~125
data centers in Oregon
Hillsboro, the Columbia River, Central Oregon
$450M+
yearly tax breaks to tech companies
the country's most generous data-center terms
$19M
AWS pays Morrow County anyway
more than the next 16 taxpayers combined
+30% / −1.3%
the 2026 rate split
data centers pay more, households pay less
Why everyone is suddenly fighting about server farms
Data centers grew quietly in Oregon for twenty years. Then, in six months, the state froze their tax breaks, a teachers' union sued two governments, and regulators rewrote how they pay for power. Three fights, one question: who's getting the better end of this?
Why here at all? No sales tax on billions of dollars of servers, cheap Columbia River hydropower, a cool dry climate that's free air-conditioning, and eight trans-Pacific fiber cables landing at Hillsboro (Oregon Citizens' Utility Board). Communities have zoned 9,100 more acres for them — enough to quadruple the industry's footprint (Lincoln Chronicle).
The state hit pause
House Bill 4084 barred new data centers from enterprise-zone property tax breaks — Oregon's largest incentive program — until after the 2027 session. Existing and already-approved deals keep their terms (Davis Wright Tremaine). Gov. Kotek had cut data centers from her own tax-break expansion three months earlier (OPB).
The lawsuit landed
1000 Friends of Oregon, Tax Fairness Oregon, Tualatin Riverkeepers, and the Oregon Education Association sued Hillsboro and Washington County over ~17 tax-break applications — tied to NVIDIA, CoreWeave, Adobe, Dropbox, QTS, and Flexential — rushed through before the moratorium, allegedly without required public notice (Oregon Capital Chronicle).
The power bill got rewritten
Under 2025's POWER Act — the first law of its kind in the country — regulators moved big data centers into their own rate class. PGE's version raised their bills ~30% and cut household bills 1.3% (OPB, Tom's Hardware). The governor, in July: Oregon should “stop being a cheap date” (KLCC).
Rural Oregon's best deal in a generation
Set aside the metro fights for a moment and look at Boardman, Hermiston, and Prineville — towns the timber economy left behind. This is the case data-center supporters actually make, at its strongest.
This is a steelman: the best honest version of the argument, built from what county commissioners, chambers of commerce, and the companies themselves point to — not a caricature of it. The counter-case follows.
Even with the breaks, they're the biggest taxpayer by far
AWS pays Morrow County more than $19 million a year in property taxes — more than the next 16 largest taxpayers combined — while three of its five sites are still fully tax-exempt. Amazon's buildings are roughly half the county's taxable value and a third of everything it levies. On top of that, fee-in-lieu agreements send tens of millions to schools, housing, and emergency services (East Oregonian, Baker City Herald).
Real jobs, in places that had lost theirs
Local officials credit data centers with 7,400 full-time-equivalent jobs across Eastern Oregon and $9 billion in regional GDP (East Oregonian). The deals require wages at least 130% of the county average (Baker City Herald). Prineville — near 20% unemployment after the mills closed and Les Schwab left — now anchors its budget on Meta and Apple (Fortune).
This is an industry Oregon actually wins
Rural counties can't recruit chip fabs or biotech campuses. They can win data centers, because the raw ingredients — cheap hydro, cool dry air, fiber landings, open land — are already here (Oregon Citizens' Utility Board). Washington, Idaho, and Arizona offer their own incentives; the choice isn't between a data center with breaks and one without, but between hosting the buildout or watching it cross the river.
The honest counterfactual is a wheat field
The abatements forgive taxes on buildings that otherwise wouldn't exist. Without the deal, the land is dryland farm ground generating a few thousand dollars a year. With it, a county of 12,000 people collects $19M+ in taxes and ~$40M in 15-year fees (Baker City Herald). Since the 2026 POWER Act rules, big users also carry 100% of the grid costs they create — households' bills went down (Oregon Environmental Council).
You paid for buildings that employ almost no one
The opposition's case doesn't depend on hating tech. It depends on arithmetic: what Oregon gives up per job, who absorbs the cost, and what the buildings consume that never shows up on a tax ledger.
Oregon's incentive study, by program type
Typical manufacturing-era deal
The main data-center vehicle
The same study found the 15-year deals return 16 cents of personal income tax for every dollar of property tax forgone — an 84-cent loss — while standard zones return $1.35.
The jobs math doesn't survive contact
A typical facility runs on ~30 permanent staff across millions of square feet, many in $35–50K security and maintenance roles (Oregon Center for Public Policy). Oregon's own incentive study: the 15-year rural deals lose 84 cents per dollar forgone and cost ~$54,500 per job — thirteen times the standard program (Governing). One Hillsboro deal penciled out near $520,000 per employee per year (Oregon Center for Public Policy).
Every school in Oregon pays a little for each local deal
The mechanic is subtler than “the district loses money.” Oregon equalizes school funding, so when an abatement cuts local revenue the state backfills that district — and the loss reappears as a thinner statewide pool, approximately $1.50 per weighted student for every $1M removed (Oregon Dept. of Education). Hermiston's superintendent told the committee the enterprise-zone school fee is “not additional support to the local district” (DCAC (June 26, 2026)). Districts took $275M in abatements in 2024 alone (Oregon Capital Chronicle) — spread across everyone, felt sharply by no one.
