You might think Don Vollum would have made peace by now with the slow vanishing of Oregon-based corporations.
Then came the March announcement that the new owners of Tektronix would move the headquarters of Oregon’s legendary technology company from its Beaverton campus to Raleigh, N.C.
The idea that Tektronix, once the state’s largest employer, would leave Oregon is as daunting as the possibility that Nike, or Columbia Sportswear, would someday give up on its home.
That’s because the Portland-born founders of Tek, Howard Vollum (Don’s father) and Jack Murdock, were deeply rooted in Oregon when they created it in 1946, some 700 patents ago.
“Tek was in Portland because my dad and Jack Murdock were from here,” Don Vollum says. “It had nothing to do with economic development, lower taxes or a better work force. The same is true with Phil Knight [and Nike].”
Microsoft? “They were in Albuquerque, and [Bill Gates and Paul Allen] wanted to go home [to Seattle],” Vollum says. “Businesses begin in a place because they have a connection. The better question today is if and why they stay.
“That next generation of professional managers is when people look at education and taxes and workforce.”
And in Oregon, today’s view and tomorrow’s forecast are bleak.
“The combination of high taxes, poor services and poor schools isn’t a winning one, and that’s where we are,” Vollum says. “You put those pieces together and you have a place that’s not desirable for people if they’re starting or running a business.”
That’s not all you have.
You have Dutch Bros, the state’s second-most-valuable company, moving its corporate headquarters from Grants Pass to Phoenix.
You have REI closing its Pearl District co-op, Adobe abandoning its Southwest 1st Avenue digs, and Keen Footwear shuttering its Swan Island factory.
You have a 35% office vacancy rate in Portland’s central city and its tallest ghost town, the U.S. Bancorp Tower, burning money.
You have door-maker Jeld-Wen—which founder Dick Wendt built into one of America’s largest privately held companies—moving its corporate headquarters from Klamath Falls to North Carolina after a change in ownership. (In May, Jeld-Wen announced it would dead-bolt its Chiloquin factory, adding another 128 people to the ranks of the unemployed in that Southern Oregon county.)
You have distant, detached ownership of several of Oregon’s largest companies: PacifiCorp, Precision Castparts, Teledyne FLIR, and The Standard.
You have Intel, currently Oregon’s biggest employer, on the ropes.
And you have Oregon ranked fifth in the nation for total tax burden. As ECOnorthwest’s Michael Wilkerson told the Oregon Legislature in April, the ongoing migration of high-income households out of Multnomah County alone has produced, year after year, “over $1 billion in income loss.”
That’s the equivalent of a cool one thousand millionaires departing annually, leaving someone else to fund the Oregon Symphony and Preschool for All.
“Why does this matter? That part seems to be missing for the political class, just what this is costing us,” Vollum says. “You see it in philanthropy. We don’t have the next generation or donors for the arts and our cultural institutions.
“The older generations created a lot of wealth, and then gave a lot away, which supported all those institutions. There is not really a younger generation of wealth creators coming along behind them in Oregon, and some of the few who are promptly leave for other states, taking their charitable contributions with them.”
Vollum, the co-founder of Vista Ridge Capital Partners, is damn familiar with how philanthropy serves the region.
The estate of his father’s partner, Jack Murdock, launched the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, which has given more than $1.4 billion to Northwest nonprofits since 1975.
And Vollum, over the years, has chaired the boards at OMSI, the Portland State University Foundation and the Columbia River Maritime Museum, and served as president of the Providence St. Vincent Foundation.
When you live in a city, be that Hermiston or Coos Bay, you are much more likely to invest your time, energy and discretionary income in the upkeep of the neighborhood. Oregon has struggled to attract major sports franchises over the years, but Portland landed an Indy car race in 1984 because Norm Daniels, the CEO at G.I. Joe’s, and Bob Ames, the president at First Interstate Bank, believed their hometown deserved the upgrade.
When Daniels died in 2021, his wife, Rickie, illuminated that connection. “He loved to work. He just loved the company,” she told The Oregonian. “It was his baby because he grew up there. That’s where he wanted to spend his time. But he also cared deeply about what the company could do to service the community.”
It’s one helluva lot harder to care about Oregon’s universities, museums, foundations or communities when company owners are parked in Texas, Omaha or Florida.
Carrie Hoops is executive director of the Miller Foundation, which provided $12 million in arts and education grants in 2024. Recipients included the Painted Sky Center for the Arts in John Day and the Britt Music & Arts Festival in Medford.
