Did Oregon get played?
A Portland company says it would have moved to Vancouver if it hadn’t received political support and tax breaks worth more than $5 million from the Oregon governor and the Portland City Council. However, economic development officials in Clark County said Thursday they never heard from Rentrak Corp. when it was considering relocating its headquarters.
Bart Phillips, president of the Columbia River Economic Development Council, said his agency had no direct contact with Rentrak. Alisa Pyszka, business development manager for the city of Vancouver, said she never met with the company, “and to my knowledge no one else in the city has met with them.” So, she said, “we also can say no incentives have been extended.”
David Chemerow, chief operating officer and chief financial officer for Rentrak, which makes software that tracks certain data for the entertainment industry, said that while Rentrak never got to the point of talking to local development officials in Clark County, the company did have “discussions and some lease negotiations with one property in Vancouver” — Columbia Tech Center — and was “very impressed by it.”
It was at that point, Chemerow said, that Rentrak “had further negotiations with our landlord and with our officials here in Oregon to see if it was feasible to stay here.”
Turns out, it was. The Portland City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to adjust the borders of a state enterprise zone to include Rentrak’s Northeast Portland headquarters, according to the Oregonian newspaper. That change enables the company to participate in state tax-credit programs that could cut the company’s state income and property tax bills by more than $5 million over five years.
Messy relationship
The situation illustrates the sometimes messy relationship between Vancouver and Portland: While the two cities share a region and depend on each other in important ways, they also occasionally get pitted against one another in a game of “Who wants me more?” In March, for example, Vestas Americas considered two Vancouver sites for a new headquarters before ultimately deciding in August to accept $2.25 million in government incentives to stay in Oregon.
In that case, Vancouver city officials had worked to attract Vestas, writing letters extolling the city’s and Washington’s attractions, including that Vancouver doesn’t have a local business and occupation tax and the state doesn’t have personal or corporate income taxes.
While Vancouver and Clark County officials never lobbied Rentrak to move, the threat of relocating to Vancouver prompted the Portland City Council to take action.
Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski also helped make the deal for Rentrak go through, according to the Oregonian. “Once you set up tax breaks, there is less revenue coming into the general fund, there’s no doubt about that,” Kulongoski told the newspaper. “But no one wants to be in a position of having let 230 jobs walk across the river. You want to know the hardest issue? You do this for Rentrak, what do you say to the next company?”
Rentrak company executives told Oregon officials that they could save between $4 million and $6 million a year by moving to Vancouver, according to the Oregonian, including savings from cheaper rent in Vancouver but mostly savings from lower state business taxes in Washington.
Chemerow told The Columbian Thursday that without support from Portland and Oregon officials, “I doubt that we would be staying here. I feel very strongly we would have been moving across the river.”
Chemerow called Vancouver’s Columbia Tech Center a “very attractive facility” that “would have been fantastic.” The center is a 412-acre mixed-use development of retail, office and residential buildings in east Vancouver. It’s also home to a satellite campus of Clark College and The Quarry, a 223-unit senior-living facility.
Officials at PacTrust, which manages Columbia Tech Center, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Chemerow said that although Rentrak never got to the point of talking to officials in Vancouver about what the city could offer, he had heard from other business people not to expect “huge” incentives.”
Nevertheless, Vancouver was attractive enough “to say let’s see how this develops,” Chemerow said.
‘Propaganda’
At least one Oregon lawmaker wasn’t happy with the deal the state and Portland gave to Rentrak. Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, noted that Forbes Magazine in October ranked Oregon as the sixth-best state in the U.S. in which to do business, according to the Oregonian. So the notion that Oregon is a bad place for business “is just business bologna, it’s propaganda,” he told The Oregonian. “We’re in the lowest 10 states in the country in business taxation.”
Forbes Magazine ranked Washington state No. 5. Utah was No. 1.
Phillips, the president of the Columbia River Economic Development Council — Clark County’s chief economic development agency — said one positive thing to remember is that Rentrak is still in the metro area. “It’s a win to keep them in the region,” Phillips said. He added that he can “almost guarantee” that a significant number of Rentrak’s workers are Clark County residents.
