his recent bankruptcy filing contains factual discrepancies, The World has learned.

In July, Stufflebean and his wife filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in federal court in Eugene. In a subsequent interview with Eugene’s The Register-Guard newspaper, Stufflebean mentioned five factors contributing to his financial wreckage.

Information available from public records, however, raises questions about each of the five factors. Stufflebean has defended his statements in recent interviews and e-mails to The World, but he has provided neither full details nor any documents to support his contentions.

The World staff writer, Meghan Walsh did an excellent job of investigating this matter. Right on!!! This is what newspapers are supposed to do.

As reported on this blog previously, Coos County Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean claimed during an interview with Register Guard reporter, Winston Ross, his recent bankruptcy was due in part to using personal savings to defend against a recall effort. The claim raised the specter of possible campaign finance law abuse as he did not claim any personal contributions or expenses with OreSTAR.

Stufflebean repeated the claim in a later interview with the LA Times about recall elections around the country. Several Coos County citizens have reported the inconsistencies with the Oregon Secretary of State and this week, Eldon Rollins asked Stufflebean during a BOC meeting why his expenses were not properly reported. Caught in a web of his own making Stufflebean tried to hide behind a claim of personal privacy and followed up with Rollins after the meeting via email-

From: kstufflebean@CO.COOS.OR.US
To: Rollins
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 13:52:50 -0700
Subject: Personal Information

Eldon:
Just to clarify your question that would be a fact that all reportable information was placed on ORESTAR per campaign finance laws.
If you have further questions regarding my personal stuff, then I would encourage you to email or stop by my office or call.

Kevin Stufflebean

From: Rollins
To: kstufflebean@CO.COOS.OR.US
Kevin, just to clarify even more:
Your campaign expenses and how you met them are not personal stuff. They are public campaign finance reporting stuff.
Furthermore, your newspaper interviews are not private stuff, they are public because you made them public.
If you are quoted in the newspapers as saying that one of the reasons you had to declare bankruptcy was because of all the money of your own you had to spend on the recall, then a prudent individual would assume you spent a fair amount of your own money on it.
Sincerely,
Eldon Rollins

So “all reportable information” was provided to OreSTAR after all, meaning Stufflebean’s statements to two separate reporters from two respected newspapers separated by a period of weeks were untrue, a falsehood, something akin to ‘a lie’. Stufflebean, when caught in inconsistencies famously blames the press for misquoting him but The Register Guard and The LA Times are not as easily impeached as the local press.

Naturally, there is no reason to believe Stufflebean is ‘accurate’ now if he was inaccurate before, in fact there is every motivation to question every statement that comes from him, unfortunately The World does not do their job and will not report for the public just how liberal with the truth some of our elected officials are.

The LA Times has written a story, ‘Throw the Bums Out‘ denoting the growing intolerance on the part of the populous for corrupt or incompetent politician. Amongst the examples given is our own Kevin Stufflebean who narrowly survived a recall last May.

Par for the course, Stufflebean continues to blame the recall on imaginary budget constraints that forced him to layoff twenty two road workers without notice and sparked a potentially devastating unfair labor practice complaint against the County.

The recall campaign in Coos County was sparked last year after the three-member board of commissioners cut the county’s 40-person roads department by 55%. The board had to reduce its $4-million budget by a quarter…”It wasn’t like I wanted to cut those jobs. But that didn’t matter,” said Stufflebean, who oversaw transportation issues for the board.

Stufflebean even repeats claims of harassment and abuse.

Residents drove by Stufflebean’s home, taking pictures of him and his family and posting the images online along with nasty comments. His wife was yelled at while grocery shopping. His son, who attends high school with the children of some of the laid-off county road workers, tried to shrug off criticism about his father.

The most interesting claim, however, regards his personal savings and the recall and his bankruptcy.

The campaign against the recall drained his savings. He and his wife recently filed for bankruptcy.

If Stufflebean did, in fact, use savings to finance the recall then he should have reported the contribution and the expenditure with OreStar. As we have previously reported it appears he did not, in violation of public campaign finance laws.

Probably, the bankruptcy court trustee would be interested in knowing that he diverted assets to a recall election rather than paying his creditors less than six months before filing bankruptcy.

Then again, maybe Kevin is just making all that up about spending his own money to save his job… trying to save face, perhaps. What do you think?

Coos County Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean, the man in charge of our public money and resources has filed Chapter 13. According to the Register Guard, Stufflebean blames the recall, his ex-wife and the exorbitant costs associated with being a public official.

