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.
