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Oregon Residents Riled Over Virtually Staff-free Data Centers Getting Tax-breaks

Posted by Soulskill on from the all-about-the-benjamins dept.

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.

11 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. And so it begins ... by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    1. Re:And so it begins ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I hear that it frees up people to do more creative things though. ;)

    2. Re:And so it begins ... by rogoshen1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      as a resident of Lane County OR, I'd say we have faaaaaaaaaaar too many under employed creative types.

    3. Re:And so it begins ... by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:And so it begins ... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

      the 67 THOUSAND page tax code needs to be scrapped and simplified.

      Except this is about Oregon state tax, and has nothing to do with the federal tax code.

    5. Re:And so it begins ... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As long as people are stupid enough to give megacorporations tax breaks for nothing in return ...

      It is really a prisoner's dilemma. The states would all be better off if there were no tax breaks. But if the other states defect, they win unless you defect too. So everybody loses, as it turns into a race to the bottom. The states would all be better off if they had a mutual agreement to stop the preferential subsidies.

  2. Re:indirect jobs by laurencetux · · Score: 5, Informative

    and i can counter with just about that many MORE indirect jobs that the place employing say 25 people would generate (added to your list).

    Food delivery folks
    Supplies delivery folks
    Clothing shops
    car dealers
    Entertainment venues
    Schools (wanna see if you can make a team of folks that DON"T have kids without doing something actionable??)
    Food shops

  3. 1 employee? Not the entire story. by tehSpork · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. It could be worse... by oneiros27 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  5. Re:indirect jobs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:indirect jobs by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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