Pre­vi­ously, I wrote about the Inter­na­tional Port of Coos Bay staff appar­ently advo­cat­ing on behalf of Ore­gon Resources with­out ben­e­fit of com­mis­sion approval or a pub­lic meet­ing. From the commissioner’s packet of Novem­ber 19, 2009 I quoted the fol­low­ing and encour­aged every­one to file a FOIA request with the Army Corp of Engi­neers when Dan Smith thanked Port Direc­tor, Jeff Bishop for help­ing them get their permits.

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.

Dur­ing a Jan­u­ary 28, 2010, SCDC meet­ing Dan Smith, COO of Ore­gon Resources is warn­ing his investors may bail out if they can’t start dri­ving pile at their pro­cess­ing plant by March 15. The Army Corp is telling them they will not have a per­mit in time to start work by this dead­line. Mirac­u­lously, in Feb­ru­ary, Smith advises the com­mis­sion they have a per­mit and that ORC’s attor­ney says with­out the help of Jeff Bishop it could not have been done. Com­mis­sioner Kronsteiner’s com­pany, West Coast Con­trac­tors gets the con­tract to drive pile at the pro­cess­ing plant.

In April, I asked the com­mis­sion when the deci­sion had been made for the port to advo­cate on behalf of ORC as there is no evi­dence in the pub­lic records that staff requested per­mis­sion dur­ing any pub­lic meet­ing. Bishop advised me staff never took it to the com­mis­sion because all they did was make inquiries, they did not advocate.

As I requested of the read­ers of this blog, I filed a FOIA request with Army Corp.Today I received a response from Army Corp claim­ing there had been no com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the port regard­ing Ore­gon Resources.

A fol­low up email to the FOIA offi­cer, Jan­ice Soren­son con­firms …“Yes, a tele­phone log would be included in the phrase all communications.”

So either the Army Corp did a poor job of research­ing or the inquiries occurred in pri­vate and were not eth­i­cal or some­one isn’t telling the truth. See for your­self in the video mon­tage below begin­ning with Dan Smith on Jan­u­ary 28, 2010 at the SCDC meet­ing, mov­ing to the the Feb­ru­ary 18, 2010 port meet­ing where Smith thanks staff for talk­ing to DEQ and gives credit to Bishop for the per­mit, to April 15, 2010 when Bishop con­firms he spoke with Army Corp. You decide. For my part I have seri­ous doubts about what went on here and emailed the FOIA office and Bishop to see if we can clear this up.

Maybe Arne Rob­lan should inves­ti­gate this mat­ter since he seems so con­cerned with pub­lic process at the moment.

This isn’t the first time Coos County cit­i­zens have been sold on the promise of jobs and eco­nomic revi­tal­iza­tion by local busi­ness lead­ers. When I moved here in 2003 the State leg­is­la­ture had put the fin­ish­ing touches on a bill to allow a nat­ural gas pipeline deemed so crit­i­cal to eco­nomic devel­op­ment in the area it was rushed through under “emer­gency clause in the leg­is­la­tion that allows for it to go into effect imme­di­ately upon the governor’s signature”.

Sen­ate Bill 0321, which gives the Pub­lic Util­ity Com­mis­sion the author­ity to approve a con­tract nego­ti­ated between Coos County and NW Nat­ural, received a 59–0 approval by House members.

Wear­ing a bright yel­low hard hat on the House floor, Rep. Joanne Verger, D-Coos Bay, urged the House to pass the bill and remove the leg­isla­tive hur­dles to the con­struc­tion of the pipeline.

“SB 321 takes care of the last piece of house­keep­ing busi­ness for the Coos County pipeline,” Verger said.

In July, 2004, The World news­pa­per reported on the boost to the econ­omy antic­i­pated by the nat­ural gas pipeline.

A $51 mil­lion pipeline could bring mil­lions of dol­lars of busi­ness to Coos County and revi­tal­ize the largest met­ro­pol­i­tan area in the West still with­out nat­ural gas, county offi­cials say…

…For years, eco­nomic devel­op­ment offi­cials in Coos County have insisted that the pipeline is nec­es­sary to attract com­pa­nies already drawn to its deep-draft port and inex­pen­sive real estate. The lack of nat­ural gas kept com­pa­nies like U.S. Gyp­sum mov­ing the area.

“They’ll ask you, ‘Where’s nat­ural gas?“‘ said Mar­tin Callery, the port’s mar­ket­ing direc­tor. “They’ll say, ‘Call us when it’s here.“‘

Now, he said, the pipeline will give Coos Bay the chance to rein­vent itself — much like Ban­don, which landed a world-class golf resort, and Flo­rence, which has become a mag­net for retirees.

