When a company like ORC rides into town promising jobs and claims to care about the community, “..we have all built houses here”, says Dan Smith, why don’t they want to help fund the schools, the police department, the fire department, out EMTs? ORC isn’t a struggling mom and pop organization trying to bring in a new organic grocery or an out of the garage computer start up. ORC has serious financial backing and the profits it hopes to extract from this area will not be staying here.
Enterprise zones were conceived with the intent to attract businesses to areas where they otherwise might not go. ORC, however, didn’t move here because of the enterprise zone exemptions, they came here for chromite, chromite of the best quality to be found anywhere, they claim. Now, a company backed by $45M, give or take, wants to exploit the vague language of the enterprise zone laws and get a combined total of eight years of free county services.
ORC wants corporate welfare in exchange for doing business here!
This means our schools will not have the resources they could have. This means the public safety, police, fire and sheriffs departments will not have the resources they should have. ORC, in effect, is saying they really don’t care about our schools, our children, or public safety, or they would want to contribute to these vital services just like everyone else.
Everyone else, that is, except Bandon Dunes. SCDC has called the Dunes ‘a remarkable community partner’. The Dunes, along with the Coquille Valley Enterprise Zone committee (includes Nikki Whitty*) extended the zone boundary just to include them, don’t appear to care about ‘partnering’ or contributing to community services either.
The Dunes was already an established and successful company when the zone was expanded and obviously didn’t come here because of the tax abatement. So what have they done with the tax savings? Have the increased salaries? Reduced green fees? Offered ‘free’ days for local county residents?
ORC profits will go back to Australia and the parent company shareholders. When the chromite is exhausted the single purpose improvements to the Bunker Hill site will have questionable value and probably be taken down.
So the real question is – Do the elected and appointed officials who agreed to extend this generosity not care about public safety and our schools either?
Maybe, just maybe, the cost to the local economy isn’t worth the jobs ORC promises to provide.
* Bandon Dunes owner Mike Keiser and general manager, Hank Hickox have contributed $750 to Nikki’s reelection campaign
