The preference, actually, would be to give Tesoro Corp. and Savage Cos. the benefit of the doubt. To chalk up the incident to an innocent oversight. To understand that mistakes happen and to move on from there.
If only it were so simple. Unfortunately, the latest controversy over a mailing from Tesoro and Savage — operating jointly as Vancouver Energy — continues a pattern of misleading information from the companies in promotion of a proposed oil terminal at the Port of Vancouver. And this persistent subterfuge casts doubt upon the companies.
Tesoro and Savage have entered an agreement with port officials to build and operate the largest rail-to-marine oil terminal in the United States; the proposal is undergoing review by the state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, and eventually will go to the governor for a final decision. For two years now, the prospect of the oil terminal has led to a tug-of-war of assertions between opponents and supporters of the project.
Certainly, there has been conflicting information from both sides of the argument, but the obfuscation is particularly glaring on the part of Tesoro and Savage. The latest issue involves a mailer that says extraction and use of crude oil from the Bakken region produces lower amounts of greenhouse gas than other petroleum sources — and the assertion might or might not been attributed to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Oil to the Vancouver terminal would come from the Bakken region.
Tesoro and Savage officials say they attributed that information to the California Air Resources Board. Either way, the mailer was poorly written and poorly designed, resulting in inevitable confusion. In a letter calling for the companies to publicly correct the information, the Carnegie Endowment’s Deborah Gordon wrote, “Residents who received your mailing have contacted Carnegie. They are confused and deserve to officially have the record set straight as well as removing any reference in future publications.” To top it off, the California Air Resources Board then publicly complained about the mailer, saying the information did not come from it, either.
In truth, the contents of a mailer sent to the public will not influence the state agency considering the merits of the oil terminal. But it further calls into question the trustworthiness of companies that wish to bring more than 15 million gallons each day through the Columbia River Gorge, through heavily populated cities such as Washougal and Camas, and into the heart of Vancouver. A pattern of deception, whether willful or accidental, has marked the efforts of Tesoro and Savage to sway public opinion in favor of the terminal:
• An earlier mailer told residents that annual projected tax revenue from the terminal would be $2 billion — when the actual number is $7.8 million. Oops. Missed that one by just 25,000 percent.
• When the project was first announced, a Savage official said it would provide 110 full-time jobs at its peak. Now the companies are projecting 176 on-site jobs and 440 direct off-site jobs, and they have on at least one occasion boasted that the project would “generate more than 1,000 jobs.”
• Proponents have said that they will be worthy community partners, but in 2013 Tesoro paid $1.1 million in civil penalties for violations of the Clean Air Act at several refineries.
• And now a mailer has been called deceptive by two organizations that were cited in it.
Given that history of stratagems, it is impossible to give Tesoro and Savage the benefit of the doubt.
