My thanks to Free Lunch author David Cay Johnston for doing the analysis and Adam Colby, Coos County Assessor for providing the statistical data –
First the top ten report – click on the image for a larger screen shot
Now for the side by side comparison done by Johnston- As you can see most of us are paying twice the tax rate of our already heavily subsidized corporate neighbors.
FONSI, meanwhile is pushing for the swift close of a county deal on a mineral rights lease with ORC to strip mine chromite on forest lands.
I need not remind you that this project will bring 70, or more, direct family wage jobs to this area and inject close to $8 million into our local economy. Moreover, they will eventually provide additional freight opportunities for our railroad and perhaps even additional barge traffic. They will add significant property tax revenues to the county’s general fund and are projecting $1.5 million or more in mineral royalties, if they are successful in negotiating a lease for county lands, as proposed. They are paying their fair share for road maintenance, per an agreement worked out long ago with county officials and they have agreed to coordinate mining operations to coincide with the county’s timber harvest and to replace topsoil and replant trees at their expense after the county harvest and the their own mining operation saving the county significant money in reforestation costs.
Jon Barton, FONSI president and the author of this graf neglects to mention the 22 county road workers laid off to help pay for the $450k improvement to upgrade 4 miles of W Beaver Hill Road to industrial grade status even though only one user, ORC requires an industrial grade road.
Barton claims ORC will add significantly to the property tax revenue but they intend to avail themselves of enterprise zone exemptions so it is very likely property tax revenue will actually go down for at least five years and possibly ten. Dan Smith of ORC stated they would likely seek an extension.
The $1.5M in royalties and the unnamed savings in reforestation are nothing but projections and promises with no guarantees of any savings or even any real local jobs.
Coos County is not the only place where this stuff happens and these battles occur. Cascade Locks on the Columbia Gorge is being courted by Nestle to open a spring water bottling plant. You can sign a petition here to help fight this.
Economically distressed rural communities are ripe pickings for resource extraction industries but just as our own history in Coos County shows they are not sustainable business models. The sustainable in FONSI only works if there are new and ripe communities to move on to but for people left to clean up the debris this is not a sustainable business practice.
Little communities like Cascade Locks and Coos Bay want and need sustainable industries and when public opposition rises to fight things like LNG and ORC and Nestle the opposition are labeled as ‘anti-jobs’ or as Kevin Stufflebean once famously said, ‘anti-people’. Nobody, wants to keep saying no to new jobs. The disagreement is over the type of jobs.
You have to laugh that those of us opposing what we view as corporate looting are deemed anti-people (that will always make me laugh) when, during the greatest period of capital influx into renewable energy by the federal government ever seen and green tech investment frenzies on Wall Street, Coos Bay chooses now to ban wind. They call us anti-people… the irony of it all!