Then direc­tor of SCDC, the late Ron Optiz told The World “more than one com­pany has expressed inter­est about mov­ing into the area once the pipeline is in.”

By Jan­u­ary 2004, The World was report­ing on all the money being poured back into the local econ­omy via local equip­ment rentals and how the imported work crews, Henkels & McCoy, were reg­u­larly eat­ing lunch at Bay Area Senior Activ­ity Cen­ter increas­ing their busi­ness ‘quite a lot’.

Coos County was also promised earn­ings from the deliv­ery of nat­ural gas.

Coos County is expected to ben­e­fit rate-wise from the pipeline.

Accord­ing to an agree­ment between NW Nat­ural and Coos County, NW Nat­ural will ship and dis­trib­ute nat­ural gas to cus­tomers and pay a 1-cent-per-therm trans­porta­tion fee.

But the trans­porta­tion fee isn’t where the county hopes to make money, accord­ing to Coos County Com­mis­sioner Nikki Whitty.

“We never did this as a project for the county to make money on the trans­porta­tion agree­ment,” Whitty said. “We did it as an eco­nomic incen­tive to get (vacant) prop­er­ties on the tax roll. [Empha­sis mine] Some­day there will be money from the trans­porta­tion fee, but not for a while.”

Such were the promises made by the lead­ers and duly reported ver­ba­tim by the local paper that Coos County cit­i­zens agreed to $27M in bonds to help pay for the pipeline. By 2007, things had gone ter­ri­bly wrong, so wrong that Coos County tax­pay­ers were per­form­ing their own mini ver­sion of the TARP Wall Street bailout

Coos County has yet to real­ize con­sis­tent prof­its from its nat­ural gas pipeline, but thanks to an Ore­gon Supreme Court rul­ing in 2006, it col­lected about $50,000 in prop­erty taxes on the line last year, despite being its owner.

The taxes were paid by NW Nat­ural, the com­pany that main­tains and oper­ates the pipeline. Fear­ing the county might find itself pay­ing the tax in the future, how­ever, county com­mis­sion­ers joined with the power com­pany to lobby for leg­is­la­tion to remove the pipeline from the tax rolls. [Empha­sis mine]

House Bill 3046, sup­ported by all of the elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the South Coast, did just that…

…
NW Nat­ural will still pay prop­erty taxes on the dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem it owns in Coos County, but not on the pipeline, which had an assessed value in Coos County of about $33 million.

Coos County Com­mis­sioner Nikki Whitty said it was only fair to sup­port the legislation.

Fair to whom, cer­tainly not the tax­payer sold this boon­dog­gle in the first place, the arti­cle goes on to explain why the tax­payer is bail­ing out NW Nat­ural for mak­ing bad busi­ness deci­sions. Free mar­ket advo­cates should take note in a truly free mar­ket, the tax­payer doesn’t bail you out.

Gary Bauer, direc­tor of gov­ern­ment affairs for NW Nat­ural, said the com­pany has a 20-year plan to make their entry into the area prof­itable, but as of last week, they only had 801 customers.

“It’s def­i­nitely not prof­itable today,” he said.

He also noted that the com­pany does not make any profit from main­tain­ing the pipeline, receiv­ing about $24,000 a year from the county. Whitty said the county essen­tially exchanges checks, as it charges the com­pany a sim­i­lar fee to trans­port gas along the pipeline.

Despite these fac­tors, the Depart­ment of Rev­enue declared NW Nat­ural was respon­si­ble for pay­ing prop­erty taxes on the pipeline.

After sev­eral dis­cus­sions with state econ­o­mists, NW Nat­ural was able to con­vince the Depart­ment of Rev­enue to reduce its tax oblig­a­tion to a nom­i­nal amount. But the depart­ment could not remove the pipeline com­pletely from the tax rolls.

To do this, Bauer went before the House Rev­enue Com­mit­tee and requested leg­is­la­tion to accom­plish this.

Now, the same peo­ple who brought us the pipeline and sold it to us via recon­sti­tuted press releases pre­sented as news at The World are try­ing to pull the same mar­ket­ing gim­mick with strip min­ing and jobs and all the glow­ing ben­e­fits to local com­pa­nies like West Coast Con­trac­tors (did they bid for the ORC work?).

The media in West Vir­ginia paid homage to big coal and cov­ered for all the rap­ing, plun­der­ing and pil­lag­ing and human sac­ri­fic­ing that was ram­pant in the indus­try to keep the work­ers unin­formed. There is too much to write about in one post so I will get more up soon but it is start­ing to feel like this is what is hap­pen­ing here as well.

Sev­eral read­ers have con­tributed research to allow me to put this up tonight and I have an inbox full of lots more for sev­eral eye open­ing posts over the next few days.

