Nike vs. Beaverton

Oregon has a system of providing local services that is very different than what I'm used to. Back in Wisconsin, for example, every inch of Milwaukee County was incorporated before I was even born. Look at maps of other metro areas: Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis -- you don't see any unincorporated islands within those metro areas. And generally an area has to be annexed before there can be any urban or suburban development.

Not so in Oregon. There are some substantial areas in the Portland metro area that do not belong to the city or any suburb. Generally the county sheriff acts as a police department in these area, and fire protection is usually from a fire district. School district boundaries aren't related to city boundaries at all. Other local services, traffic management, for example, are often provided by the nearest incorporated jurisdiction.

Taxes are lower in these unincorporated areas because the property owners pay nothing to support the community. They only pay for services directly provided to them. They may indirectly benefit from many things the city does, but they don't pay for them. And if anyone asks them, the say they're in that city that they're really not in.

So Nike acts as if it's in Beaverton, even though it's not. Beaverton surrounds their campus. They get all the benefits of being in Beaverton, but they pay for none of them. And when Beaverton came up with a long-term plan to annex areas benefiting from Beaverton services, Nike went into full attack mode.

It's bad enough that they got the state legislature to pass a law that prohibits Beaverton from annexing them for numerous years. (It's amazing what some well placed bribe... er.. a... campaign contributions can buy you, and how cheaply some legislators can be bought-off.) Nike took legal action against Beaverton, and made a public records request for all documents pertaining to the annexation plans.

Well, Beaverton handed over the documents that they could find, but that wasn't good enough for Nike. They insisted that there had to be more. They got a court to order Beaverton to hand over any documents that had any words from a list of keywords they handed over.

So Beaverton complied. They handed over every document that had, for example, Murray Blvd. in it as they were ordered to. As you can imagine that included a ton of crap that Nike had no interest in. So off they went to court again. And the judge agreed with them! So now the city has a week to hand over just the relevant documents -- which is what they did in the first place, but apparently wasn't good enough. The judge is jerking the city around.

And who's going to pay for all of this? The taxpayers of Beaverton, of which Nike is not one.

So whenever you think you have a bad neighbor, just remember that at least they're paying property taxes. Nike wants all the benefits of being in Beaverton, but doesn't want to pay any taxes for those benefits. I find that deplorable.

That's how I see things.