Our 90-year-old company, Vancouver Granite Works, has worked hard to get business from the Portland area over the years and not charging sales tax is the one of the ways we get that business. Sales tax is always a question that comes up. We sell monuments and markers. These are the types of things that, when you add tax to them, people from Portland will not come here to do business with us.
Our sales from Oregon are about a third of our retail business. If we would lose business from Oregon, we would most likely have to let one of our employees go. This would be an employee who lives in Clark County and pays sales tax here and would be on our state’s unemployment and no longer getting health insurance.
Where then would be the added revenue?
Bruce Fuerstenberg
Vancouver
