Those poor, abused county commissioners…

Why do they keep coming back for another beating?

“I’m so sorry, honey! I don’t know what got into me! I’ll never do it again sweetheart, I promise!” Even if we have not heard them in person, we’re all familiar with the domestic abusers’ pleas. After thoroughly trashing their insignificant others, they faithfully promise to turn a new leaf, and to be ALL-NEW, REFORMED SPOUSES to their black-and-blue partners. Word-of-honor, cross-my-heart.
And the worst part is, many victims are naiive enough to believe them, so they give in to their abuser’s blandishments. But unless they man up, they are highly likely to get another thrashing. And another, always followed by a glowing reconciliation brimming with pious promises.

K & K: Promises, Promises

A prime example of such serial abuse occurred at the County meeting of October 30, when the Commissioners were thoroughly mollified by the contrite pleas of one of our many economic development (“ecodevo”) agencies that has fallen on hard times. This time the remorseful abuser was SCDC, the South Coast Development Council, that after 13 years has quietly lost the third director on whom it had projected all its hopes. Begging on behalf of SCDC were John Knutson and David Koch, whom I will describe as K & K for short. For a mere $75,000, K & K piously promised the Commissioners that despite 13 years of waste and uselessness, this time SCDC would do something for its money. But only if it got that 75 grand.
Last year John Knutson, the owner of Knutson Towboat Company, gained some notoriety by having a state legislator put his main competitor out of business, at a cost much less than one towing charge. Pretending to eliminate a monopoly, the Legislature created one for Knutson by outlawing the Coos Bay Towboat Company, which had provided towboat services for 85 years. Knutson’s alliance with Koch, the present manager of the Port of Coos Bay, may rest on his awareness that the Port also, despite its general ineffectiveness, can bestow favors. The most conspicuous example occurred in 1987, when the Port illegally sold a military barge called YFU-75, owned by the federal government, to Knutson, who made good money on it. I’m not saying that Knutson did anything illegal; in buying the vessel it seems to have trusted the assurances of the Port, which was being run by one of the biggest swindlers who ever hit Coos Bay. Nevertheless, such incidents may explain Knutson’s fondness of government officials who can grant undeserved favors. At present Knutson is “President” of SCDC which, although completely useless at boosting the economy, may also be in a position to expedite financial or other help for friendly local businesses.
Even more curious, although as a private non-profit SCDC is exempted from Oregon’s Open Meeting Law, it’s been financed by every local government in sight. From its founding in 2000 it has sold annual “memberships” for a minimum of $10,000 to the Port, to the Port-owned North Spit Urban Renewal District, to Coos Bay and North Bend, to Coos County and others, for a minimum of $10,000 each, and in an average year it has managed to burn up around $300,000 for two staffers plus a lot of travel and public relations. For what purpose? Well . . . K & K admitted sheepishly, for nothing in particular.

Secret In-Breeding

The pricey memberships got each paying government body a “voting seat” on the board of SCDC but without public awareness of what they were doing there, since Board meetings were not open to the public. The same was true of SCDC’s mother-organization, which was called FONSI, another “ecodevo” outfit founded by Arnie Roblan in 1998. Though officially a “grassroots” organization, FONSI’s board meetings were also closed to the public. But secrecy is something which Knutson finds essential, as he has publicly stated. When he and Dale Sause were financing the failed coup d’état that would have transferred most of the County Commissioners’ powers to an appointed administrator, he argued that it would keep the bothersome public in the dark:

“One of the things that I’ve become aware of in the recent past is that commissioners can’t meet one on one to discuss county activity, it has to be at a public meeting. And I find this to be almost laughable because how can you run a business, how can you run a business when you have to do it in front of the public. You need to con – you need to quit operating in the manner that you have in the past twenty years . . .“

Instead of “running a business,” such arrangements produce Crony Capitalism, a mild form of fascism in which government bureaucrats and businessmen sleep in the same bed and do stuff together. As SCDC President, Knutson succeeded his sandbox-buddy Jeff McKeown. And McKeown, as Coos Bay mayor, used a million or so of Urban Renewal money to build SCDC its own palatial office, smack in the middle of downtown.
But the plot thickens further. County Commissioner John Sweet, who will be deciding SCDC’s financial fate, spent his entire career with Sause a few feet away from Knutson, and has been on SCDC’s board ever since 2001, when he was appointed Board Chairman. He really should recuse himself. And that is nowhere the full extent of the bureaucratic inbreeding that runs rampant in the ecodevo world.