His wife lost her job a few years back, Stufflebean said. When he became commissioner two years ago, he said, he took a $28,000 annual pay cut. Stufflebean makes about $59,000 a year now.

Campaigning against the May 5 recall election also cost him a significant amount of money personally, Stufflebean said.

Until recently, he also was paying for on-the-job expenses out of pocket, as the board of commissioners was trying to keep its expenses down.

“I took about a $3,000 per month loss in revenue,” Stufflebean said.

Another hit came from legal fees when the mother of Stufflebean’s son filed to gain custody of the boy, he said.

A check on OreSTAR would confirm whether Stufflebean spent his own money fighting the recall although if he did he did not report it from what I can see.

It should be possible to confirm the salary drop as well. Unconfirmed sources have told me in the past Stufflebean was in such deep financial trouble he had to buy a big screen television at ‘Rent to Own’.

Fairview residents, Ronne Hearn and Jaye Bell have been dogging the commissioners on the ORC mining venture and wrote this well crafted and thoughtful letter.

Dear Commissioners,

We all out here seem to be lacking that magic one page sheet (written after the fact) that says that Nollan and Dolan have any thing whatsoever to do with road proportionality, let alone when we, the county, currently have no stake in the deal and thereby, presumably, are not the ones destroying the road. Counsel may be busy but she’s the one who brought up this “one page” piece of elusive information. She works for you. Ask for it. You work for us. We want the page.

The DVD. Copying DVDs is generally not difficult, particularly in light of a $340,000 computer upgrade which might include the ability to copy DVDs. That meeting was the 1st of May. We are now celebrating Memorial Day weekend. If the county can’t do it, give it to Bob Arnold along with a few bucks for his effort and some blank DVDs and he’ll take care of it. If, as was suggested, the DVD is flawed, then contact Mr Ralls and suggest a new copy. I’m sure he’d be on it in a heart beat.

As to the ORC Letter to the Editor in Saturday’s World: It sounded so much like Mr PubEd that we looked up the guy in the phone book to see if he was for real.

Did you notice any of the flaws in the rationale in that letter? Russell Ralls, not ORC, did say there was gold and platinum in the sands and that because their specific gravities were substantially heavier than the other minerals, they would spin off first. Perhaps it is a thought that the county, rather than ORC, determine for the sake of the county whether the gold and platinum are “worth” saving. I’m sure you’d be a lot more solicitous of your gold and platinum than would be ORC.

1.5 million dollars. Based on what? All the commodities – except for gold and platinum…. – are way down. Just get in there and sign some stupid deal or the voters will get you in 2010. Hello…… We ARE the voters. You work for us. We don’t want you going off on some NWN/Methane type of deal. Neither has served the county well as all of you may have noticed. You were told in advance that these were boondoggles. You didn’t listen

And we’re telling you now: Go Slow. Hire your own expert attorney, Drag your feet all you want. Unless there’s something going on under the table, you have no obligation to ORC. And the mineral sands are yours, which is to say the mineral sands are ours. We want them taken care of for the valuable commodities that they are. They are precious. Treat them that way.

Also, we need to determine what our timber losses and related timber job losses are going to be if we destroy our younger stands. County says an acre of saleable timber produces from $16,000 to $33,000, while ORC says that a mined acre will likely yield $32,000. Based on what? What weight? What sales price? What royalty? Over what time?

Which brings us to the cost of road repairs. The URS Pavement Analysis Report from June 3rd, 2008 suggests all sorts of ways we can spend county money to benefit ORC, one of which was an outlay of some 1.2 million dollars to upgrade the road to industrial grade to accomodate the huge and weighty mining trucks. An outlay of up to one million dollars in the face of a potential income of 1 to 1.5 million dollars doesn’t make any economic sense, especially when the 1 to 1.5 million dollar income figures are drawn from thin air.

Do some of your own drilling and assaying. Know what you have from someone independent. Might not be a bad idea to have more than one assay done of the same core drills. Could be very enlightening.

There is no rush. If ORC won’t mine without the county’s 6,000 acres, so be it. If they have enough to mine the private lands, so be it. ORC is not your concern. We are your concern. Our land and its wealth are your concerns. We want all of this open, above board, and as transparent as a framed space with no glass, no glass to reflect or refract the images seen through the opening.

Ronnie and Jaye

Especially appreciate the reference to counsel and the constant claims of attorney client privilege. Surely privilege cannot be applied when rationalizing a decision to commit public funds to something like road improvements.