They were coming anyway — the neighbors prove it
Oregon stacks four subsidies: no sales tax (Amazon saved roughly $3B on $39.3B of eastern Oregon investment), ~$450M/yr in property tax breaks, publicly funded infrastructure, and a 10-year income tax exemption that let Meta pay about 1.3% instead of 7.6%. The decisive fact Tax Fairness Oregon put before the committee: California and Washington offer no data-center property tax break at all — and still have data centers (Tax Fairness Oregon). Even the governor concluded Oregon was underpricing itself (KLCC).
The climate ledger is going backwards
Umatilla Electric — 16,000 customers — now emits 1.8 million tons of CO₂ a year serving Amazon's buildout, making it Oregon's third-largest utility emitter; its power is 2,000% more carbon-intensive than a decade ago (Governing). Regional reports warn data-center gas demand could push Oregon and Washington off their 2050 climate targets (Oregon Capital Chronicle).
The water story only came out in court
Google's The Dalles campuses drank 274.5 million gallons in 2021 — over a quarter of the entire city's water, near 40% in recent reports — and the public only knows because the city lost a 13-month fight to keep it secret (The Register, WaterWatch of Oregon). Statewide reporting requirements are still virtually nonexistent, even as the boom reaches basins already in a nitrate groundwater crisis (Rolling Stone).
When the door was closing, they went around the public
In the weeks before the moratorium took effect, companies filed a flurry of Hillsboro applications — six from one firm in a single April day — and staff approved them, the lawsuit alleges, without public notice or a vote of any elected body (Oregon Capital Chronicle). Whatever you think of the deals, that's not how public money is supposed to move.
Three findings that decide the argument
Both sides are quoting real numbers. Put them side by side and the disagreement gets smaller — and more useful. The evidence points to three conclusions neither campaign leads with.
Change in electric bills under PGE's 2026 data-center rate class
New rate class: 10–30 year contracts, 100% of new grid costs, minimum-take rules
First decrease after years of increases driven partly by grid buildout
Both jobs numbers are true — and that's the point
Amazon directly employs roughly 740 people in its eastern Oregon data centers; boosters' 7,400-FTE figure adds construction, contractors, and ripple effects (Governing, East Oregonian). A 2026 Georgia Tech study of the whole country splits the difference: metro counties gain ~4.1% employment after a data center opens; rural counties see “negligible” job spillover — but wages rise ~5% where clusters form, and electricity prices rise ~5% too (Fortune). Data centers are weak jobs programs everywhere. That was never their real value.
Geography flips the verdict
The same deal that's hard to defend in Hillsboro is easy to defend in Boardman. Morrow County traded taxes it could never have collected — the buildings wouldn't exist — for payments that now carry a third of its levy (East Oregonian). Washington County traded real school revenue to companies drawn by fiber cables that were coming ashore regardless (Oregon Center for Public Policy). The question was never “data centers, yes or no” — it's “which county, at what price.”
The POWER Act proved the win-win is buildable
For years the debate assumed someone had to lose: either block the industry or let households subsidize its grid. Then Oregon wrote the first law in the country making >20 MW users a separate rate class — and the industry stayed, its bills went up ~30%, and household bills went down (OPB, Tom's Hardware). Priced correctly, the arrangement survives. That's the template for every other term of the bargain.
The win-win test: six conditions, and where Oregon stands
A data center deal is a genuine win-win when the host community keeps more than it gives up — on taxes, power, water, and trust. That's testable. Here's the test, applied to Oregon as of August 2026.
Score today: 1 met, 1 partial, 4 unmet. The met one — grid costs — was considered impossible until 2025. None of the unmet four requires banning anything; they require pricing, disclosure, and process. Scoring updated after reading the committee's own record.
01Large users pay the full cost of the grid built for them
The POWER Act (2025) and PGE's 2026 rate class make >20 MW users sign 10–30 year contracts, cover 100% of new distribution costs, and meet minimum-take rules. Data-center bills rose ~30%; residential bills fell ~1.3%.
02New load is tied to new clean energy, not backfilled with gas
PGE connects new data centers only if emissions-free power is available — but HB 2021 and the POWER Act reach only about 61% of Oregon electricity sales. Co-op and PUD territory is exempt, and that is exactly where Umatilla Electric's carbon intensity rose 2,000% in a decade serving Amazon's buildout.
03Water use is disclosed and capped in stressed basins
State reporting requirements are virtually nonexistent. The Dalles spent 13 months in court trying to keep Google's water figures secret; Google used over a quarter of the city's water in 2021, near 40% in recent reports.
04Tax deals return more than they give up
Oregon's own incentive study found 15-year rural enterprise-zone deals — the main data-center vehicle — lose 84 cents per dollar of property tax forgone and cost ~$54,500 per job, vs. $4,200 in standard zones.
05Schools and services are held harmless
Hermiston's superintendent told the committee the enterprise-zone school fee is 'not additional support to the local district' — equalization backfills the district and the loss lands on the statewide pool, roughly $1.50 per weighted student per $1M. Negotiated fees do fund real local projects, including a $240M Boardman school bond over 80% covered by one operator.