Thanks to every­one who has been help­ing, keep that info coming

Fur was fly­ing yes­ter­day dur­ing the pub­lic com­ment period at the Coos County Board of Com­mis­sion­ers meet­ing. Moved to the Owen Build­ing to accom­mo­date the crowd the room nat­u­rally divided in half with pro-Oregon Resources Corp (ORC) and anti-ORC tak­ing oppo­site sides of the room. Report­edly, out of town ORC man­age­ment, Black­lock, Wil­son and Gar­rett were in atten­dance despite ORC not being on the agenda.

Sadly, I was out of town so can’t report directly but as I under­stand it the anti-ORC forces spoke very well to the issue of strip min­ing in a des­ig­nated coastal zone and apprais­ing the min­er­als before cut­ting any deals. Numer­ous alter­na­tive means of gen­er­at­ing rev­enue and jobs for the county were offered includ­ing car­bon tax cred­its. The mat­ter of an eco­nomic impact state­ment was ham­mered home at the meet­ing and through sub­se­quent emails to the BOC and Stuffle­bean ended the com­ment period speak­ing on behalf of the com­pany (can’t wait to see the video).

To help pro­tect the coastal zone The Ore­gon Coast Alliance (ORCA) was formed in 2009. There are jus­ti­fied con­cern strip-mining is not a com­pat­i­ble indus­try with the Ocean and Coastal Resource Man­age­ment Plan. The strip-mining process pro­posed is claimed by ORC not to be as inva­sive or dif­fi­cult to mit­i­gate as moun­tain top removal typ­i­cal with coal min­ing but a recent EPA study con­firms the dam­age done to the Appalachias through strip min­ing has been dev­as­tat­ing. ORCA and ORC will be wag­ing a bat­tle with per­mit­ting agen­cies over this and other envi­ron­men­tal issues sur­round­ing strip min­ing near Seven Devils.

“A decrease in for­est cover fol­lowed by con­ver­sion to grass­lands or other land cover has the poten­tial to shift the fauna of the region from that found in intact, high-elevation forests to one dom­i­nated by grass­land and edge dwelling species,” the EPA report said.

Cit­ing pre­vi­ous stud­ies by U.S. For­est Ser­vice experts, the EPA report found that frag­men­ta­tion is caus­ing inte­rior for­est to be lost at a rate up to five times faster than the over­all for­est lost in the region to moun­tain­top removal.

The min­ing indus­try is a fairly haz­ardous employ­ment choice and you can view sta­tis­tics on min­ing related fatal­i­ties and injuries at the Mine Safety and Health Admin­is­tra­tion. Addi­tion­ally, safety vio­la­tions appear to be com­mon place amongst mine oper­a­tors and the recent min­ing deaths, once again bring to the fore­front the fla­grant dis­re­gard on the part of mine oper­a­tors for the safety of their employees.

Is this really the type of indus­try we want in Coos County? Is this what we want Coos County to be known for? Strip min­ing and dirty oil fil­ter recy­cling and for­eign oil imports? This is a des­ig­nated coastal zone not a sanc­tu­ary for dirty industry.

KCBY posted this report.

The World finally has there account up and man­age to make strip min­ing sound like a wood­lands restora­tion project.

There is tim­ber grow­ing where strip min­ing was done roughly 70 years ago. And county Forester Bob Laport has even con­tended the process may increase growth.

After the sands are mined it will take three to four days before the remain­ing sands will be rede­posited into the ground. About 70 per­cent will go back, but Smith said there is only a 5 per­cent notice­able change.

‘We’re essen­tially fluff­ing it up and putting it back,” Smith said.

After min­ing is fin­ished, Ore­gon Resources will pay to replant the timber.

Plant a pine here, an oak there, some tril­lium here…

UPDATE Just received some clar­i­fi­ca­tion from county forester Bob Laport regard­ing com­ments The World attrib­uted to him in the graf above. Laport told The World that only in very spe­cific cir­cum­stances where min­ing oper­a­tion is occur­ring in hard pan sim­i­lar to where cran­berry bogs are housed, the ‘fluff­ing’ process might poten­tially ben­e­fit tree growth. The forester did not intend his com­ment to be con­strued as a sweep­ing rec­om­men­da­tion of strip min­ing for pur­poses of encour­ag­ing tim­ber growth.

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

Thanks to the duti­ful efforts of sev­eral cit­i­zens con­cerned that no pub­lic com­ment period had been offered in advance of grant­ing a storm water per­mit to ORC for min­ing oper­a­tions any per­mit will be with­held. Spoke with Vaughn Balzer at DOGAMI who con­firmed the pub­lic would be prop­erly noti­fied, given time to review mate­ri­als and then com­ment before a storm water per­mit is granted to ORC along the haul roads of their pro­posed min­ing operations.