The Germans call it KOTZEN

First to address the County Commissioners was David Koch, by my count the seventh overpaid Manager of the Port of Coos Bay since that body started pretending it could “create jobs”, back in 1974. Koch’s name, which means “Cook” in German, is normally pronounced KOGH, with the kind of sharp G you find in “Baja.” But for some odd reason he insists that it be pronounced KOTZ, which strikes German speakers as funny since it means BARF in that language. On the other hand, that would be an apt description of the arguments K & K presented to the Commissioners.
But first we should address one most peculiar aspect of those arguments. Not long before their joint appearance Koch’s own organization, the Port of Coos Bay, had refused to give any more money to SCDC, something it had been doing since the outfit’s founding.
This poses a reasonable question: why would Koch, after turning down SCDC himself, now be asking the County Commissioners for money to keep SCDC alive? And why would its survival be so important to him, when SCDC is merely one of some twenty existing ecodevo agencies whose combined activities have worsened instead of improved this area’s economy?
To understand this puzzle is to understand the official mind.
Even if the Port bureaucracy closed its own wallet to SCDC, that didn’t mean it wanted to see it vanish. Self-preservation is a priority for every government agency, but it’s at the very top of the list for agencies with lofty, unachievable goals, like those in the ecodevo business. It already is a fact of government life that officials devote much of their time inventing reasons why their jobs are vital to the continuation of life on earth, if not the entire universe. They write these reasons down and memorize them, ready to rise up and wax indignant at people who question their effectiveness, or to unload on some intrepid but poorly documented layman who calls into question their department’s very usefulness. So, if an agency like the Port is short of funds and must choose whether to continue giving them away or laying off its own bureaucrats, self-preservation provides the answer. It will keep the money for itself.
But while making a “hard” financial decision, the Port saved a consolation prize for SCDC, in pushing for funding from a different source. And once again, the reason for doing so was self-preservation, expressed as bureaucratic solidarity. In the official mind, government should grow but never shrink. Once people start realizing they can do without one ecodevo agency, where will it stop? Will the fiscal hatchet drop next on the Enterprise Zone, on Urban Renewal, on the Business Incubator, on the CCD-EDC, on WorkSource Oregon, Business Oregon, South Coast Employment Corporation, the City of Coos Bay’s Economic Revitalization Director, or on any other of the twenty-odd ecodevo agencies including – aaargh! – the Port of Coos Bay and its expensive pretend-achievers? STOP! The barbarians are at the gates!

Hey Man, Where Is My Focus?

K & K were unanimous in telling the County Commissioners that SCDC needed their $75,000 because the agency had “lost its focus” and must be “re-focused.” So, what was this “focus” that must be retrieved? From all appearances it seems to consist of K & K’s discovery that Coos County had received some money from the State of Oregon that had been earmarked for “economic development.” Therefore, K & K thought SCDC should get most of it “to help us step back in and reposition and refocus and re-energize that organization to serve the needs that our region has for an entity that can bring it all together.”
Huh?
What was it that SCDC would “bring together”, in exchange for a mere $75,000? Why, it turns out that in the minds of K & K, the Final Solution to Coos Bay’s economic development problem is some sort of Total Ecodevo War, with all the other twenty agencies coordinated by a re-focused SCDC, no small job for an organization that in thirteen years has managed nothing yet. But Koch complained:

“. . . no one entity here can do it alone – the Port can’t do it alone, the cities can’t do it alone – the County can’t do it alone. Ah, and even entities like, um, CCD and the college and the Chambers can’t do it alone. We all have individual pieces to play but a regional organization like SCDC helps us to bring it all together. Our focus for that organization, um, to get things back on track, is going to be on business retention and expansion, not going out and trying to, to bring in that, you know, that that that big heavy hitter and multi-million, you know, dollar investment but to focus on the industries that we do have here, the businesses we do have, help them figure out what they need in order to stay here and expand their operations here, hire more employees, whether it’s access to financial markets, whether it’s creative financing or funding, whether it’s workforce development and training, ah, or marketing in order to extend our market reach outside the traditional markets they serve. Those are the types of things that, that a refocused SCDC is going to be looking at over the next couple of years and it’s ah – I believe that the focus of the application that you’ll be seeing before you, that you’ll be reviewing and would hope that we can count on the County being another partner with us as we get that organization back on track.”

Maybe I am too dumb to grasp the finer points of ecodevo as expressed by K & K, but it all sounds like gibberish to me, and vague gibberish at that. What I do know is this: in less than 2 ½ minutes Koch used the word focus 7 times. If that isn’t an admission of SCDC’s failure, I don’t know what is. And his argument is: we need to refocus SCDC, because it has failed, so we need to get it focused back on track (a track it never ran on), and for that we need the County’s money. QUESTION: How do we know that money won’t be wasted as well? As Einstein observed, doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results amounts to insanity.
Incidentally, the idea that SCDC is essential to “bring it all together” is not very original. On January 15, 1998 already, SCDC’s predecessor FONSI said the overlooked secret to successful ecodevo was to “get all the agencies working together.” But on that occasion, FONSI was going to do it.
Koch’s other argument is that the present ecodevo outfits can’t do it all, so we need more of them. This too validates Einstein’s observation. It also supports a skeptical Canadian’s remark that a common plan for achieving economic growth in this country seems to be “. . . to employ people as economic developers.”
And finally Koch spouted a bunch of drivel about funding and workforce training and new markets for smaller businesses. These people talk as if no businessman is capable of finding financing or personnel or buyers for his product; they need to turn to the all-wise gurus at SCDC, the ones who have never proved capable of achieving anything in the first place.
John Knutson shed no more light on why SCDC needs to be resuscitated:

“ . . . the economic development that we all need to help support and continue. SCDC can be instrumental in that regard. We, as David indicated, are um basically reinventing ourselves. We are – we’re in the process of hiring an interim director who will then help us ah, find a full time permanent director. Our focus has changed. The need is still there. The county, ah, the cities, as David indicated, the municipalities such as the port and the airport district aren’t in a position to have full-time economic development people in the field promoting Coos Bay and the south coast region.

A Fruitful Fount of Nepotism

Back in January 2001 Jeff McKeown, then-Chairman of SCDC, announced the hiring of SCDC’s first executive director as a great victory. Since only a small clique of the Board had made that decision it was disputed, but ratified afterwards. That dog is still up to his old tricks. Two years after her appointment, SCDC’s first director resigned “to pursue some other career avenues,” according to then-SCDC Chairman Ron Opitz. Opitz said they would be advertising for a new director, but then he somehow was appointed to the post. By 2004, however, the eagerness of contributors to give SCDC money seemed to be waning. Coos Bay mayor Jeff McKeown gave the outfit some extra help by giving them $25,000 of Urban Renewal money to help “develop” some property at the south end of town, bordering Coalbank Slough, which never went anywhere; and of course he built them their palatial downtown office with UR money as well. Then in February of 2009 Ron Opitz died; whether that was also “to pursue some other career avenues” depends on one’s religious outlook. And so we ended up with Sandra Messerle who – just coincidentally – was married to Fred Messerle, a recent County Commissioner. You wonder if Sandra would still be here if Fred had not lost the election.
But while Sandra Messerle was here she received a lot of breathless praise for her efforts in bringing in the so-called “Dream Team,” a group of experts sponsored by the American institute of Architects. This Dream Team studied our area in order to recommend what to do about its economy, although some of the things they reported did not reflect diligence. For instance, their report stated near-despairingly that from Coos Bay, “the drive to Eugene will always take about four hours,” no matter how much highway 38 was improved. It also talked about “US Highway 101 which passes through Coos County, connecting the area to Tacoma (WA) to the north.” I’d never thought of that, but maybe that’s how they drove to Eugene. In any case, while the Dream Team did make some valid observations about the visual deterioration of Coos Bay and its waterfront, their recommendations made it plain that they had arrived with a pre-determined agenda which called for all kinds of new government “planning.” But Coos Bay has not suffered from a lack of planning. On the contrary, we have had far too much of it, starting with the destruction of downtown by means of Urban Renewal, and all through the hundreds of millions more spent for plans to attract new industries that never came.
In any case, after the Dream Team’s report landed in our local planners’ mailboxes, it sat there, and SCDC sadly “lost its focus.”
The only one at the Commissioners’ meeting who had something sensible to say was a character by the name of Phil Thompson, who objected to a repeat of “. . . that South Coast Development Commission . . . pay the people at the top of the line thousands of dollars as we did just recently and we don’t get nuthin’ out of it — you might as well give me the money and buy me a fishing boat or somethin’ . . . They’re just sucking the blood out of us. It’s our taxpayer dollars that they’re asking for. I really don’t see any benefit . . . of reenacting the South Coast Development.”
Amen to that.

Many of Wim de Vriend’s contributions on this website are based on his recently published book “The JOB Messiahs – how government destroys our prosperity and our freedoms to ‘create jobs’. A hefty tome, The JOB Messiahs is written in an easy, entertaining style and contains hundreds of historical pictures, many by the author himself. To help the amateur historian, it is documented by thousands of footnotes and contains an extensive index.
JOB Messiahs, Wim explains, are people like those working for the Port of Coos Bay, Fonsi, SCDC and Coos Bay’s many other economic development agencies who pretend to be our economic saviors. JOB Messiahs pretend to create jobs for us, but the only ones they create are their own. The book’s conclusion is that government “job-creation” schemes don’t work, and all they have done is turn Coos Bay into the most economically backward part of Oregon.
Although twenty years of work went into The JOB Messiahs, its price is a mere $35. It is available for sale at the office of The Sentinel in Coquille, at Farr’s Hardware in Coos Bay, at the Blue Heron restaurant in Coos Bay, and at Books-by-the-Bay in North Bend.