Here's a tale of two companies. Each has been in the same family for three generations, surviving the recessions, growing in the boom times. Now they're doing well, expanding with the economy.

The owners of Albina Pipe Bending love living in Oregon and are happy to keep running their manufacturing business here. They're proud of their state-of-the-art plant in an industrial zone in Tualatin and the skilled union workers who have been with the company for decades. They have no plans to downsize, outsource or leave for cheaper, more business-friendly pastures out of state.

The owners of Albina Fuel also love living here. But they're moving their headquarters, and its 30 jobs, from Portland to Vancouver, Wash. They say it was too hard to work with the City of Portland to rezone and develop a five-acre tract in inner-Northeast Portland. Neighbors didn't want fuel trucks or high-density retail and condos on the land. "The business environment in Portland and Multnomah County is not what I think it should be," Albina Fuel's owner told The Oregonian this spring.

So who's right? Is this a good place or is it a lousy place to run a business?

I could line up facts to convince you either way. For instance, only nine states have fewer bureaucrats per resident than Oregon, and in only 11 states do taxpayers pay a smaller percentage of personal income in taxes. Yet, with no sales tax and property taxes capped, we have some of the highest income and capital gains taxes in the nation, which discourages investment and job creation. Oregon ranks in the bottom half of states for business costs overall, with comparatively low labor, energy and workers' comp costs. But we rank 12th for business taxes and user fees. We're a small business state, many will say (see page 25), and yet the Small Business Survival Committee ranked Oregon 42nd last year, which is pretty lousy.

And that's the message I heard last month as moderator of a panel at the Oregon Business and Economic Forum, titled "What is a Business-Friendly Environment?"

In the first hour, Kulongoski chief of staff Peter Bragdon, the Portland Development Commission's Marty Harris and Hood River Sen. Rick Metsger(D) told us that, while work still remains to be done, the business climate is definitely getting sunnier. Bragdon plugged the state's first inventory of certified shovel-ready industrial sites. He bragged about regulatory streamlining and turnover of government department heads, a first step, he says, to reining in the "spend it or lose it" attitude in state agencies. And new jobs, these officials said, are coming in to replace the old jobs leaving.

In the second hour, the audience -- mostly owners of small- and medium-sized businesses -- let loose a chorus of complaint, with many condemning what they called Oregon's draconian land-use policies, socialistic transportation and sustainability planning, unjust taxes on income and business growth and blood-sucking bureaucratic meddling in the private sector.

Clearly, the bureaucrats' report of progress had fallen on deaf ears. There was just no convincing this group -- short of wholly dismantling Oregon's tax and regulatory structure -- that government wants business to thrive here. And the attacks on government were equally ineffectual -- because Bragdon, Harris and Metsger had already left the room.

Business climate change is possible. It may already be happening. But it won't succeed if no one sticks around to talk.

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Copyright 2004 Oregon Business magazine