MGX---County Assessor has Real Disconnect on Community Enhancement Plan

7/20/2014

At the county ideology trumps reason

A person has actual bias or prejudice when no fact can persuade that person to vote or rule another way.

https://mgx.com/2014/07/15/county-ideology-trumps-reason/

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.
Jansen writes:
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.

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