Skip to main content
In Coos Bay, everybody knows Arnie Roblan. That’s because Roblan, 77, a onetime co-speaker of the Oregon House, worked at the town’s Marshfield High School for 32 years, as a math teacher, dean and principal.
Since then, the former state lawmaker has served on numerous local boards and commissions, including, currently, the Coos Bay School Board and the port commission.
Roblan left the Oregon Legislature in 2021 after 16 years, but he still commands enormous respect in Salem.
When backers of the Pacific Coast Intermodal Port at Coos Bay sought $100 million for dredging from the Legislature this year, they had to convince one of the Capitol’s longest-serving and most fiscally conservative lawmakers: state Sen. Fred Girod (R-Stayton), co-chair of the Joint Ways and Means Capital Construction Subcommittee.
Enter Roblan. “Arnie is a good friend and somebody I trust,” Girod says. The committee OK’d the money, contingent on $1 billion in federal matching funds.
Accompanying Roblan to his meeting with Girod was a smiley former student of his, ex-state Rep. Brian Clem (D-Salem). They are an odd couple: Roblan, unassuming and avuncular; Clem, 53, a brash dealmaker.
Clem went to work for then-U.S. Rep. Ron Wyden in 1995 after graduating from Oregon State University, where Clem was student body president. Clem later entered the Legislature in 2007. Two years later, he decided to explore a run for governor.
Clem’s mother-in-law, a Parkdale orchardist, loaned his campaign $500,000. That got him noticed. When former Gov. John Kitzhaber entered the race, Clem withdrew.
In the Capitol, Clem specialized in real estate deals, such as brokering a solution to development pressure on the Metolius River. Real estate also reportedly made him wealthy.
In 2015, Clem and another Oregon man bought a defunct Iowa college. Initially, the purchase looked dicey, he later told The Oregonian. But eventually, an Asian investor bought the college property. Clem told friends he made a fortune.
In 2022, Clem got the opportunity to invest alongside NorthPoint Development in Coos Bay. He would later extol the idea of a container port to his old boss, Wyden. (Clem declined interview requests.)
The project quickly gained powerful sponsors, including former U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, and his successor, Rep. Val Hoyle, whose district includes Coos Bay. In December 2023, President Joe Biden dispatched White House infrastructure czar (and former New Orleans mayor) Mitch Landrieu to Coos Bay, where he toured the port with Wyden and Hoyle.
“The Biden administration strongly supported this project to improve supply chain issues for the U.S. economy and to generate thousands of rural jobs,” Wyden says. Supporters are optimistic the Trump administration also sees value in their project.
Perhaps more than anybody, Roblan hopes the project will happen. “I want to leave this place [Coos Bay] better than I found it,” he says.
Roblan is aware some critics say the container port makes no sense. But he points to Prince Rupert, B.C., which had just as many naysayers 20 years ago and is now a thriving megaport.
“There was nothing up there,” he says. “People thought it was crazy.” But the Canadian government wanted another port for strategic reasons. He is optimistic the Trump administration does, too. “If the feds want this to happen,” Roblan says, “we can get there.”