As Hoops notes, corporations accounted for just under 7% of charitable giving in the United States in 2023. But, she adds, there’s an “economic ripple effect” when a corporation moves on:
“Many employers encourage their employees to volunteer. When a corporation leaves, it can lead to job losses, which then affects individual donations. People are laid off, and those people don’t have the money to contribute to their favorite charities.”
The slow vanishing of Oregon-based companies may be picking up speed. A January 2025 report by the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research & Engagement found that Oregon businesses are routinely recruited to expand outside the state, leading to a loss of “thousands of potential jobs and billions of potential private investments in the past five years.”
That two-thirds of those recruited businesses have reported “moving or expanding outside Oregon” isn’t surprising.
How much faith can one retain in the local workforce when Oregon’s fourth and eighth grade test scores for reading and writing are among the nation’s worst?
Ponder that for a moment. Even as spending per pupil has soared, Oregon’s test scores have bottomed out. The state is dead last in fourth grade reading and math scores and—thank heaven for West Virginia—the numbers are almost as discouraging at the eighth grade level. Those scores are terrifying forecasts of economic growth and stability.
How does one recruit talented tech workers to Portland’s central city, where they will be forced to pay the highest income tax rates outside the island of Manhattan?
And how long will entrepreneurs continue to believe Oregon is fertile ground on which to build or keep their companies?
“We have so many regulations [that] it is very difficult to do business here,” Jordan Pape, the president and CEO of The Papé Group, based in Eugene, wrote in an email. “[We] need a public policy agenda that wants to lure, rather than lose, business investment.”
Our cultural institutions may not otherwise survive.
Is that panic in the wings?
“Panic? Panic is the wrong word,” Vollum says. “We’re long past the panic stage. We’re in the stages of grief.”
Denial? Anger? Bargaining? Depression?
“I’m more in the acceptance stage. I think all this is fixable…but, ultimately, it seems voters want what they have.”
Cratering test scores. Self-defeating tax policies. Empty office towers. And the lingering exhaust fumes from the Oregon companies that are moving on.
Oregon Journalism Project
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom for the state of Oregon. OJP seeks to inform, engage and empower Oregonians with investigative and watchdog reporting that makes a significant impact at the state and local levels. Its stories appear in partner newspapers across the state. Learn more at oregonjournalismproject.org.
I am an Orgonian! I am also leaving this state post its destruction by the new Liberals in charge, as have the majority of my friends.
Seriously… Blaming the liberals again… So boring. The American consumption based capitalist system is broken and outdated. Perhaps one’s energy should be focused there instead of trying to duck responsibility and play the blame game.
Do you have anything positive or constructive to say?
Yeah your kind have no leaders its a progressive free for all,you give drug addition a monument, make misfits martyrs your progress is creative ways to empty the treasury,
Please that a ridiculous argument. You are leaving because it’s too expensive and you can’t afford it
Let them eat cake!
It’d be nice if we as voters and not company owners or CEOs could see a breakdown of which policies and regulations make operating a business in Oregon problematic. Bemoaning taxation in and of itself isn’t sufficient. The taxes on corporations are high in Oregon? Is that true, or are they just too low in other states? Oregon companies are outsourcing to other states to increase profits. To what end? More money for shareholders? Then the solution is to increase corporate taxes in other states, not to decrease them in Oregon. And taxation aside, what regulations are problematic? Environmental regulations? Having to do with air or water pollution? Regulations on minimum wage? What are you talking about here? More detail is needed on the specifics. As for standardized test scores, that is only a little concerning, with such a small margin of differences in scores between states, and of course the conservative states place more value in standardized testing and thus it is not surprising to see their scores are higher when they are trained not in critical thinking but in passing a test. I grew up in TX and remember too well the tests that were crammed down our throats at the expense of intellectual curiosity and creative thinking and problem solving. Compare the general aptitude of your average Oregon adult to someone on TX if you want a real gauge on the value of public education. I don’t have data on that but I’d be surprised if Oregon didn’t win in 10 out of 10 metrics.
Tektronix is not moving its headquarters to NC. The parent company of Tektronix, Fortive, is headquartered in Everett, WA. Fortive is splitting off some of its companies into a new organization called Ralliant, which will be headquartered in Raleigh, NC. Tektronix will remain in Beaverton, OR.
The values and the ethics of local and regional leadership are simply not honest. You would reward the lazy and punish the industrious. You would heap praise on “The Gallant Gallstone” of Ayn Rand when there is nothing there worthy of praise. You deserve your fate.
Very interesting article.