06Deals are approved in public, with notice and a vote
A June 2026 lawsuit alleges Hillsboro and Washington County staff approved ~17 enterprise-zone applications — filed in a rush before the moratorium — without required public notice or governing-body authorization.
So which way does it lean?
As signed before 2026, the bargain leaned toward the companies. That's not an activist's claim; it's the state's own math. The 15-year vehicle that built the boom loses 84 cents on the dollar, the buildings employ dozens where the renderings implied thousands, and the costs that never hit a ledger — carbon, water, school revenue — piled up in the dark.
But “bad deal” is not the honest verdict either. In Morrow County, the alternative to an under-priced deal was no deal: the fees and taxes are real, transformative, and bigger than anything else that region could plausibly have recruited. And the POWER Act showed the terms are negotiable — Oregon raised the industry's power bill 30% and the industry kept building.
The win-win exists, under conditions Oregon has only started to enforce. Full-cost power pricing (done), clean-energy additionality everywhere including co-op territory (half done), water disclosure with caps in stressed basins (not done), abatements repriced toward fee-in-lieu deals that hold schools harmless (not done), and approvals in public (not done). If the 2027 Legislature converts the current pause into those terms, Oregon keeps the industry and the returns. If the moratorium simply lapses, the pre-2026 pattern — private gain, socialized cost, discovered later — comes back with the AI boom behind it.
How to price a data center deal
The whole fight reduces to three numbers: what the site would pay fully taxed, what the deal actually pays, and how likely the company was to build without a break. Get those three, and “good deal or giveaway” stops being a matter of opinion.
The model prices the deal from the host community's side. It deliberately excludes construction activity (temporary, and present in every scenario where the facility is built) and assumes bare land yields ~no revenue — both stated in the fine print, both adjustable in spirit by moving the sliders.
What the site pays fully taxed
Taxable value ≈ 70% of on-site investment — servers are most of the value and depreciate fast, but they're refreshed continuously — times the county's rate, over 15 years, discounted. A $2B campus at 1.1%: about $15M a year, or $171M in present value.
What the deal actually pays
Fees in lieu of taxes during the abatement, full taxes after it ends, plus state income tax from the permanent jobs. A Morrow-style deal — ~$2.7M/yr in fees, 100 jobs — pays about $37M in present value: roughly a fifth of full freight.
The break-even leverage
Divide №2 by №1 (plus income taxes on both sides): the deal beats holding firm only if the chance they'd build anyway is below that ratio. The Morrow-style deal breaks even at ~21%; a Hillsboro-style deal at ~64% — and the fiber cables put Hillsboro's true leverage well above that.
Price the deal
Start from a region, then move the levers. Every input is a real deal term — the presets track the public record for each region.
Cheap land and power exist across the river in Washington too — leverage is genuinely low.
The deal pencils out only if leverage is below
21%
At your estimate (25%), signing loses to holding firm by $7.9M in expected 15-year value.
$94K
taxes forgone per job, per year (state study range: $4.2K–$54.5K)
$6.5M
15-yr PV of income taxes from the jobs (goes to the state, not the county)
Teaching model, not a forecast: 15-yr horizon, 4% real discount, taxable value ≈ 70% of investment (server refresh vs. depreciation), 6.5% effective income tax, baseline land revenue ≈ $0. Construction activity, utility fees, and service costs are excluded on both sides.
This is the policy insight hiding in the arithmetic: the right abatement is not a number, it's a curve. The scarcer a community's advantages, the more it can afford to give; the more unique its advantages, the less it should. A statewide flat program — which is what the enterprise-zone system was — prices Boardman and Hillsboro identically, and therefore misprices both. Benchmarks for the cost-per-job readout come from the state incentive study (Governing).
Oregon already ran this calculation — and published the answer
In June 2026, Business Oregon handed the advisory committee its own return figures by program. The short-term standard enterprise zone returns 29.16 per dollar. The Strategic Investment Program returns 6.24. The 15-year rural enterprise zone — which carries $15.4B of the $15.8B in data-center investment and $233.6M of the $240.9M in abated taxes — returns 1.18 (Business Oregon). The state's economic development agency is not disputing the critics' arithmetic. It supplied it.
Morrow County's assessor put the same point in county terms: $123.6M of property tax exempted against $72.3M actually collected countywide, with $23.9M coming back as negotiated fees (Morrow County Assessor). Both things are true at once — the fees are transformative for a county of 12,000, and the exemption is larger than the entire tax base.
What a fully priced framework looks like — Minnesota, presented to Oregon in May
Oregon's POWER Act allocates cost. Minnesota's 2025 bipartisan package, presented to this committee by its Department of Commerce, also directs what gets built: utilities must show a new data center won't raise other customers' rates or impede the state's 100%-clean-by-2040 standard; 15-year agreements run at 80% take-or-pay with upfront collateral and exit fees; a large-user fee funds low-income weatherization; rules reach down to 5 MW so projects can't shrink under the threshold; and the electricity sales-tax exemption was repealed. Google — testifying as the customer — called Oregon's law a missed opportunity by comparison (DCAC (June 26, 2026)).
