[Editor: Starting this one with a caveat. I don’t write long pieces here very often anymore. And usually, it tends to be when something is stuck in my craw. And I feel the need to rant. But this one is more metered. I figured if Governor Tina Kotek’s Oregon Prosperity Council was going to take the time and energy to compose a 452 page report on what Oregon needs, I would give it the space it needed. And I’d read all 452 pages. So you didn’t have to. This is my take. It’s not perfect. But hopefully, it provides some insights into the document, some highlights, and some questions. I’m literally just posting this to serve as an artifact for future reference. Rather than some glowing insight.]
Recently, ahead of the deadline, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s Prosperity Council released a report on their findings after surveying the community and having a ton of listening sessions. The result…? A 452 page document.
You’re a startup founder. You don’t have the time to read War and Peace. I get it.
I mean, you should read War and Peace. It’s like a bucket list kinds of thing. And a significant mental undertaking. It’s a great piece of literature. And a must read for anyone who ever wants to write anything ever. Especially anything lengthy. But I digress…
Let’s get the cynical part out of the way first, because you’re already thinking it: isn’t a 452-page state report just political theater? A council, a deliverable, a nicely formatted PDF that gets handed to the Governor with a photo op and then ages quietly on a government website while precisely nothing changes?
Honestly…? Yeah. Maybe. Partly.
But maybe just maybe, it would reveal something more? I mean, when I began digging into the full document, I had these wild hopes of finding some new insight. Finding some innovative imaginative solution to ailing our collective woes. Or perhaps something that I didn’t even have the context to understand. Instead, what I found, was a document that says the quiet obvious part out loud without really revealing anything new or earth shattering.
The big ol’ tl;dr
That one sentence that founders and investors needed. It’s there. The state, in its own words, now recommends reconnecting Oregon’s QSBS exemption to the federal tax code.
Okay. So we’ve got that covered. What else is in there…?
tl;dr Here’s the whole thing in 10 seconds, and then you can decide where to dig in if you want:
- Validation: The report names entrepreneurship, startup formation, and business expansion as the growth engine Oregon should double down on
- Win: It now recommends reconnecting Oregon’s QSBS exemption to the federal tax code
- Reinvent: They recommend tearing down Business Oregon and standing up a new Oregon Commerce Authority with an actual mandate
- Money: A modernized R&D credit, a $250M/biennium site-readiness fund, a $20M/biennium university research fund, and funded innovation districts
Salient recommendations, translated for founders
The report runs ten priority recommendations deep, and plenty of them are big, structural, statewide moves that aren’t specifically about startups. But almost all of them shape the ground you’re trying to build on. Here are the ones worth your attention:
Rebuild Business Oregon into a Commerce Authority
tl;dr The state’s economic-development agency gets torn down to the studs and rebuilt as an “Oregon Commerce Authority” a business and innovation led organization, with an actual mandate.
The council recommends transforming Business Oregon into a new Oregon Commerce Authority, governed by a board of business and innovation leaders alongside the Governor, modeled on the way Arizona and North Carolina run economic development. Why the teardown? Because, in the report’s own words, Business Oregon today manages more than 90 legislatively directed programs “without a clear mandate or sufficient political support to lead a strong, coordinated statewide strategy.” Co-chair Renée James put it more bluntly: “There’s no urgency or organization. Everyone’s not going in the same direction.”
Fix the tax code — and yes, that includes QSBS
tl;dr A four-part tax package for the 2027 session: an R&D credit, estate tax, the CAT threshold, and the QSBS reconnection.
The council recommends a tax package aimed squarely at the 2027 legislative session: modernizing the R&D credit (a 15% credit for company-led research, 20% for university partnerships), raising the estate-tax exemption so family businesses can actually be handed down, lifting the Corporate Activity Tax threshold from $1 million to $2 million, and reconnecting Oregon’s QSBS exemption to the federal code.
Walking back the Oregon changes to QSBS policies will be critical to helping Oregon retain and grow emerging small businesses at a time when founders, investors, and growing companies are increasingly being recruited to other states. Keeping support for long-term investment in Oregon businesses can prevent the loss of jobs, capital, and future business growth to more business-friendly states.
Get the land ready to build on
tl;dr A $250 million-per-biennium fund just to make industrial sites shovel-ready — because “we’d love to grow here” means nothing if there’s nowhere to put the building.
A $250 million-per-biennium site-readiness fund. Unglamorous, and easy to skip past if you’re a software founder who’s never thought about industrial land in your life. But if you’re building anything physical — consumer products, hardware, climate, advanced manufacturing, or any of the other physical stuff Oregon is actually well-positioned for — the difference between a ready site and a not-ready one is the difference between a company that stays and a company that gives up and leaves.
Fund university research and the innovation districts
tl;dr A $20 million-per-biennium University Innovation Research Fund plus catalytic “innovation districts,” the pipeline that turns Oregon research into Oregon companies.
