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Oregon Residents Riled Over Virtually Staff-free Data Centers Getting Tax-breaks
An anonymous reader writes: The population of Hillsboro, Oregon is becoming vocal about the state's enterprise zone program offering enormous tax concessions to companies setting up data centers in the region — even though the five-year deals on offer only require data center operators to employ one person. That's exactly as many people as one DC plant, Infomart Portland, employs full-time, yet it gets more tax relief than highly-staffed enterprise zone neighbor Solarworld. The current influx of data centers to Hillsboro have only generated seven jobs to date. More installations are coming, and all Hillsboro residents are seeing is space taken up that might have gone to businesses that give something of benefit to the community.
Finally people are waking up to the fact that the digital revolution doesn't necessarily create jobs, jobs, jobs.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I think this fails to take into account the indirect job creation that this operation permits. For instance, the building maintenance and construction had to be done by locals. Any time the A/C breaks down, it has to be repaired by locals. If a server fries, there has to be someone to build that machine and swap it out. There is a lot of consumption of infrastructure resources, like power and water, that also feeds into the economy. There are a lot of DC jobs that you can't see. Granted, they aren't the same number of people as a factory might employ, but there are a lot of unseen positions that these data centres create.
I'd be interested in seeing a poll of the number of people bitching about the lack of local jobs being created who also shop online.
I don't respond to AC's.
I live in Hillsboro and have no complaints, though I have hardware in one of those datacenters so I may be biased. I think these articles are failing to account for the jobs created indirectly. I know a few folks that work for companies that have hardware in one of these local datacenters, in addition to traditional sysadmin jobs their duties include being on-call for hardware failures and the like. A at least one of these companies is fairly large and chose to come to Hillsboro and hire techs here because of the space available.
Posting anon since I should know more about happenings in my local area, but I find it amusing, for some reason I can't put my finger on, that I live in Hillsboro and this is the first I've heard about this.
I've actually lost count how many megachurches have been built on farm land in Upper Marlboro, MD. I assume the land must be cheap, as we have The First Baptist Church of Glenarden, which was built just 1.2 miles from Riverdale Baptist Church. And it's not to be confused with the First Baptist Church Upper Marlboro, which is about 8 miles away as the crow flies.
All of these are non-profits, so there will likely never be any more tax revenue from them, and unless they also have a school (which Riverdale does), it sits nearly empty for most of the week.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If they want to put a rack in my flat in Beaverton this winter I would love the free heat
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
Reminds me of the data center shit that happened up in Quincy Washington, Sure, they created a few jobs, but it also made the land and homes so expensive that the locals couldn't afford to buy and live there any longer... Of course Washington got smart and killed a lot of the tax breaks MS, Yahoo, and others were enjoying at the time...
... these local governments are still of the mindset that "industrial/technology" means factories, which means jobs. But as we all know, everybody that builds a datacenter wants as little staff as possible. A datacenter full of staff is seldom a good thing. When I walk past our datacenter on my way to work, if I even see the lights on or more than one car in the parking lot, I clench up, because I know it isn't going to be a good day when I get to my office on the other side of the campus.
Looks like summer around here.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The Data Center of the future will employ only one man and one dog. The man is there only to feed and care for the dog. The dog is there to bite the man if he touches anything.
Sure. Give more taxpayer largesse to Solarworld.
Oregon's Solyndra, kids. Just wait.
are located in Hillsboro Or. Also located there is a major part of their design group and process science.
The tax breaks were given to Intel, But in an an attempt by the county and city gov. to not look biased, I presume they extended the breaks to all tech. Of course, The companies are eating the infrastructure for lunch.
It's a real bank:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I see what you did there... but no one has really made any convincing argument that the tax code should be scrapped. It got to 67,000 pages (if that's even a real statistic) for a reason. How many man-hours of work does that represent? It reminds me of young cowboy programmers who always want to chuck the whole thing and start over, actually believing they can single-handedly replace 1000s of man-years of work, because everyone who came before them was an idiot.
You could make the exact same argument about the entire legal system. How many pages is the criminal code? Way too many, right? Sure there were centuries of debate and millions of man hours put into it, but it's just too complicated. It'd be faster to just rewrite it from scratch in Java than to fix all the issues with it.
You don't need to use "man-years" and "man hours".
Instead, just use "hours" and "years". Context makes your meaning clear.
They're screwing up the game of bait and switch!
The reason why Illinois is so infested with unions is that the costs of moving the means of production are outrageously high so it's easier to just pay them off than it is to have massive capital investments sitting idle/collecting dust.
These incentives for baiting companies to make capital investments in a locality are a trap. Bring in the money, bring in the jobs(they're hiring contractors instead of salaries employees I'm sure), and eventually: it becomes a hub like "Silicon Valley" where the convenience of being located where it's cheap to commoditize employees in to interchangeable/fungible cogs which don't require investment in training.
They can get all of the benefits of a talent hub without the costs of San Francisco(and have cheap hydroelectric power at the same time). Electricity in Oregon is cheap, and the climate trends on the cooler side of the extremes because of all the rain.
Once the market is captive via inertia: now you raise taxes and bleed them.
Do you even Machiavelli?
Instead we must think of population control. this planet can't susta more than 2.7-3 billion Homo sapiens any way.
Sure it can.
It *does*, therefore it can. Proof by example.
Say it ain't so!
Why no mention of part time jobs?