The transferable lesson for pricing: Minnesota converts every soft condition into a contract term with a number attached. That is what makes a deal checkable rather than promised — and it is why the same approach works for water disclosure and abatement length, not just electricity.
The same math, on a map
Run the framework across Oregon's regions and a siting policy falls out: where deals can pencil, where they can't, and where the answer isn't price at all. The state has started acting on the same logic — in July 2026 the Governor pulled 32 state-owned acres in Salem from a proposed data center (Governor's Office).
Schematic, not a survey — each verdict comes from the region's leverage, water, and grid position. Same variables as the calculator.
Hillsboro / Washington County
Pull backFull freight. With leverage this high, almost no abatement pencils out — the state's study and the 2026 lawsuit both point the same way.
The Dalles / Columbia Gorge
ConditionalConditional. Deals can pencil at mid leverage — but only with mandatory water disclosure and caps written into the agreement.
Columbia River East
ConditionalThe strongest case for deals — and the weakest guardrails. Pencils at low leverage, but fees near Morrow's ~$2.7M/yr run close to the break-even line, and clean-power terms don't exist here yet.
Central Oregon
ConditionalConditional, tightening. The cluster is established; abatement terms should ratchet down with each expansion, not roll over.
Willamette Valley
Pull backThe state has already answered: in July 2026 the Governor withdrew 32 state-owned acres in Salem from a proposed data center. High-value farmland is the wrong trade at almost any price.
South & Southeast Oregon
Not viableNot a pricing question. Without fiber and grid, no subsidy attracts a serious project — chasing one means giving away the most for the least.
The seven people drafting Oregon's answer
Everything above — pricing, siting, water, power — lands on one desk: the Data Center Advisory Committee Gov. Kotek convened in January 2026. Its recommendations, due by October 2026, are the blueprint the 2027 Legislature will work from.
Charge, membership, and schedule from the Governor's announcement (Governor's Office) and the Oregon Dept. of Energy's committee page (Oregon Dept. of Energy), where agendas, recordings, and materials are posted.
The seven members
- Margaret HoffmannCo-chairOregon member, Northwest Power & Conservation Council
- Michael JungCo-chairEnergy & climate policy professional
- Dan DorranChair, Umatilla County Commission
- Greg DotsonAssociate professor of law, University of Oregon
- Bill EdmondsAdjunct professor, University of Portland
- Tim MillerDirector, Oregon Business for Climate
- Jean WilsonOperating partner, Sandbrook Capital
A deliberately mixed table: grid planning, environmental law, a county in data-center country, climate-minded business, and private capital — the coalition any deal framework has to survive.
What it must deliver
- 01Encourage responsible siting that supports economic development, especially in rural communities
- 02Understand data centers' effects on Oregon's climate, clean-energy, and natural-resource goals
- 03Ensure data centers get reliable energy without burdening other ratepayers
- 04Protect Oregon's limited water resources as cooling demand grows
- 05Identify the policy framework the state needs to guide growth responsibly
Deliverable: recommendations for a comprehensive regulatory framework, due to the Governor no later than October 2026 — the direct input to whatever replaces the moratorium in the 2027 session.
One topic per month, in public
- Feb 27, 2026Economic development & workforce
- Mar 27, 2026Water resources
- Apr 24, 2026Land use
- May 29, 2026Energy
- Jun 26, 2026Energy affordability, revenue & incentives
- Jul 31 & Aug 4, 2026Deliberations & draft report
- Sep 23, 2026Public listening session on preliminary findings
- Oct 2026Final report & recommendations to the Governor
You can weigh in — here's how
- Meetings run on Zoom with recordings posted to YouTube; agendas, slides, and summaries are published for every session.
- Each meeting reserves ~30 minutes for public comment — 15 first-come slots. Email datacenter.ac@oregon.gov with your name, the meeting date, and a two-minute summary.
- A dedicated public listening session on the preliminary findings is scheduled for September 23, 2026 — the last realistic moment to move the report.
Thirteen things the committee's own documents establish
We downloaded all 77 documents and recordings the committee has posted — agency decks, industry slides, tribal testimony, and the facilitators' summaries of what was actually said in the room. The most useful findings aren't the contested ones. They're the numbers the state produced about itself.
Everything below is attributed to a specific presentation, all of them linked at the bottom of this section. Where presenters disagree, both figures are kept — that disagreement is usually the most informative part.
The 15-year program Oregon used for nearly all data-center value barely breaks even
Business Oregon's own table: the long-term rural enterprise zone carries $15.4B of $15.8B in investment and $233.6M of $240.9M in abated taxes — and returns 1.18. The short-term standard program returns 29.16. The state is not disputing the critics' arithmetic; it published it.
Business Oregon, June 26 session
Morrow County exempts more property tax than it collects
$7.25B of exempt data-center value against $4.20B of total certified value; $123.6M in exempted tax against $72.3M actually collected countywide, with $23.9M returning as negotiated fees. Umatilla exempts $119.7M and receives $14.2M.
