Just within the last decade the Port of Coos Bay has made extremely bold and justified spending tens of millions of dollars using the most meager excuse for an agreement with industrial partners. Think about the $60 million dredging project approved by the legislature based upon a “protected” agreement with a bulk cargo terminal developer. Then there was the pretend “emergency” that precipitated repairs on a railroad purchased to meet a condition of the aforementioned $60 million. Now we learn that agreements the port claimed with two of three coal partners, Mitsui & Co. and the Korean Electric Power Corp may have ended months ago.
We know the two partners terminated their involvement not because the port saw fit to inform the taxpayer but because OPB filed public records requests to obtained the documents.
The amended agreement was revealed in response to a public records request from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Hamner said Oregon Public Broadcasting had requested copies of the amended agreement several months ago, but the port didn’t have signed copies of the documents in hand until Friday.
Meanwhile, the Senate is set to approve the appointments of Donna Opitz and Eric Farm to fill vacancies on the port’s commission tomorrow. The port exists solely to act as an economic development agency but despite the millions in taxpayer dollars spent and approved by a rubber stamping commission, unemployment has risen from less than 9% in 2003 to 14% in 2012.
Please write the Oregon State Senate and advise them that monies directed to the Port of Coos Bay have not paid off for the taxpayer and might have been better used on viable projects elsewhere in the state.
Read the amended agreement here
Wim?
You have MORE than earned the right to walk down the sidewalk in Coos Bay, in front of the SCDC/Port offices shouting at the top of your lungs, “I told you so”.
I would be proud to waddle along behind you and hold your cape !
The poor ignorant people of this county are ignorant on these issues because these clowns have run the local paper for decades, they won’t let the public know the truth.
And they all smile, thinking we are such dumb asses.
Karma is a bitch, and she has a very long memory.
Of course, I hate to say “I told you so,” but in The JOB Messiahs (first edition p. 18-18, second ed. p. 19-18) I dismissed the revived coal export idea as a re-appearance of the ghost of 1980. That’s when a promoter who called himself “Canasia Coal” got everybody excited about the same concept, which in the end was proven to be uneconomical by simple transportation-arithmetic.
I have not seen the papers about Mitsui’s withdrawal, but I would bet that they realized the shaky economics of the concept as well, and prudently bowed out.
As to The World acting as the Port’s cheerleader: they have always done that, but a simple reading of their February 27 article about the Southport deal:
http://theworldlink.com/news/local/slip-s-first-trip-ships-wood-chips/article_1b57170c-814b-11e2-97c2-0019bb2963f4.html
makes it obvious that our hometown newspaper printed Elise Hamner’s press release VERBATIM, as an article. In fact, the print article didn’t list any of The World’s writers below the heading. Pathetic.
Remember the spokesperson for the port is the former daily garbage can liner editor. Dont expect unfiltered fact from any person involved in the port. Reporter / Editor (seems all employees are editors) Thomas Moriarty is too young to know how to lie like his colleagues at the daily garbage can liner. Interesting that former editor Casey who believes that his village is cursed with idiots is out of retirement again and covering the county.
There has to be a common denominator here. If the Port is blowing through so much money with nothing to show, someone has to be benefiting from this. Over & over & over… If the motive is not to increase employment, that has been proven by past performance, the motive must be to enrich a select few people whom have their fingers in the pie. There is a pattern the names remain undisclosed.
It is also just part of the developer mandate… the port has to be shown as actively engaging in economic development, no matter how pointless, or there is no reason to continue to fund it as is. The best thing we can do is either reinstate elections for the commission or better yet, do away with the port as an entity all together. If the latter, would anyone actually notice???
And don’t forget readers, clark walworth plastered the $60 million all over his paper for two or three days, then when the cat was out of the bag, and civilians pressed them, they admitted it was a sham. But good ol boy clark, chose to ignore the truth completely. He never reported the truth to his readers. Is that just incompetence, and nothing can be done? We’re not talking peanuts here are we?
These guys control ever word of information Clark prints. His readers still think the gubernut is paying for this, and not the tax payers. Ignorance abounds when citizens are not told the truth.
Hey, I’d support any entity that could bring help to this county, I’m invested here, but after forty years, can’t we say they failed? Bigtime? And stop the bleeding now? Not millions M, many hundreds of millions of dollars.
Who controls the waterfronts on the East Coast? Hummmmm????