Port of Coos Bay CEO Jeff Bishop has participated in a locally produced public access program entitled “Build Docks and They Will Come” with Frank Williams. As the title suggests the program suggests that if regulators and environmentalists will just get out of the way and let the Port build some docks, industrial commerce will inevitably appear to utilize the docks to ship their goods thereby employing lots of longshoremen.

Bishop cites the relative value of cargo ships putting into to port including LNG tankers at $500,000 and mentions a figure of $700,000 for ships loaded with logs for export to Asia. At its peak, the Port of Coos Bay saw 384 ships per year pass through the harbor and if we reachieved that heyday Bishop says it would add up to “real money” for the local economy. Bishop lauds the resurgence of raw log exports as a boon to the local economy. In the case of ships transporting whole logs there may be a significant cost to the economy in the form of lost mill worker jobs and lost tax revenue because large timber owners “no longer pay timber harvest tax and comparatively little property tax.”

Below are selected quotes from a series of essays on this very issue and I encourage everyone to read each essay in full. If we really want jobs in Oregon we will have to stand up and demand these tax subsidized companies stop exporting US jobs to Asia.

Drive the Columbia River from Longview into Portland, and you can see big log ships lined up. At least 500 timber jobs leave the Northwest weekly as boatload after boatload of raw logs are exported to Asian mills.

The Business Insider website reports, “While Canada has drastically raised lumber shipments to China in recent years, the U.S. has instead expanded exportation of logs to Chinese sawmills and plywood manufacturers. With exports up 150 percent,” the Insider says, “the U.S. is now the third largest softwood log supplier to China.”

Federal logs are also shipped overseas in huge quantities as pseudo-processed products, chips, pulp, slabs and cants, where the bark is removed and logs are squared up on three out of four sides.

These products could be processed here in our state, employing thousands of Oregonians in living wage jobs.
Bowers takes Keene to task for applying a jobs multiplier of 12 jobs per million feet to the hundreds of millions of board feet of logs being exported each year by private industry. The same equation can be found in Bureau of Land Management data, a result of empirical research, and on Peter DeFazio’s website.

Clearly Keene’s intent was to point up the hypocrisy of selling off publicly owned forests at a loss while shipping vast quantities of raw logs into Asian markets. Yet Bowers says, “Keene’s contention that additional jobs would be created if we halted log exports is not necessarily true.”

Does an Oregon State University Extension Service forester such as Bowers really believe that halting massive raw log exports wouldn’t create more domestic timber jobs?

Many exporters, including Weyerhaeuser, deposit the payments for these exported logs (think jobs) in offshore accounts. The tax rate on repatriated money is normally 35 percent. But in 2005, Congress passed a one-year law to allow that offshore money to be bought home at a 5.75 percent tax rate.

In an announcement titled “DeFazio Fights to Save Timber Jobs,” our congressman notes his resistance to BLM budget cuts. He says, “Reducing the amount of marketable timber the agency is able to offer in fiscal year 2011 by 45 million board feet will cost 500 to 600 timber jobs.”

Figures compiled by Forest Service economist Debra Warren show 1,100 million board feet of raw logs exported from the Northwest in 2010. This year’s first quarter exports, at 390 million board feet, are double the 191 million shipped in 2010′s first quarter. Ironically, three times more timber than DeFazio is trying to save from BLM’s annual budget shortfall now leaves the Northwest every month.

The Business Insider website comments that, “While Canada has drastically raised lumber shipments to China in recent years, the U.S. has instead expanded exportation of logs to Chinese sawmills and plywood manufacturers.” Unfortunately, domestic mills can’t compete with the prices China pays for logs. Interestingly, when the Russians began charging tariffs to protect their forests and mills, China increased its purchase of raw logs from our less protected shores.

Driving through Coos Bay, my wife, who was born and raised there, was shocked to see the volume of logs awaiting ships. Heading back to Roseburg on Highway 42, we counted more than 20 log truck loads and a half dozen chip trucks rushing toward the port. A Menasha Campbell company representative, defending log exports in a Coos Bay World newspaper opinion, claimed that a 5.5 million board foot shipload of logs “creates more than $1.7 million worth of economic activity for the Coos Bay area.”

By comparison, how much economic activity would the Roseburg area enjoyed had these logs been milled in Douglas County? With the passing of HB 3575 in 1999, large forest owners of more than 5,000 acres, like Menasha Campbell, no longer pay timber harvest tax and comparatively little property tax. This makes industrial log exports a double whammy for the county of origin.