Morrow County Assessor, June 26 session
The school 'support fee' does not add money to the school
Oregon equalizes school funding, so when an abatement cuts a district's local revenue the state backfills that district. The loss shows up instead as a thinner statewide pool — about $1.50 per weighted student per $1M — meaning every district in Oregon pays a little for each local deal.
Oregon Dept. of Education & Hermiston School District
Permanent jobs are small; construction jobs are not
ECONorthwest counts 2,630 direct operating jobs statewide, 0.2% of Oregon employment. A future 30 MW facility supports 730 construction jobs and 46 permanent ones. Business Oregon's larger 7,600-job figure counts construction and payroll effects — both numbers are real, they measure different things.
ECONorthwest & Business Oregon
Electricity demand is the number that actually changes the state
Data-center consumption rises from 14.0 TWh in 2025 to 24.8 TWh by 2030 on ECONorthwest's projection — pushing toward 40% of Oregon's electricity demand. Average IT power per facility more than tripled, from ~11 MW pre-2010 to 39.5 MW for recent vintage.
ECONorthwest, July 31 session
There are 2,482 diesel generators behind the cloud
6,328 MW of permitted backup capacity across 39 campuses — more than the state's largest power plants combined — up from 135 MW in 2012. Emission controls are not required, and DEQ's voluntary incentive to install them has had no takers.
Oregon DEQ, July 31 session
Growth is moving west, where the case for subsidy is weakest
The installed base is eastern Oregon, but the next five years of physical growth run 80% west and 12% east. Hillsboro's advantages — eight trans-Pacific cables — are exactly the ones no abatement created.
ECONorthwest, July 31 session
Data centers took two-thirds of Oregon's new industrial land
9,093 acres of identified demand, 6,472 of it needing UGB expansion or rural upzoning. In 2025–26, urban-growth-boundary expansions for data centers hit 3,243 acres — roughly two-thirds of all new industrial land brought inside UGBs statewide.
DLCD, April 24 session
Connection requests already exceed the entire Northwest grid
Bonneville told the committee its queues hold roughly 60 GW of generation requests, 60–65 GW of transmission service requests, and about 40 GW of line-and-load — of which some 30 GW is data centers. Regional peak demand is about 30 GW. The asking is larger than the system that exists.
Bonneville Power Administration, May 29 session
Oregon's ratepayer protections cover about 61% of the state
HB 2021's clean-energy mandate and the POWER Act's cost rules bind investor-owned utilities — roughly 61% of Oregon electricity sales. Much of the data-center buildout sits in co-op and PUD territory, where neither applies. Committee members flagged the risk that weak-protection territory simply attracts the next wave.
ODOE & facilitator summary, May 29 session
Google told Oregon its own law was the weaker model
Presenting on energy, Google called the POWER Act a missed opportunity next to Minnesota's 2025 package — which pairs cost protection with affirmative clean-energy obligations, covers facilities from 5 MW up, and funds weatherization from a large-user fee. Oregon's law allocates cost; Minnesota's also directs what gets built.
Google & Minnesota Dept. of Commerce, May 29 session
Everyone agreed on disclosure — including the cities burned by secrecy
DEQ called withheld information its 'biggest challenge' in permitting. The Dalles conceded that redacting Google's water figures 'created skepticism and hurt public trust.' Tribes, advocates, academics, and agencies all converged on mandatory reporting as the floor.
March 27 water session, facilitator summary
The committee has already conceded the central point
The facilitator's June summary records that 'the DCAC agreed incentives need to be reviewed and modernized,' with several members flagging that school support fees mainly change who pays. The open question is no longer whether to reprice, but how far.
Facilitator summary, June 26 session
Every camp that testified, and its hardest number
Seven months of hearings drew agencies, tribes, utilities, unions, county assessors, the companies themselves, and the advocates suing them. Laid out by camp, the coalition structure explains the politics better than any single argument does.
Notice who is missing from the committee itself: no tribal member, no utility, no operator, no ratepayer advocate. Those groups got a presenter's slot, not a seat at the table where the report gets written.
Mike Gorman
Morrow County Assessor
Reports the numbers without taking a side — and they are the sharpest in the record.
Morrow County exempts $7.25B of data-center value against $4.20B of total certified value: $123.6M in exempted tax versus $72.3M actually collected countywide, with $23.9M coming back as fees. Umatilla exempts $119.7M and collects $14.2M in payments.
Alex Albertine & Michael Held
Business Oregon
Incentives leverage investment the state would not otherwise capture.
The agency's own return figures split hard by program: short-term standard enterprise zones return 29.16, while the 15-year rural program that carries nearly all data-center value — $15.4B of $15.8B invested, $233.6M of $240.9M abated — returns 1.18.
Nolan Moser & Bret Stevens
Oregon Public Utility Commission
Growth pays for growth — the POWER Act is now operational.
PGE's May 2026 order sets a 90% minimum demand charge, 10–30 year contracts, exit fees, and a 1¢/kWh surcharge on facilities over 100 MW funding efficiency for energy-burdened households. Rates: +29% data centers, −1.3% residential, −3.7% small business.
