Vanishing Act

By Steve Duin
June 13, 2025

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.