Anti-consolidation activist Dale Bishop owns Skatewave in North Bend and has put up this reminder to residents about how the ballots fared in the past on the issue of combining the two cities. The last line is his prediction of the outcome for the May 18 election. World Photo by Lou Sennick

Twenty-six hours before the Bay Area Chamber's Wednesday debate on consolidating Coos Bay and North Bend, Shirley Liberante, the chamber's executive director and the event's organizer, still had only one team on the proverbial field.

Weeks earlier, four members of the pro-merger group Stronger, Together, Now! had agreed to appear at the luncheon forum, part of the chamber's weekly Independent Business Operators series. According to Liberante, in mid-March she wrote Johanna Dillard, chairwoman of the Pro North Bend Committee, a group leading opposition to unifying the cities, to ask whether the committee might send members to make the case for keeping the Bay Area's twin cities separate. The committee wrote back, declining to take part.

"We told them we would go ahead and do the forum," Liberante said Friday, "and that we really wanted their representation." Finally, on Tuesday, her phone rang at the chamber office.

"The day before, about 10 a.m., they called and said they had one person willing to talk," she said. One man against four seemed to have the makings of an unequal debate, but it would indeed be a debate, not a monologue.

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Within three minutes of beginning his speech at noon Wednesday, Dick Wagner had his work cut out for him.

"How many of you are for consolidation?" said Wagner, a volunteer for the Pro North Bend Committee, a group campaigning to defeat the planned unification of Coos Bay and North Bend in a May 18 referendum.

From the lectern, Wagner saw about three-fourths of the estimated 120 people, packed into a carpeted banquet room at The Mill Casino-Hotel in North Bend, raise their hands. He smiled slightly and adjusted his glasses.

"How many are against it?" he asked. Five hands went up. "How many of you are neutral?" A dozen more hands were raised.

It was hardly home territory for the North Bend resident: pro-consolidation audience members before him and a large projection screen behind him, bearing the logo of the pro-unification group Stronger, Together, Now!. Nevertheless, he went on the rhetorical attack.

"How many of you would make a multimillion-dollar deal without doing a case study?" When no audience members raised their hands, Wagner bellowed, "I rest my case; you've just joined the Pro North Bend Committee!"

The four consolidation supporters - John Whitty, a Coos Bay attorney; Bob Randall, a North Bend resident who manages Ikon Office Solutions; Brady Scott, chief executive of the Coquille Economic Development Corporation; and state Sen. Ken Messerle, R-Coos Bay - to speak in favor of Measure 6-102, which would dissolve the two city governments and create a single one with a new charter.

The mostly pro-merger audience was treated to an hour and a half of spicy, often clever rhetoric but little new ground from nearly two years of public debate: a set-piece verbal battle in which the pro-consolidation speakers predicting increased efficiency and more business investment under one government, while Wagner foresaw higher taxation and economic decline in North Bend.

Opening the debate, Wagner declared the case for combining North Bend and Coos Bay reckless and poorly researched, saying backers of Measure 6-102 have failed to produce evidence that other merged cities of similar size have thrived.

The economic consulting firm E.D. Hovee and Company compiled a report in 2002 comparing the cities' government costs with those of a unified city and existing ones of similar population, between 19,000 and 27,000 people. The Hovee report calculated North Bend's per-resident cost in 2001 of providing city services as $1,224, Coos Bay's as $796 and that of a consolidated city as $911 in its first year: lower than North Bend's and between the totals for Grants Pass and Roseburg.

Wagner discounted the report as incomplete.

"They've never given us the kind of information we demand when we make million-dollar decisions," Wagner said. "They should have been digging for studies across the nation of comparable communities that have merged.

"They have failed American democracy," he continued, his voice growing fiery, "because democracy depends on an educated and informed public. Are you getting information or are you getting slogans?"

Disputing the idea consolidation would lower the cost of city services, Wagner argued North Bend's government already is the more efficient and fiscally sound - he pointed at the city's Budget Committee, which last week passed a 2004-05 budget in two days - and envisioned North Bend residents facing future tax hikes to subsidize improvements benefiting Coos Bay.

Given his chance to respond, Scott, a North Bend native, declared the city remains financially vulnerable and pointed to its failed attempt two years ago to raise property taxes as a sign of its difficulty providing services.

"Is North Bend in that great fiscal shape?" he asked. "If you live in North Bend you can remember when the city asked for a $1.77 property tax increase (per $1,000 of assessed value) for a laundry list of needs.

"None of them have been addressed - and all of a sudden North Bend is fiscally sound? When your revenues are going up 31/2 percent a year and costs 41/2 percent a year, at some point you have to hit the wall."

Part of the expense of providing public services, Whitty said, is due to excessive and redundant staffing for a small population: two city managers, two police chiefs, two fire departments where one would do, and at lower cost.

"We have two ladder trucks designed to reach five- and six-story buildings," he said of the Bay Area's two sets of firefighting vehicles. "We have, what, five or six buildings of that size?"

Randall, who moved to the area in 2000, called consolidation the simple recognition that North Bend and Coos Bay already are a social and economic unity.

"I have customers from Coos Bay and North Bend; none of them care if my office is in Coos Bay or North Bend," he told the audience. "This operates as one community in many ways, yet we function with two governments. ... Duplication is wasteful and not in our best interest."

Among the endorsements for or against merging the cities, Randall continued, the most telling are those from trade groups and the Oregon Board of Realtors - the groups he called closest to the outsiders who must decide whether to settle in the Bay Area - and possibly bring investment and jobs.

"They are the people closest to the pulse of those people who are able to invest here," he said.

While the other speakers debated the costs of savings of a single city administration, Messerle talked instead of a consolidation's potential to make both cities more visible to investors - he recounted an Idaho businessman visiting North Bend asking innocently "Coos Bay, that's about 20 miles away?" - and seem a more worthwhile place for the state to provide services. He recalled his battles in 1999 to convince Oregon legislators to back the construction of a natural-gas pipeline, a project that began four years later.

Apart, Messerle said, North Bend and Coos Bay appeared to most outsiders far too small to be viable markets.

"What I ran into was (that) they saw us two little villages with a timber industry going down, with a fishing industry that was gone," he said, adding the Bay Area's falling population makes it ever harder for both cities to get a decent share of state grants and services. "Competition is what it's all about: from other counties, other states and the rest of the world."

While the pro-merger speakers emphasized the need to make the Bay Area more visible to outsiders, Wagner continued focusing on preserving North Bend's autonomy.

Representing both present-day cities with only seven councilors instead of 14, he said, would discourage political participation and with it fresh thinking, while the majority Coos Bay population could reshape any aspect of the city by vote, even the name specified by the proposed charter for a unified city: Coos Bay-North Bend.

"Nothing in the charter is protected from a majority vote at another election," he warned. "By a majority vote, the city could be named 'Coos Bay.'"

As the lengthy debate finally wound down, Scott closed his case by questioning whether North Bend can remain viable alone.

In the same subdued, unexcitable tone he used throughout the forum, he declared: "The evidence doesn't support the idea that 'we're fine and we don't need anything.'"