Leigh McIlvaine
Dept. of Land Conservation & Development
The land-use system is strong but straining; should siting be UGB-only?
9,093 acres of identified demand, 6,472 of it requiring urban-growth-boundary expansion or rural upzoning. In 2025–26, data centers accounted for roughly two-thirds of all new industrial land brought inside UGBs.
Pete Wyckoff
Minnesota Dept. of Commerce
Here is a package that does what Oregon's doesn't.
Minnesota's 2025 bipartisan law requires utilities to show a data center won't raise other customers' rates or impede the 100%-by-2040 clean standard; sets 15-year agreements at 80% take-or-pay with collateral and exit fees; funds low-income weatherization from a large-user fee; and removed the electricity sales-tax exemption.
Vanessa Clark
Oregon Dept. of Education
Explains who actually loses school money — and it isn't the host district.
Equalization backfills the abating district; the loss lands on the statewide pool instead, diluting every district's per-student rate. Roughly $1.50 per weighted student for every $1M added to or removed from the State School Fund.
Ania Loyd
Oregon DEQ
Reports the diesel fleet nobody was counting.
2,482 large diesel backup generators totaling 6,328 MW across 39 permitted campuses, up from 135 MW permitted in 2012. Emission controls aren't required, and a 2025 streamlined-permit incentive for installing them has had zero uptake.
Ellen Harpel
Smart Incentives (national expert)
Reprice and condition; don't abolish. And speed can beat money.
38 states offer data-center incentives, but only 11 have statewide property tax breaks. The 2026 trend is pause-and-adjust — moratoria in Ohio, Arizona, Illinois; conditions in Pennsylvania and Utah. Fast-track permitting often matters more to operators than subsidy dollars.
Elaine Hart
Sylvan Energy Analytics
Whether the region stays reliable depends on whether data centers can be curtailed.
E3 projects a ~9 GW regional capacity shortfall by 2030. Data-center flexibility cuts new 2030 capacity needs from 1–5 GW to 0–3 GW — but baseline growth implies 7 to 9 days of large-load curtailment in a January-2024-type winter.
Terry Wirkkala & João Ferreira
ECONorthwest / UVA Weldon Cooper
Commissioned, explicitly neutral: here is the size of the thing.
2,630 direct operating jobs statewide — 0.2% of Oregon employment. Electricity demand rising from 14.0 TWh in 2025 to 24.8 TWh by 2030. A future 30 MW facility supports 730 construction jobs but only 46 permanent ones.
Supt. Tricia Mooney
Hermiston School District
The school fee doesn't actually reach the school.
The enterprise-zone School Support Fee is offset by the state equalization formula — it is 'not additional support to the local district.' Districts often choose the 15% minimum to leave room for negotiated community benefits instead.
Torrie Philippi-Griggs
Boardman Chamber of Commerce
Locally negotiated deals buy things a small town could never fund.
Fees flow through a local nonprofit board: more than $2.5M in homebuyer incentives over 15 years, a $6M business incubator, and a $240M school bond with a single data-center partner covering over 80%.
Steve Forrester & Mayor Jason Beebe
City of Prineville
Data centers rebuilt a town the timber economy left for dead.
Unemployment fell from 20% in 2009 to about 6%; county wages went from near-worst to second-highest in Oregon. Franchise fees run $10–12M a year against roughly $30,000 a month before the data centers arrived.
Mark Morgan
City of Hermiston
Per acre, a data center is the lightest water user in town.
Annual use per acre: schools ~1.7M gallons, food processing ~1.3M, homes ~850K, irrigated agriculture ~815K, hyperscale data center ~180K. With aquifer storage, he calculates a 191M gallon/year net gain for the Lower Umatilla basin.
Niki Iverson & Dan Dias
City of Hillsboro
Not a water problem here, and we planned for decades.
Data centers used 112 million gallons in 2025 — 1.8% of total city consumption and 3% of industrial use. 'Data centers are not considered large water users in the City of Hillsboro.'
Robert Echenrode
Umatilla Electric Cooperative
Consumer-owned utilities already solved this locally; don't preempt us.
Data-center load pushed co-op sales from about 1 million to 8.4 million MWh by 2024 while residential rates stayed roughly 30% below the national average. Utility plant grew from ~$140M in 2010 to ~$775M in 2025.
Hamody Hindi
Bonneville Power Administration
The queue has blown past anything our planning model can handle.
Roughly 60 GW of generation requests, 60–65 GW of transmission service requests, and about 40 GW of line-and-load — some 30 GW of it data centers — against a Northwest peak of about 30 GW.
Beau Schilz
Amazon Web Services
Our water use is small, efficient, and more than offset.
284 million gallons statewide in 2024 — 3–11% of host utilities' production — at a water-use effectiveness of 0.16 L/kWh, about 70% below the North American average, alongside roughly $400M invested in community water infrastructure.
Jeff Omelchuck
Infrastructure Masons (retired)
Court traditional hyperscalers, not gigawatt AI campuses — and plan for the bust.
Oregon has ~123 data centers and zero AI-scale campuses. A Stargate-class project runs 6,000 construction jobs against 300 operating jobs. Warns to require decommissioning plans and financial surety: 'we don't want a hi-tech ghost town.'