I really wish these tax deals didn't exist. I'm on the opposite end of this problem, living in New York. Taxes are high, cost of living is high, but in my opinion quality of life is high too. Florida, North Carolina and Texas constantly go trolling for companies in high-tax states (NY, CT, MA, CA, etc.) and bribe them to move. Some of these bribes are crazy, as in, "We'll build you a headquarters, give you free utilities for 10 years, and you'll pay zero property taxes." The problem is states end up playing Prisoners' Dilemma with each other. New York does the same kind of incentives, but can't support the level of offers that no-tax states can...I think some regions of upstate NY are waiving local taxes for a certain number of years, but businesses want permanent gains. The worst thing is that the anti-tax folks whip the media up into a frenzy whenever one of these companies moves, trying to get more people onto the anti-tax side using this as an example.
The problem is that in Florida and Texas, states with no income tax, you get what you pay for in terms of services. In NY, outside of NYC, even the crappiest school districts are adequately funded and provide OK education. The state university system is good and still a bargain if you get into one of the better schools. Public services are decent in most places. In a state where you pay no income tax and $1000 a year in property taxes, you're not going to get the same level of services. I worked for one of those relocated companies, and went on a fact finding trip when they wanted to move me to Orlando. A real estate agent (who was actively trying to sell me on the idea) actually mentioned that if our kids are used to NY public schools, I would have to put them in private school to get them the equivalent. There goes all that cost savings from the cheap house and low taxes! Plus the weather sucks -- yeah, yeah, I'm weird, I like winter.
In this case, Oregon just hasn't figured out that data centers are not an employment source. Most run lights-out and employ one or two techs to swap out equipment and maintenance/security forces. Any images of 20-something developers in hip office spaces cranking out the latest phone apps are not applicable here -- they're still sitting somewhere else.
Their first hint should have been from the last time this happened in the 1980s and 1990s, and Hillsboro got built up from being a farm town in the middle of the last arable land west of Portland to one of the 5 largest cities in the state, now making it pretty much nonstop city from Forest Grove to Wood Village. Yet the gridlock is horrible because all the tax breaks that were given to build up the tech meant that there's nothing in terms of basic infrastructure to support it. Intel's campuses sit on two lane farm roads, with the exception of Hawthorne Farm (which has it's own MAX station), despite being, literally, in the middle of a city with more than 100,000 people and no mass transit to speak of (TriMet largely doesn't serve Washington County except for the MAX, and frequent service ends miles east of the economic incentive zone in Beaverton). God help you if your house catches fire or you have a heart attack at rush hour, nothing's getting through that traffic. But that's only the tip of the socioeconomic iceburg.
I was born and raised in Portland on Jessup and Garfield, just off of 99E, in the only part of town that has any racial diversity. I'm Cherokee, I'm bisexual, and I can't say I miss the low IT wages, unavailability of anything longer than a six month contract, employer abuse of H1B visas (we're looking at you, Intel, undermining a market with 20% U6 unemployment to basically hold wage slaves on the threat of deportation!), extremely high cost of living, and entrenched white-supremacist racism and homophobia. Or getting harassed by the Washington County Sheriff's Office, Hillsboro Police, Beaverton Police and the Portland Police Bureau on a twice-weekly basis for driving or waiting the bus while redskin (yet, good luck getting one of 'em to turn up any of the more than a dozen times my home was broken into or my vehicle stolen over the years; that only happened during a brief few months living in Salem, turns out Oregon State Police are the only professionals there). Or getting punched in the face by a total stranger for holding my boyfriend's hand on the MAX (Portland Police's answer? "Don't hold hands."). Worst yet, I didn't know this wasn't normal behavior for people until I just packed what I could into a duffelbag, spent the last of my money on a plane ticket, took the MAX one last time to Portland Airport and flew off into the sunrise, and discovered that Oregon, all of it, big cities included, is an unmitigated backwater yearning to be the hipster version of the Deep South.
You know your hometown has a problem when moving to an indian reservation in the midwest, sight unseen, a single bag of clothes, no savings, and no game plan, when the only thing you know that's waiting for you when you get there is a safe couch to surf, and even without taking advantage of any of the tribal benefits, it improves every aspect of your life personally and professionally, being the exact opposite of Oregon in every regard, with the sole exception of relatively minor things like sales tax rate (way lower prices and WAY higher wages more than offset this, though) and access to public transportation. I have my own car now (which hasn't been stolen yet, making 3 years and counting the longest I've ever owned a car), I have my own home now (which hasn't been broken into yet, equally record-setting), and I have job security and upward mobility (both of which are things you read about other people having if you're in Oregon).
Self sufficient income and personal safety are two things I deeply lacked in Oregon, and it's the three things I prize above everything else now (hey, you live the first 30 years of your life without those two things and the novelty won't wear off once you do). About the only way I'd ever go back there is if someone actually hired me with a high enough wage so that I don't have to deal with the locals unless I really want to, and make me well off enough inside a few months that I could go back home to Oklahoma and take the rest of the year off, or fatten
Furries make the internet go.
you are correct there, Not living there I have no idea how bad their tax code, if its anything like NYs its just as bad as federal and should also be scrapped
But since you do not know for sure, you might as well STFU and learn about it before trying to conjoin this issue with federal taxation issues (or more to the point, stop trying to shoehorn your pet-peeve issues into every single issue you come across unless you factually know the two are related.)