Oregon’s corporate daily newspaper, The Oregonian’s May 7, 2017 coverage of the leading Community Rights campaign in the state this year – the Coos County Right to a Sustainable Energy Future Ordinance, coming up for a vote on May 16. The Oregonian has seen fit to focus on the corporate opposition to the ordinance, which has been fierce and well-funded, rather than educating its readers about the groundbreaking nature of rights-based electoral organizing here in Oregon. Visit the Coos Commons Protection Council’s campaign website for a non-corporate perspective. And here’s the Oregonian’s news story…
The Jordan Cove Energy Project has generated one of the most expensive and divisive ballot measure campaigns ever on the southern Oregon coast.
Backers of the proposed liquefied natural gas export terminal in Coos Bay have poured an unprecedented amount of money into an effort to torpedo a ballot measure that threatens the project. The $359,000 donated so far to the “no” campaign is the most ever for a ballot measure in the county – about $9 for each of its 41,613 registered voters.
The May 16 election will mark the latest chapter in a 12-year fight that has pitted neighbor against neighbor, jobs versus the environment, and property rights against property taxes in the south coast county and a broad swath of Southern Oregon.
The stakes are high for Jordan Cove and its parent company, Calgary-based Veresen Inc., which have donated all but $1,000 of the money gathered to fight the measure.
The ballot measure doesn’t mention the project specifically. But it takes direct aim at the export terminal and 231-mile feeder pipeline that the company has spent more than a decade and several hundred million dollars to launch – so far without success.
The project is designed to take natural gas from Canada and Colorado, pipe it onto the North Spit of Coos Bay, super-chill it into a liquid, and load it aboard tankers for shipment to customers in Asia. It’s expected to be at least a $7.5 billion construction project, with thousands of construction jobs and 150 permanent jobs at the terminal.
Federal regulators denied the company a license last year, but Veresen has since reapplied and hopes a fossil-fuel friendly Trump administration will greenlight the project. In the meantime, the company hopes to stave off any local efforts that get in the way.
“Our financial interest in this is to make sure that this unconstitutional measure does not see the light of day,” said Jordan Cove spokesman Michael Hinrichs. “It’s so broadly impactful, it would be bad for Coos County whether its Jordan Cove or something else.”
The “no” campaign’s war chest dwarfs the $12,000 that backers have cobbled together to promote the measure, which goes by the somewhat cumbersome title, The Coos County Right to [a] Sustainable Energy Future Ordinance.
Mary Geddry, a Coquille activist who is the chief petitioner, calls it a local bill of rights modeled on those that have been passed in other communities around the country on issues such as anti-GMO crop measures or fracking. MORE…