Ellen Zuckerman
We'll pay full incremental cost — and Oregon's law asks for less than Minnesota's.
Points to a fleet PUE of 1.06, a 24/7 carbon-free commitment, and an Xcel Minnesota deal pairing 1,400 MW of wind and 200 MW of solar with a 300 MW/30 GWh iron-air battery — estimated at $1.1B of net benefit to other customers over 15 years. Calls Oregon's POWER Act a missed opportunity.
Jody Wiser
Tax Fairness Oregon
End the property tax breaks outright in 2027.
Oregon stacks four subsidies: no sales tax (Amazon saved ~$3B on $39.3B of eastern Oregon investment), ~$450M/yr in property tax breaks, publicly funded infrastructure, and a 10-year income tax exemption — Meta paid about 1.3% instead of 7.6%. California and Washington offer no data-center property tax break at all.
Anahi Segovia Rodriguez
Verde
Put residential affordability at the center; communities bear the burden.
PGE and Pacific Power rates rose more than 50% between 2019 and 2025. Disconnections hit 71,190 in 2025, with 9,839 in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
Kelly Campbell
Columbia Riverkeeper
The only voice asking for a pause.
A 100 MW data center consumes roughly 100 million gallons a year — about what 2,500 people use at home. Only half of data centers track water use at all. Asks for mandatory reporting plus a temporary moratorium until rules catch up.
Sam Diaz
1000 Friends of Oregon
Prepare the land you already have; tie abatements to outcomes. No moratorium.
A 66-jurisdiction survey found 9,746 acres already zoned industrial but only 21% development-ready, and 57.5% of jurisdictions reported missed opportunities for lack of ready land.
Ben Gordon
Central Oregon LandWatch
Slow down and review cumulatively — not a ban.
Asks for NEPA-style cumulative fiscal, infrastructure, and environmental review, statutory definitions for hyperscale and exascale, and stronger UGB-expansion standards before Oregon expands data-center land supply again.
Julie Carter & Elijah Cetas
Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission
Treaty rights attach to places; assess cumulatively, not project by project.
Salmon runs fell from 15–20 million fish a year to under 500,000 by the late 1970s. Asks for legally protected instream flows, groundwater and surface water managed as one system, and a true-cost analysis that counts treaty-resource damage.
Trustee Lisa Ganuelas
Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
Presenting to this committee is not consultation.
Draws a formal line: CTUIR requires government-to-government consultation with the Governor's office when recommendations are finalized, not a presenter's slot. Flags siting opacity, waste heat, and small modular reactor co-location as unresolved.
IBEW, LiUNA, OPEIU & the Building Trades
Oregon construction unions
Explicitly opposed to any moratorium.
Twenty-plus crafts work a single campus; one Central Oregon IBEW local grew from roughly 40 to about 500 electricians. Apprenticeships are debt-free and five years long.
Why the debate is shaped the way it is
Read the record and the alignments stop looking like opinions. They look like positions people hold because of where they sit. Eight structural features of this process explain most of what gets said — and what never comes up.
Tax policy was not in the original charge
The Governor added it after the charge was drafted. That is why the money question landed in month five of a seven-month process, compressed into a single June session, while water and land use each got a full day earlier in the calendar.
The people most affected aren't on the committee
The seven members include no tribal representative, no utility, no data-center operator, and no ratepayer advocate. Those voices appear as presenters — heard for a scheduled slot, then absent from the deliberation that follows.
Only new data centers are in scope
The charge covers siting of new facilities. The roughly $450M a year already committed to existing deals is structurally outside what the committee can recommend changing — the largest number in the debate is the one it cannot touch.
Benefits concentrate; costs disperse
Morrow County collects about a third of its property tax from data centers, so its commissioner sits on the committee and defends the deals. The offsetting school-funding loss is spread thinly across 197 districts, where no single actor feels enough pain to organize. That asymmetry explains almost every alignment in the record.
Counties negotiate alone against trillion-dollar counterparties
Assessors approve exemptions; the state does not. A county of 12,000 people negotiates with Amazon's real-estate team. One presenter asked the state to fund negotiating help for small towns — an admission of the mismatch that current law builds in.
Secrecy is structural, not incidental
NDAs and shell LLCs are standard, and utilities are often bound to confidentiality. DEQ says withheld information is its biggest permitting obstacle; The Dalles fought a newspaper for 13 months over water figures. Regulators are negotiating against parties who know far more than they do.
Power had a forcing mechanism; taxes don't
The POWER Act worked because one regulator with jurisdiction could rewrite one tariff and bind every large user at once. Tax policy has no equivalent lever — it is 36 counties making separate deals, which is why reform there requires the Legislature rather than an agency.
The labor coalition rules out the loudest option
Building trades unions testified against any moratorium, and neither 1000 Friends nor LandWatch asked for one. With construction jobs real and concentrated, a pause has almost no constituency — which pushes the debate toward pricing and conditions instead of prohibition.
