dog·ma (dôgm, dg-) – An authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true.
Dogma is a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. It serves as part of the primary basis of an ideology or belief system, and it cannot be changed or discarded without affecting the very system’s paradigm, or the ideology itself.
For too long, economic development in Coos County has been driven by too few who persist in using a dogmatic, ideological “build it and they will come” approach that socializes the risk but never pays off long term for the working class. In fairness, this happens everywhere and finding companies willing to meet the modest requirements necessary to accept corporate welfare is the only reason economic development agencies like SCDC (South Coast Development Council) and the Port of Coos Bay exist. Nevertheless, this county’s record for continuously exploiting taxpayer funded giveaways without producing any measurable positive results must be second-to-none.
Recently, the state legislature awarded a free pass to any private operator using the publicly owned Coos Bay Rail Link which mirrored an earlier giveaway to NW Natural for its use of the county owned $51 million natural gas pipeline. In both instances, the developers never even factored property taxes into their business plans, (assuming there ever were actual business plans). This oversight necessitated local representatives to craft hasty legislation which spared these promoters the embarrassment of admitting both the flaw in the financial projections and the less than stellar results of the project overall. These projects and so many before them all promised to be the next “glass slipper”, the cure to end all ills and all were endorsed by the county’s business leaders… pretty much always the same names… that dogmatically assume the public should be grateful to subsidize every scheme they bring our way.
While there is absolutely zero, (I am using the word ZERO here), empirical or statistical evidence that enterprise zones and urban renewal and all the other tax abatement and avoidance schemes show a net positive gain in jobs to the area they are intended to assist, or any mechanism to determine what these jobs actually cost the taxpayer, local leaders persist in repeating these tactics while expecting different results. In a conversation with John Sweet, he claimed that he was “concerned” about enterprise zones and urban renewal districts but since everyone else has them we “wouldn’t be competitive” with the rest of the country if we didn’t continue using these tools.
This is what I mean by dogma. Even though a strategy doesn’t work, and certainly tax breaks to companies isn’t paying off in Coos County, the conventional wisdom won’t allow any deviation from the ideology espoused by county “leaders”. When I pointed out to Sweet that more than $350 million in federal and state funds has passed through Coos County in the name of economic development in the last ten years and that unemployment and poverty has risen while population and median income has gone down during the same period, he responded that while a bad investment for the rest of the country, without it things would be even worse here.
When I suggested that more voices and a wider view of development were needed to invest this money effectively Sweet remained silent. In other words, some of our leaders are so entrenched in their own dogma, their own unproven belief systems, that the rest of the country can be damned rather than even consider looking for a new and hopefully more effective approach.
You can view part of my exchange at PEG Central here http://coosmediacenter.pegcentral.com/player.php?video=4b304c544f92b3a7f79515ee548e9f05 Begins at 1:13:00 approximately with Bob Main expressing discontent with not being consulted before the port asked the legislature for the exemption and continues pretty much through to the end. Sweet, knew about the bill relieving the rail operator of taxes but is so dogmatic about development and the role of tax abatement it never occurred to him that anyone might possibly object. My conversation with Sweet begins shortly after Main’s discussions and continues off and on until almost the bitter end.
Mary,
This pretty well sums it up. Them what is power get to spend what they want where they want and if youse don’t like it go howl at the moon. We get lip service about transparent government but the state agencies are fully behind this gand of scoudrels being their source of cash and refusing to investigate. Who are the players behind the scenes who will make the money? Who are the local big winners if the pipeline goes through? Who has that kind of pull at the state level? Figure that out and we will see who gives these fly weight crooks their instructions.