Timm Slater has sent out the call for ORC supporters to urge Whitty and Stufflebean to extend property tax relief an additional two years for a combined total of eight years.

Monday November 1st, 6 pm in the Coos Bay City Council Chambers, the Coos County Commissioners will hold a public hearing on the extension of Enterprise Zone benefits for Oregon Resources Corporation’s manufacturing facility. Please plan to attend and show your support for ORC!

If you are looking to testify, attached is a fact sheet on Enterprise Zones, prepared by SCDC, which can help in the development of that testimony.

SEE YOU THERE!

Timm Slater

Executive Director

Bay Area Chamber of Commerce

541-266-0868 FAX 541-267-6704

Success is our Agenda!

Attached to the email is a talking points memo from SCDC signed by ‘jb’ or Jon Barton. Amongst the ‘factoids’ are the following:

• This is an election year and the vocal minority is putting considerable pressure on commissioners to disallow the extension. One commissioner in particular has decided to oppose this, presumably because of this pressure. This is not in Coos County’s best interest.
• There are two very simple reasons why: a) the County receives more money from community service fees than from taxes and b)we send a terrible message to potential investors in our community when we fail to approve what is legally available to them.
• ORC first applied for EZ relief in 2007 and relied on EZ treatment according to what was available under the law as they developed their business plan and made commitments to their investors and lenders. The delays in reaching this point are not of their doing. Working through the bureaucracy has been substantially more difficult than they anticipated. This has resulted in considerable extra cost to the company. Failure to grant the EZ extension would be grossly unfair.

Jon Barton believes the taxpayer should bear the burden of ‘bureaucratic delays’ because it wouldn’t be fair to make ORC do it. The delays are not the doing of the taxpayer either and are a simple fact of doing business in a free market society. Barton, SCDC and the Chamber want to socialize the risk because well paid ORC management didn’t adequately plan for the real cost of doing business. How is that fair, exactly?

How many businesses in Coos County with much less backing and lower priced help than ORC would appreciate a public handout for errors in judgment?

Barton ends with this [emphasis mine]

The above should give you some ammunition for your testimony on Monday evening, November 1st. What is important is that we have a large number of people testifying rather than length of testimony. We urge you to pick one or two issues to focus on and drive those points home. With enough people testifying, we will cover the waterfront and we will make sure someone will be assigned to “clean-up” to cover anything of importance that was missed.

Additionally, for those who do not wish to testify, we will have a fresh supply of ORC buttons for those who just want to be seen in support.

We’ll see you there.

jb

Dropped a note to Sandy Messerle asking who pays for the ‘fresh supply of ORC buttons’ but haven’t received a reply.

UPDATE: Sandy Messerle advised the ORC buttons are paid for by a private donor that wishes to remain anonymous.