Balzer has indi­cated he will make mate­ri­als avail­able at the local DEQ office in Coos County. Com­ment period is not open ended, obvi­ously but this is a great oppor­tu­nity to put some brakes on what appears to be a run­away train.

Julie Jones a mem­ber of Ban­don Wood­lands Com­mu­nity Asso­ci­a­tion a group ded­i­cated to main­tain­ing the qual­ity of life in the wood­land envi­ron­ment now being threat­ened by pro­posed chromite strip min­ing was instru­men­tal in this action. Jones and BWCA have been track­ing the ORC per­mit­ting process from the begin­ning and knew they should have been noti­fied of a pub­lic com­ment period for the storm water per­mits but were not. Jones per­sisted and DOGAMI will now estab­lish a pub­lic com­ment period before any per­mit is granted.

DOGAMI works under a Mem­o­ran­dum of Agree­ment with the Ore­gon Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­ity and will be mon­i­tor­ing the treat­ment of water runoffs in the min­ing process that have the poten­tial to dam­age frag­ile wet­lands and wood­land streams. Thanks to Julie Jones for her persistence

The gang at SCDC (South Coast Devel­op­ment Coun­cil) are hot to aid and abet Ore­gon Resources Corp to begin strip min­ing for chromite and other min­er­als (sup­pos­edly no gold or plat­inum, they will put that back???).

The U.S. Army Corps of Engi­neers has issued the defin­i­tive oper­at­ing per­mit, giv­ing the Portland-based firm approval to mine chromite, zir­con, high-iron and gar­net off Seven Dev­ils Road between Charleston and Bandon.

‘Every­thing fell into place,” said Dan Smith, Ore­gon Resources’ chief oper­at­ing officer.

Watch­ing the video of a Jan­u­ary 28, 2010 SCDC meet­ing shows Sandy Messerle (I think) absolutely gush­ing about 70 new jobs in the county as Smith down­plays the poten­tial envi­ron­men­tal issues, explains how badly they have been treated by the var­i­ous per­mit­ting agen­cies and mocks Ore­gon for hav­ing an inter­na­tional rep­u­ta­tion for being tough to strip mine in. He also empha­sized that fund­ing for ORC was being held up pend­ing per­mits and the future of the for­eign owned cor­po­ra­tion was in depen­dent upon expe­dit­ing the go ahead. One thing is cer­tain, not a sin­gle per­son present at the meet­ing even ques­tions the pos­si­ble long term effects if even the slight­est thing goes wrong with ORC’s operation.

Remem­ber the 12″ gas pipeline and that débâ­cle. The same movers and shak­ers pre­sid­ing over that mess are sup­port­ing this ven­ture despite a large local fish­ing com­mu­nity and the poten­tial to dam­age already dimin­ished salmon runs and wet­lands. [Photo cour­tesy of Larry Van Elsberg]

Jobs are crit­i­cal but of the 70+ posi­tions how many will be filled with local work­ers, how many are really fam­ily wage and what hap­pens in 18 years when ORC is done pulling pub­lic resources out of the ground? No one at the meet­ing con­sid­ered the 22 road work­ers laid off to afford the $450K cost of upgrad­ing a per­fectly ser­vice­able county road to ‘indus­trial grade’.

Also, dur­ing the Jan­u­ary 28 SCDC meet­ing, Port Direc­tor, Jef­frey Bishop dis­cusses the odd land lease arrange­ment with Wey­er­hauser. Did I hear right? Was the lease arrange­ment based on a future prop­erty value IF the LNG ter­mi­nal was built? If some­one has time to watch, please let me know what that is about.

**Received a note from a reader that cor­rectly noted the Port had a pur­chase agree­ment (actu­ally paid $25M?) and now they are in a pure option agree­ment (Wey­er­hauser gave back the money.. with inter­est???) So, did the port make a pur­chase of land based upon an appraised future value? Would a legit­i­mate appraiser do such a thing and would it be legal for the port to make such an arrange­ment with­out an appraisal? **

The funny thing about SCDC is I am sure if they believed there was a bil­lion bar­rels of oil under the ground they would fall all over them­selves try­ing to drill for it. There is the equiv­a­lent of a bil­lion bar­rels of oil under the ground in wind resource in this county and money to be made and saved in renew­able energy but these guys only want to enter­tain another Wey­er­hauser busi­ness model. They want to be depen­dent on some out­side plun­derer who will take the pub­lic resources and then pack up and leave tak­ing their jobs with them. It is not like it hasn’t hap­pened here before.

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.