The Port Westward Influence Map Runs Through Public And Private Hands

Start with the names the Port itself puts on the record

The Port of Columbia County board page names Nick Sorber, Chip Bubl, Nancy Ward, Robert Keyser, and Brian Fawcett as commissioners. The Port's 2024 strategic plan names Sean Clark as executive director and Amy Bynum as deputy executive director.

The same names recur in Port meeting minutes while the NEXT project moves through lease amendments, infrastructure planning, and permit-related updates.

NEXT keeps showing up in official Port minutes

The June 14, 2023 Port commission minutes list Natasha Parvey of NEXT among the guests while Sean P. Clark and Amy Bynum appear on the staff roll. The February 12, 2025 commission minutes again list Natasha Parvey with NXT Clean Fuels among the guests alongside the same Port leadership names.

The developer is repeatedly present in the public-facing Port record, over multiple years, while the Port continues to manage land, dock, and infrastructure decisions that matter to the project.

The Port is financially aligned with the project, not neutral to it

Port Resolution 2024-03 makes the financial alignment hard to miss. The Port said NEXT had already paid $3,522,452.73 through the site development agreement, ground lease, and rail safety study. The same resolution temporarily dropped NEXT's monthly rent from $108,497 to $15,000 while the federal EIS remained unfinished, with the deferred balance and 18 percent interest pushed down the road until a project approval decision.

Oregon's Regional Solutions packet also projected more than $5.5 million a year in Port fees if the refinery went forward.

The state coordination layer was explicit from the start

Oregon's official North Coast Regional Solutions work plan carried NEXT Renewable Fuels as an active project by October 2019 and again in the 2021 work plan. The packet does not describe passive observation. It says the state had been meeting with NEXT about permitting, transportation impacts, wetland mitigation, workforce development, and housing needs.

The same state matrix names Business Oregon as agency lead and Jennifer Purcell as team lead. It also lays out a partner map that included the Port of Columbia County, Columbia County, the City of Clatskanie, DLCD, ODOT, DEQ, DSL, the Oregon Department of Energy, the Army Corps, and private-sector NEXT itself.

The developer side is not anonymous either

NEXT's own management page names Christopher Efird as CEO and chair and Gene Cotten as president. The company says Cotten has spent years overseeing the technical design and execution work on the Port Westward project itself.

Then NEXT added a former Army Civil Works chief to its board

In July 2023, NEXT announced that Jo-Ellen Darcy had joined its board. The company highlighted her years as Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, which it described as the civilian head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The announcement belongs in the influence map because the Corps is still carrying the broadest yes-or-no decision lane for the project.

The network is named in the public record

The public names show how the project moves: commissioners, Port staff, state coordinators, recurring developer representatives, and former federal officials all appear in the visible record.

Once the names are on the page, board votes, calendars, contracts, and later disclosures become testable.