Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon

Prologue to the Revised Edition

Prologue to the Revised Edition When I finished the research for the first edition of Hard Times in Paradise , the resource-dependent communities around the Coos Bay estuary were experiencing high unemployment, soaring poverty, the proliferation of social problems, and a sharp decline in the number of familywage jobs. Southwestern Oregon's economic decline, columnist Russell Sadler wrote in 1980, would "take decades to turn around." Dwindling timber inventories, a troubled ocean fishery, and the region's relative isolation from the more prosperous Interstate-5 corridor suggested a less-than-promising future. Sadler predicted that the south coast economy would be in for tough times until replanted private timber stands began reaching maturity sometime around 2010. As Coos County eases into the twenty-first century, the region's stark economic struggles bear witness to Sadler's now twenty-five year old prediction. While Oregon's overall economy boomed during the 1990s, Coos County's job growth has remained flat, a trend reflected in a stagnant population profile and persistent high unemployment.1 Born in 1938, Al Sandine lived in the thriving sawmill town of North Bend until 1952, when his family moved to Eureka, California. When Sandine returned to his childhood roots in the fall of 1998, he noticed striking changes along North Bend's once bustling Sherman Avenue: "stores that sold used goods, used books, antiques, surplus goods, and bric-a-brac. I counted ten. There were empty storefronts too. 'Sign up for paintball,' said a fading sign in one. They had tried almost everything , it seemed." When Sandine visited the local Oregon Employment Department office, an employee told him that the Coos Bay area had suffered"a grievous wound" and that the prospects for recovery in the immediate future were not promising. Raw statistics reveal many of the difficulties that have surfaced in North Bend, Coos Bay, Charleston, and the county's outlying communities in the last quarter centurymore than four thousand jobs lost, acute drug and alcohol abuse, and sharp increases in domestic violence. Most job growth has taken place in the low-wage service sector, much of it in the tourism industry and in senior-care facilities. For the last few years the Bay Area Hospital has been Coos County's largest employer.2 The North Bend/Coos Bay waterfront today has a very different look from its thoroughly industrialized appearance when I first began ix x PROLOGUE TO THE REVISED EDITION making extensive visits to the area in 1983. The huge Weyerhaeuser complex, which opened the year before the Sandine family departed for California, closed its North Bend sawmill in 1989, putting two hundred people out of work. At the same time, Weyerhaeuser was in the midst of selling the southernmost parcel of its North Bend waterfront property to the Coquille Indian Tribe, which had regained federally recognized tribal status in 1989 after a long, contentious, and difficult struggle . Although Coquille people had participated in the wage-workers' economy for more than a century, they were mostly invisible to the larger community when I spent several months in the area in the mid1980s . When the tribe opened The Mill Casino in 1995, the new venture offerednumerousemploymentopportunities for the area's hard-pressed economy. When the casino made the move from temporary quarters to its newly constructed buildings on the old Weyerhaeuser site in 1997, the tribal enterprise began to flourish, offering family-wage jobs with health benefits to full-time employees. As the Coos Bay area moved into the twenty-first century, The Mill Casino with its five hundred workers ranked as the county's second largest employer.3 When Oregon's economy fell into recession ahead of much of the nation in 2001, already hard-pressed southwestern Oregon led the state in pressuring social service agencies for assistance with heating costs, energy bills, and food requests. The Coos Bay World reported that citizens were readying themselves for a worsening "unemployment picture in a region that already is depressed by the departure of industrial behemoths such as Weyerhaeuser and International Paper and dwindling fisheries."4 A good argument can be made that the large forest-products firms that profited most from southwestern Oregon's timber bounty have also helped accelerate the area's rapid deindustrialization . In that sense, the Coos Bay communities enter the postindustrial twenty-first century largely bereft of the magnificent timber resources that had sustained the local economy for more than a century. With one exception, the area also is absent the...