Tomorrow, Coos County Board of Commissioners will be the final arbiters of whether a resource extraction corporation backed by $45M in foreign investment is more important than local schools and public safety. Will the county follow the lead of the North Bend and Coos Bay city councils and the Port Commission and agree to provide free lunch to a strip mining operation instead of funding lunch programs and teachers for our schools?

Oregon Resources Corporation has already begun construction on its Bunker Hill processing plant and may be as much 20% complete, if not more. Does their existing business plan, the one that enabled them to begin construction, include paying property taxes like everyone else? If it does, then they can well afford to pay their share of public services. If it doesn’t, well then, what well healed, finely tuned, responsibly run corporation would have begun construction without having those details in place first?

No matter how you look at it, ORC is sticking it to local schools. No matter how you look at it, the city and port officials who support this extension are denying schools and public safety agencies badly needed funds and supporting a corporation that may not have the common sense to write a decent business plan.

Throw into the mix the fact that most of the management of ORC worked for Iluka Resources, arguably a less than stellar corporate actor, and uninformed and misguided elected and appointed officials blindly believing tax abatement is good for the economy, you have a repetition of the decisions that have led to the economic downfall of Coos County.

Clearly, ORC believes offering a slightly higher salary to a handful of employees is cheaper for them than paying their fair share of property taxes. How does it compare, however, to hiring four or five teachers? How many children will benefit from more teachers compared to how many people benefit from a few higher paid management personnel at ORC?

The onus is on the commissioners now. We will find out how much they really care about public safety and education.