John Baxter, Bandon resident has penned an excellent letter to the editor, as yet unpublished in The World, regarding the $1M free lunch offered to ORC. For your reading pleasure, he has agreed to print it here.

Have the Commissioners’ erred again?

Last Monday’s Board of Commissioners’ meeting in Coos Bay was very well attended. Many business leaders spoke in favor of extending the tax exemption for the Oregon Resources Corp. (ORC) an additional 2 years. Some endorsed the tax exemption on the basis that ORC managed to get the form filled out correctly. Others endorsed the tax exemption because they thought that ORC was investing 43 million dollars in Coos County by building a processing plant. Others seemed to think that because the Coos Bay City Council and the North Bend City Council had endorsed the tax exemption that the Commissioner’s concerns were secondary. So, let’s review.

ORC is a mining company. They located “Rare Earths” at a site in Coos County. To simply extract those rare earth ores from the ground and ship them out could not be profitably done. The ore needs to be “processed” to acquire value. ORC is spending money in Coos County to build a plant to process their “rare earths”. This plant is being built to add value to the activities of ORC and not to add any value to Coos County. An ore processing plant only has value if you have ore to process. Once the ore is depleted, the processing plant has no value or additional use.

Any new business in an enterprise zone is automatically eligible for a three year tax exemption upon application.

ORC has received this three year tax exemption already, so it is obvious that they can complete the application form correctly. However, the Commissioner’s job is to determine merit: that is, if the applicant is actually meeting the Enterprise Zone requirements by making a continuing investment in Coos County. The applicant must earn their additional tax exemption. Commissioner Main was the only Commissioner that felt the need to go beyond spell checking the form.

Continuing value is needed to justify this County not collecting tax from a company in an Enterprise Zone. Commissioner Main clearly stated his concerns with the longevity of ORC in the Coos County business community by using personal anecdotes to show how continuing value might be determined. Using any standard, ORC’s value to Coos County expires when the deposit of rare earth ore is depleted.

He also stated his concern with the methods ORC used in their day-to-day activities. He referenced several company sources that showed how different ORC public and private statements had different information on the exact same issue. His example was: A simple question of test hole depth to determine ore concentration is given as totally different depths in three documents. They ranged from 10 to 100 feet depending on the particular document.

My view is that ORC arrived in Coos County and will extract every ounce of rare earth ore, process every one of those ounces and then close up and move on to the next mining opportunity.

The jobs that they have promised to the people of this County will only exist as long as the rare earth ore is mined. The jobs available to applicants from Coos County will not be the professional or engineering jobs. We will get the temporary grunt labor jobs and possibly a few foreman jobs. All the professional jobs will go to someone from somewhere else. ORC’s track record has already made that clear in their operations-to-date in Coos County.

So, Coos County Commissioner’s Stufflebean and Whitty have given an unknown amount of property tax monies, maybe as much as a million dollars a year, to ORC in exchange for part of the cost of one deputy ($60,000/yr) and a promise of 50 jobs for these two years. These jobs are to receive one and a half times the average rate of pay and will spend at least ¾ of their time at the processing plant. This means to me that the people that work the processing plant will receive no benefits, as they will be ¾ time employees. I cannot see ORC sending processing plant employees to the mining job site to play cards to fill out their hours worked for full time employment.

Commissioner Main said ORC is not bringing adequate continuing value to Coos County to qualify for the tax exemption extension. There is not enough information to know what we are actually giving ORC in this tax exemption. ORC has a track record of providing questionable information. He took a look at ORC as a company that needed to qualify by doing more than filling out the right lines on the form and found them lacking. His “NO” vote was the only correct vote of the evening.

I hope Commissioner Main continues to “do his homework” and use due diligence in resolving the many issues that come to Coos County as he has obviously done in this instance.

What a relief to learn I am not alone in questioning the so called $45M investment into Coos County.