A comment posted by County Assessor Steve Jansen on a local blog betrays the unimaginative, dogmatic, ideological and unscientific thinking that unfortunately infests those same people that hold sway over our elected leaders. Jansen accuses blog author Rob Taylor of deliberately misstating facts related to enterprise zones and specifically the Jordan Cove LNG fifteen year property tax exemption and in so doing reveals his own disconnect from empirical evidence and statistical fact.
You are correct in saying that the average citizen can’t get a tax break like this. That’s because the LTREZ program was carefully designed by the Oregon Legislature to create incentives to attract high-dollar industries to areas like SW Oregon. Individual citizens (unless they’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffett) have no possible way to make such an economic impact…
…It was the Legislature doing the right thing (for a change?) by creating a tool for areas like ours to use to be able to compete with cities like Portland/Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, other states, and other countries.
If you think we in Coos County can compete (without tools like LTREZ’s) on a level playing field with opponents like that, you are woefully uninformed.[Emphasis added]
Clearly Jansen doesn’t believe in the American Dream, instead he promotes the enslavement of the average taxpayer who should be genuflecting to the likes of Warren Buffet. There is no empirical evidence that enterprise zones and other so-called economic incentives payoff for the taxpayer or level the playing field, in fact quite the opposite is true, particularly in Coos County. Using terms like “compete” and “opponents” when referring to other cities is not only infantile but nothing more than an attempt to make a point with what amounts to a straw man argument. Somehow Coos County is expected to overcome its obvious geographical limitations by offering up tax exemptions so it can compete in the industrial Olympics. 
The scary thing here is that Jansen is on the BS Oregon steering committee and it wouldn’t be much of stretch to accept that this studious lack of critical thinking and adherence to old school dogma pervades that whole group. Unfortunately for Coos County we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them.
The county’s hearings officer, Andrew Stamp, recently read a statement regarding bias that I believe identifies a key problem that permeates this area. “Bias means having certain preconceived thoughts about an issue of policy, the facts, the law or the parties. To disqualify a decision maker from participating in the hearing, the bias must be an actual bias and not an apparent bias. A person has actual bias or prejudice when no fact can persuade that person to vote or rule another way.” Unfortunately for Coos County too many of our elected leaders fall into this category.
Steve Jansen is another official telling us that we need to abolish the URA, even if that wasn’t his intention. The URA only works if your one of the local property owners holding land on the spit. Why should they get to screw-over the rest of the county with a deal that only serves the few holding the special cards in a rigged game. We have been told that our county commissioners can abolish this special taxing district with a vote. If you ask them to think about this they will stick their fingers in their ears so fast you will think a siren went off behind them. So who do you think they work for?
County Ideology is very easy to see if you read the comments at the worldlink. They have a permanent pro LNG supporter that goes by the name of DHCollins. He is a very aggressive attack dog that comes with every story or letter concerning Jordan Cove. His attacks always center around making money and stuffing his pockets come hell and high water. He has a few tag alongs that help out, but mostly he fights the online battle for the SCDC and BScrowd. Its not surprising that they have a person doing what he does but it is surprising to see an editorial taking this persons absurd idea to use the LNG tank platforms as an evacuation location when the tsunami comes to town. Did Clark Waldworth slip in the back door down there at theworld and write their editorials?
Its not whether its 19 or 20 years that the average citizen gets upset about, its the fact that Jansen is working for BS Oregon, aka SCDC re-vomited, which is of course Veresen aka Jordan Cove and the good-ol-boy network of locals from the chamber of commerce. While he has been drawing a pay check on the tax payers dime, he has been working like a busy beaver advocating tax privatization, when he should be insisting that his employer,Coos County is not going to get screwed. Looks like he is just another lobbyist being paid by his victims. The cities of NB and CB are suffering the same ills. This area should be a case study on how to corrupt a remote community and all its elected officials.
Mr. Jansen was a supporter of SCCF, CEP, bayfront investment before he was neutral. Now he has shifted to the other side. Why Mr. Jansen don’t you stick to facts – verifiable facts? It serves no useful purpose to bring the Taylor family matters before the public. Perhaps Mr. Taylor should ask you about MAD booms, Canyonville, why a right seater 737 jockey should be considered the ultimate source regarding Jordan Cove and its ability to dodge the tax man. Neither are of interest to the struggling county taxpayer.
Thank you Wim and Mgx. Mr. Jansen admitted, in public, and on film, that he was only parroting the information handed to him by JORDAN COVE. That wasn’t hard to figure out even before he admitted the truth. One has to wonder whether he will, as so many before him, gain a lucrative job at The Port when he’s released from his cage? My humble opinion only, always. And forty years of history, thanks to Wims’ book. Just another little fish who wants to swim with the sharks, another who wants to “be somebody” later. And it continues as Coos County flounders. Shame on every one of these water carriers, for promoting the policies of the oil driven last gasps of Maraka.
Hmmm . . . Steve Jansen starts out claiming he’s “not trying to split hairs”, but then accuses Rob of “mis-stating an important fact” about the Jordan Cove EZ zone. This important fact is that it would last 20 years, not 19. Are we supposed to be impressed?
More important, he says: “It WASN’T the Port that asked the Legislature to draw up and pass the EZ bill. It wasn’t the cities of CB and NB. It wasn’t the Coos County Commissioners (at that time). It was the Legislature doing the right thing (for a change?) by creating a tool for areas like ours to use to be able to compete with cities like Portland/Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, other states, and other countries.”
Now that’s quite a mouthful of untruths. The Legislature did pass the EZ bill, as the only part of state government that could do this. (Mr. Jansen said they: “carefully designed” it; I will come to that part soon.) Anyway, the Legislature doesn’t operate in a vacuum, sitting around dreaming up bills to pass; they are constantly approached, if not besieged, by interest groups. At that time, 1986, when Coos Bay was selected as an EZ, much of the credit went to John Whitty, who also served as a Port Commissioner, and everybody cheered. In an apparent time warp, Steve Jansen is still cheering. But he doesn’t stop to wonder: What have EZs achieved? The answer is: NOTHING, and the reasons are plain. In 1986 Coos Bay was just one of ten areas of the state that were allowed to create an EZ, and more have been created since. By the next year, 1987, Oregon’s most prosperous region, the Willamette Valley, had a number of EZs, and even Portland had one. It seems that everybody could document “stagnation and pervasive poverty,” so Coos Bay had no advantage. Also in 1987, Oregon officials were claiming that the new EZ “tool” had already created 800 new jobs. The fine print of their report revealed that 90 percent of those jobs had been “created” by a Crown Zellerbach project in northeast Portland, and a metals plant in the Willamette valley.
These items speak for themselves, as are more generally known facts about the Coos Bay EZ’s alleged success stories. Those are that the Bandon Dunes development did not come here because of any EZ, but because of the presence of the dunes; even so, they got the EZ bennies when the Bandon EZ was expanded retroactively. The ORC plant, now unfortunately idle, did not come here because of the Coos Bay EZ, either, but because of the presence of chromite ore. And Jordan Cove – well, they are on the record acknowledging that the EZ played no part in their arrival, and it’s generally known they came only because nobody else wanted them.
Similarly, nationwide, no credible evidence exists that EZs actually work in boosting laggard parts of the country. So for Mr. Jansen to claim that Coos Bay’s EZ enables us to “compete with cities like Portland/Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Houston, other states, and other countries” shows he’s really drunk the Kool-Aid of the local JOB Messiahs. You know: the people who live in the dream world in which Coos Bay will, on some great glorious day, be a global industrial center and a World Port.