Mr. Vollum was quoted as saying that he believes “all this is fixable”. As Mr. Keith suggested in his comment, it would be helpful to know what changes Mr. Vollum and other bussiness leaders think would fix the current unfavorable business environment. Perhaps a follow up article exploring this would be possible?
When I was a boy growing up in Forest Grove and Hillsboro in the fifties and sixties, we didn’t have much money. As kids, our summers were spent riding our bicycles and swimming at the public pools and working for farmers picking berries and beans. At that time, during the heyday of Tektronix, and during the days when Republicans like Tom McCall were in the majority in Salem, I recall that Oregon had among the highest rated schools in the nation.
Now that Oregonians have become far more wealthy, we have lost our ability to pass on basic educational skills to our kids.
And no amount of self congratulation regarding our progressiveness is going to bring back all of the wonderful restaurants or entertainment that Portland has lost in the past twenty years. Portland had been recognized by the New York Times as having the best food in the nation. But we went down the diversity highway, and many of the eateries the Times praised are now gone. As a best case, it will take a generation to get restaurants of similar stature back.
Portland may have increased diversity during the last couple of decades, but lost a lot of good stuff in the process.
Very simply, people should not be able to vote for taxes they don’t pay. You got people who don’t own land voting for property taxes and people who don’t work voting for income taxes. Equilism is everyone paying the same tax and getting the same benefit. Property taxes should be per house and business not based on value, and one vote per unit paid. Income taxes should be a flat percent everyone pays with no deductions, and there should be a minimum amount you have to pay or go to jail, supporting the government is just like child support, pay your share or go to jail. Your equal share of the $6.75 TRILLION FEDERAL SPENDING IS $22,000.
60% of Americans collect more in direct payments from the government than they pay. They pay 0% of their fair share but claim the rich don’t pay their fair share.
The top 10% of Americans pay $500,000 a year in federal taxes on average. We lose jobs to overseas factories not because labor is less but because taxes are less and profits can be sheltered and untaxed in shell companies in Dubai.
You CAN NOT BE :
PRO-UNION
PRO-LIVING WAGE
PRO-HIGHER MINIMUM WAGE
PRO-SAFE WORKING CONDITIONS
PRO-CLEAN ENVIRONMENTAL RULES FOR INDUSTRIES
PRO-AMERICAN
And be ANTI-TARIFF at the same time.
-Jeffreyjames Halvorson -former Oregon resident
Oregon’s karma ran over its dogma many years ago, but no one admits it. Every election cycle we just “atta-boy” our dying dogma because we don’t know what else to do.
Just an expansion of the cancer that is liberal communism! It only works, if there is a dollar to steal! When it can’t take any more dollars from there unless continuance. It collapses !!
Mr Vollum puts this squarely in the laps of the voter saying, “ “I’m more in the acceptance stage. I think all this is fixable…but, ultimately, it seems voters want what they have.” Well, sir, I am not at all happy with our schools, their test scores, or Oregon infrastructure, to name a few problems. But I certainly didn’t vote against any of these things. It appears to me what we are lacking is leadership and you are one of those leaders. Oregon still has a lot of tax dollars but they seem more worried about charging tolls than fixing our schools. Sometimes it’s not about the money. If it’s fixable then educate the voters on how you plan to do that. Make a workable plan and sell it to the voters. I’m tired of the tax burden on people in Multnomah County myself. How do we fix it and lower taxes? Good luck with that.
This sounds like wealthy people complaining about paying taxes when it is already proportionally regressive to the working class. I agree that we should be looking at the ROI of dollars spent on education versus other states. One thing that stands out about Oregon not seeing a good return is how difficult it is to incentivize quality teachers. Other states, that get a better return, have cost of living adjustments regionally and offer housing stipends or subsidies for high cost areas. I think the certification path for teaching may be more strict in Oregon as well. Add all of that up and you’re only left with teachers who are willing to sacrifice their standard of living…who are goddamn heroes btw! If corporations were people, they’d be psychopaths. Sure, they are good for the local economy and provide jobs, blah blah, but they will jump ship the minute they see another place that they can get cheap labor (or taxes). If all that mattered was the GDP trajectory, then we may as well reinstate slavery. I mean, it’s good for the economy, right? I know this is hyperbole, and I am a conscious capitalist, so I don’t want to lose sight of the benefits of industry. But the trend over the last 20 years can hardly be characterized as these industrial leaders doing everything to build the community up by providing secure jobs for the workers. This is a lackluster analysis of the situation. Cry me a river.