Put together, these push toward one destination. A moratorium has no constituency — labor opposed it and the major land-use groups never asked for it. Abolition has no path — the money is already committed and out of scope. What's left is repricing and conditioning, which is exactly what the facilitator recorded in June: the committee agreed incentives need to be reviewed and modernized (DCAC (June 26, 2026)). The fight in 2027 will not be over whether to change the deal. It will be over how much, and who gets to decide — the state, or 36 counties negotiating one at a time.
Every document, linked
The committee posts everything: agendas, presenter slides, facilitator summaries, and full meeting recordings. This is the complete index as of August 2026 — the raw material for anyone who wants to check our reading against the source.
Hosted by the Oregon Department of Energy (Oregon Dept. of Energy). Written comment goes to datacenter.ac@oregon.gov.
Founding documents
Feb 27, 2026Economic development & workforce
RecordingMar 27, 2026Water resources
Recording- Agenda: data centers & waterODOE
- Data centers & water dialogue (draft)ODOE
- Ivan Gall — water rights & supplyOregon Water Resources Dept
- Josh Hatch — data center water useConsultant
- Mike Kucinski — water-quality permittingOregon DEQ
- Iverson & Dias — Hillsboro's water systemCity of Hillsboro
- Klebes & Anderson — The Dalles' water dealCity of The Dalles
- Morgan — Hermiston's perspectiveCity of Hermiston
- Cochran, Maille, Travor & HildebrandPanel
- Schilz — Amazon's water stewardshipAmazon
- Shin — Google in The DallesGoogle
- Campbell — river & water advocacyColumbia Riverkeeper
- Carter & Cetas — tribal fisheriesCRITFC
- Quaempts — First Foods & waterCTUIR
- Means & Gray — coldwater fisheriesTrout Unlimited
- O'Connor — water & climateEnvironmental Defense Fund
- Poton — environmental justiceVerde
- Smith — farms & parksRII
- Facilitator summary, Session 2Facilitation team
Apr 17, 2026Public listening session
RecordingRecording only — no slides posted.
Apr 24, 2026Land use
Recording- Agenda & speakersODOE
- McIlvaine — what Oregon land-use law allowsDLCD
- Mabbott — Morrow County's experienceMorrow County
- Dias — Hillsboro's experienceCity of Hillsboro
- Hoagland — how data centers get sitedMackenzie Inc.
- Diaz — statewide siting guardrails1000 Friends of Oregon
- Gordon — high desert sitingCentral Oregon LandWatch
- Brandt — co-siting with renewablesRenewable Northwest
- Facilitator summary, Session 3Facilitation team
May 29, 2026Energy
Recording- AgendaODOE
- Bayer — Oregon's energy landscapeODOE
- Hart — load growth analyticsSylvan Energy Analytics
- Wyckoff — how Minnesota does itState of Minnesota
- Zuckerman — Google's energy approachGoogle
- Hindi — federal power & transmissionBonneville Power Administration
- McFarland — serving large loadsPortland General Electric
- Falkenberg — a PUD's viewNorthern Wasco County PUD
- Hathaway — efficiency programsEnergy Trust of Oregon
- Basofin — climate guardrailsClimate Solutions
- Tabak — flexible data centersVerrus Data
- Ganuelas — tribal energy prioritiesCTUIR
- Golightly & Sheets — hydro & fishCRITFC
- Facilitator summary, Session 4Facilitation team
Jun 26, 2026Energy affordability, revenue & incentives
Recording- AgendaODOE
- Moser & StevensSession presenters
- GraySession presenter
- EchenrodeUmatilla Electric Cooperative
- JenkSession presenter
- RodriguezSession presenter
- LeBel, Eberle & GriffinSession presenters
- SaladinoSession presenter
- Albertine & HeldSession presenters
- GormanSession presenter
- Philippi GriggsBoardman Chamber of Commerce
- WiserTax Fairness Oregon
- MooneySession presenter
- HarpelSmart Incentives
- Facilitator summary, Session 5Facilitation team
Jul 31, 2026Additional considerations & deliberations
RecordingAug 4, 2026Deliberations, continued
What happens next
The moratorium didn't settle the fight — it scheduled it. Beyond the committee's report, three places to watch.
The moratorium forces a decision
HB 4084's enterprise-zone ban for new data centers expires 90 days after the session adjourns. Lawmakers must renew, replace, or let the old rules return.
The Hillsboro / Washington County lawsuit
1000 Friends of Oregon, Tax Fairness Oregon, Tualatin Riverkeepers, and the Oregon Education Association want the pre-moratorium approvals voided.
Pacific Power's data-center rate case
PGE's rate class was first. Pacific Power's proceeding decides whether the same guardrails cover the rest of the state's investor-owned territory.
And if you live near a proposed site: the enterprise-zone sponsor — your city or county — is where the next deal actually gets decided. The committee section above has the dates and the comment address.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure links to a public document, a named study, or on-the-record reporting, pulled in August 2026. Both cases were built from what each side's strongest advocates actually cite — and the committee sections come from reading all 77 documents and recordings it has published, indexed in full above.
A live story
The advisory committee reports in October 2026, the Hillsboro lawsuit is in early stages, and Pacific Power's rate case is pending. Time-sensitive figures should be re-checked after each.