Tektronix: Diane's Former Client Leaves Oregon For North Carolina

Oregon Is Dying

Tektronix’s plant at Sunset Highway and Barnes Road, west of Portland, in 1954.

Economists are warning that Oregon’s biggest city, Portland, is headed towards what they call an “urban doom loop.” This happens when businesses close, people move out of a city, and in turn, tax revenue goes down, which causes a decrease in programs that spark economic activity, causing more businesses to keep closing. Although we escaped in 2020, we keep an eye on what is happening in Portland and her burbs. Every week we learn another long established business is closing. Americans have been escaping Democrat-run, Democrat-ruined jurisdictions for over six years now, but Portland seems to be spiraling into its cesspool quicker than most. Perhaps domestic terrorists, who own the streets at night, can take part of the “credit” for that.

LOSING TEKTRONIX

Tektronix and Oregon are almost synonymous. That’s because the Portland-born founders, Howard Vollum and Jack Murdock, were deeply rooted in Oregon when they created it in 1946, some 700 patents ago. When I was an insurance broker for Alexander & Alexander, Inc. in Portland, Tektronix was my biggest client. My staff and I handled their employee benefits, such as group life, group health and group disability insurance. That was 1978 to 1984, and Tektronix was already the pride of the Greater Portland Area.

Then came the March 2025 announcement that the new owners of Tektronix would move the headquarters of Oregon’s legendary technology company from its huge Beaverton campus, just west of Portland, to Raleigh, North Carolina. 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.

Dutch Bros, Oregon’s second-most-valuable company, is moving its corporate headquarters from Grants Pass to Phoenix, AZ. REI is closing its Pearl District co-op in downtown Portland, Adobe is abandoning its digs in downtown Portland, and Keen Footwear is shuttering its Swan Island factory.

There is a 35% office vacancy rate in Portland’s downtown and its tallest ghost town, the U.S. Bancorp Tower, which I watched being built from my corner office on the 7th floor of the “uptown” Black Box, 200 Market Street, is burning money.

Southern Oregon is also losing its biggest employer. Door-maker Jeld-Wen, which founder Dick Wendt built into one of America’s largest privately held companies, is 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 nearby Chiloquin factory, adding another 128 people to the ranks of Oregon’s unemployed.

There is now distant, detached ownership of several of Oregon’s largest, home-grown companies: PacifiCorp, Precision Castparts, Teledyne FLIR, and The Standard (insurance).

IS A MAJOR CHIP MAKER ABOUT TO LEAVE?

Chip maker, Intel, currently Oregon’s biggest employer, is on the ropes. After laying off 3,000 of their 20,000 Oregon employees in December, they just announced another layoff in July. They plan to lay off up to a fifth of its factory workers, an enormous cutback that will have a profound effect on one of the chipmaker’s core businesses.

Intel has two main semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Washington County, just west of Portland. These locations are part of Intel's largest and most comprehensive site for semiconductor research and manufacturing. Loss of these jobs will accelerate what economists call an “urban doom loop” which I reported on in my February article “Portland Is Dying.” It now appears the State of Oregon is dying.

OVER TAXED, OVER REGULATED, POOR QUALITY OF LIFE

“That next generation of professional managers is when people look at education and taxes and workforce,” according to Don Vollum, the co-founder’s son. 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.”

“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.”

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 (Portland) 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 “Preschool for All.”

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.

AS OREGON “EDUCATES” A SERF CLASS, WHO WILL FUND THE WELFARE STATE?

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?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 the numbers are almost as discouraging at the eighth grade level. Those scores are terrifying forecasts of economic growth and stability.

I find these test scores sad but rather amusing as I recall being in a room at Portland State University with about 10-12 arrogant professionals (Liberals all) when they were making fun of Mississippi’s “failing” education system. That was about a decade ago. Now, Mississippi has the highest reading and math scores while Oregon has the lowest. Obviously, throwing money at Oregon’s education system did not produce quality: Too much education money was funneled to Democrat donors (teachers unions, public employees unions, et al) and into Leftist indoctrination curricula.

Two years ago the Democrat governor, the Democrat legislature and the Oregon Department of Education decided that grading students was racist because black & brown students couldn’t keep up with white & Asian students, so they removed all standards. Everyone was allowed to pass every course. If a student sat in chairs in school buildings for 12 years, he received a high school diploma. No wonder employers are streaming out of Oregon.

2024 Demographically Adjusted NAEP Scores. These test scores are published by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and are widely considered the best representation of the relative effectiveness of state policies on K–12 education. (Urban Institute)

How does one recruit talented tech workers to Portland, where they will be forced to pay the highest income tax rates outside the island of Manhattan? How long will entrepreneurs continue to believe Oregon is fertile ground on which to build or keep their companies?

Cratering test scores. Self-defeating tax policies. Empty office towers. And the lingering exhaust fumes from the Oregon companies that are moving on.

Thank you to Steve Duin and the Oregon Journalism Project for providing most of the research for this article. And thank you to my subscriber, John, who alerted me to Duin’s article. We are both refugees from Portland suburbs.