Stand up a $20 million-per-biennium University Innovation Research Fund and aligns Oregon’s higher-ed research agenda with the rest of the West Coast. Alongside it, a smattering of “innovation districts” — the Confluence Innovation Campus in Portland, a Southern Willamette Valley Innovation Corridor — funded as roughly $10 million-per-project catalytic partnerships. You know, like we tried to do with the Portland Innovation Quadrant (Portland IQ). But with actual funding this time. And more statewide emotional support.
Get out of the way on permitting
tl;dr A permitting “shot clock” and a 20% cut in regulatory burden by 2029. So building something here feels more friendly.
The report calls for a permitting “shot clock” — so an application can’t just sit and ferment on someone’s desk indefinitely — and a 20% reduction in regulatory burden by 2029. This one doesn’t sound like much until you’ve watched a founder describe the sheer unpredictability of getting anything approved around here.
The honest part: where the room disagreed
tl;dr This wasn’t a unanimous love letter. Two council members dissented, labor pushed back hard, one member says it doesn’t go far enough, and there’s a referendum lurking.
I’d be doing you a disservice if I sold this as a clean win. It isn’t. And the disagreement is worth respecting rather than waving off. Inside the report, two council members dissented on the tax recommendations.
Why…? They’d rather put those dollars into workforce and existing programs than into business tax expenditures, and that’s a legitimate bet about what actually moves the needle for Oregonians.
- Outside the report, the pushback came from every direction at once: a “High Road to Prosperity” counter-paper from organized labor argued the package delivers “for corporations and the wealthy, not working families”
- Council member Jordan Schnitzer said it doesn’t go nearly far enough to make Oregon competitive
- Republican gubernatorial nominee Christine Drazan called it “an election-year gimmick” yet “a meaningful start”
- Representatives Ed Diehl and Dwayne Yunker have a “No Tax Clawback Referendum” collecting signatures for the November 2026 ballot, aimed at the whole SB 1507 decoupling, not just QSBS.
Questions from the community
In the spirit of “I read it so you don’t have to,” I asked the community if they had any questions. Here’s a selection of the questions and my responses based on my read of the report.
Does the report mention similar past reports over the decades, and any outcomes — good or bad?
The report anchors itself to exactly one predecessor: Governor Kotek’s own Prosperity Roadmap from December 2025, which is the thing that created the Council and handed it its assignment. So its lineage is measured in months, not decades. What it does not do is situate itself in the long line of “here’s how we finally fix Oregon’s economy” reports that this state has been producing since the late ’80s. No Oregon Shines. No reckoning with the 2007 Oregon Business Plan or the 40/40/20 education goal the Legislature actually adopted as state policy back in 2011. Those show up. But down in the appendices. In submissions from people who wrote in. Not the Council.
The closest the Council itself comes to a backward look is diagnostic, not historical. It says Oregon has slid “over the past decade” on costs, population growth, and competitiveness. And it’s blunt about the fact that “decades of incremental reform” left the state without a clear path. So it acknowledges the problem is well established. It just doesn’t grade the previous attempts to solve it.
What are the KPIs, the timelines, who does the reporting — and is a third party measuring it?
This is the right question to be asking next. The report gives a few real targets in some places and hand-waves in others. However, it functions more as a to-do list than a list of how to get those things done successfully. And it does not mention an independent body to measure progress and outcomes.
The actual numeric targets are:
- Cut regulatory and administrative burden 20% by 2029
- Stand up a nonpartisan tax-reform working group and have a long-term proposal implementable by 2029, ahead of the federal SALT expiration
- A dedicated $250 million per biennium site-readiness fund
- $20 million per biennium to the University Innovation Research Fund
How is success measured overall?
The report actually provides a one-sentence answer. Right up front. It says the state’s success “will be measured on rising incomes, quality job creation, improved educational outcomes, and stable public revenues.”
It’s deliberately not just “GDP went up.” Incomes, good jobs, education, and a revenue base that doesn’t collapse. Hard to argue with any of them.
The catch is that those four measures show up as aspirations. Not as instruments. There’s no baseline number, no target value, no date attached to any of them. “Rising incomes” rising to what, by when, off of what starting point? The report doesn’t say. So overall success is defined directionally (up and to the right on four things everybody agrees are good) rather than as a scoreboard you could actually win or lose on.
The definition of success for this document and its purpose is sound. What’s missing is the measurement architecture underneath it — the baselines, the targets, the dates, and somebody outside the building keeping score. That’s not a reason to be cynical about the report. It’s a reason to show up for the part where those numbers get filled in. Which is the 2027 legislative session.
How can board prosperity happen when constructing the infrastructure to enable it is so ludicrously expensive? As far as I can tell the plan does nothing to change this dynamic.
You’re correct. I didn’t find anything that specifically addresses that.
What happens next — and where we come in
Here’s the honest state of play. A recommendation is just a recommendation. The report is the easy part — ten good ideas sitting in a PDF, which either become law in the 2027 session or quietly become a document that ages in interesting ways. The levers are named and knowable:
- Senator Anthony Broadman chairs Senate Finance and Revenue
- Representative Nancy Nathanson chairs House Revenue
- Governor Kotek’s written commitment is on the record
And since I took so long to release this. Some additional thoughts from the community.
To read the report yourself, please visit the Oregon Governor’s Prosperity Council.
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