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.

Comments

And so it begins ...

[BarbaraHudson]

Finally people are waking up to the fact that the digital revolution doesn't necessarily create jobs, jobs, jobs.

Re:And so it begins ...

[Lunix Nutcase]

There are certianly hundreds, maybe thousands, of jobs in businesses that utilize the gear in that data center.

Which doesn't help the community unless those jobs are paying in tax revenue to Hillsboro to offset the tax breaks. You're clearly being intentionally dense if you don't understand the complaints.

Re:And so it begins ...

[Jack Griffin]

Did this same one person build the Data Centre? Lay the concrete, build the walls, install the Air-con, the electrical, the plumbing? I'm pretty sure there's more than 40 hours a week worth of work in constructing one of these things.

Re:And so it begins ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:indirect jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

The question isn't whether ANY economic benefit is brought to the community, but whether that benefit exceeds the ~750k per year of tax reduction given to the company mentioned in the article. Some people seem to think so, some not. Hard to tell who is right, but it deserves to be highlighted that communities simply paying corporations to establish isn't automatically a great deal.

Re:Free heat please

[Anonymous Coward]

A "flat" in Beaverton? You should really re-evaluate your vernacular... primarily because you live in Beaverton, Oregon where the only "flat" you're gonna find is of fruit or a pickup truck.

Re:indirect jobs

[rsilvergun]

Food delivery/shops -> with only 25 jobs and thousands of unemployed I can pay those 25 people subsistence wage. They won't be buying food from restaurants. They can barely feed themselves. Same goes for clothing and entertainment. As for cars, hah! They can walk. Meanwhile we're cutting funding to schools. And besides, once they have kids they're dead weight. I'll just fire 'em and hire more young single people from the local tent city.

See, once you start racing to the bottom there's no end in sight. And all the trickle down (voodoo) economics in the world won't save you.