The Real Cost of Growth: Hillsboro Proposes “Non-Stop” Utility Rate Hikes While Tech Giants Heavy-Load Our Systems

If you are from Hillsboro, Oregon, you can set your clock by utility rates going up, and once again it is time to line up a sewer and water rate increase!  Are you ready for this again?  Because sewer and stormwater rates are going to go up again!  If you are tired of the never-ending treadmill of price increases on everything from groceries to housing, look out: the City of Hillsboro is about to step up the pressure on your monthly utility bill.

On Tuesday, July 7, 2026, the Hillsboro City Council will hold a crucial work session to review proposed rate increases for our sanitary sewer and stormwater utilities. While city staff frames these hikes as “low and consistent,” the real story under the surface reveals a fundamental issue of economic equity. Regular residents are being asked to foot the bill for a massive system-wide backlog, much of it accelerated by the massive influx of data centers and industrial expansion in North Hillsboro.

It is time for the community to get involved, look upstream, and demand answers.

The Breakdown: What’s Coming to Your Bill?

When you cut through the confusing phrasing in the staff report, here is what the total monthly utility bill, which bundles together the City of Hillsboro, Clean Water Services (CWS), and Hillsboro Water charges, will actually look like for a typical single-family home:

• Current Total Combined Bill: $149.71 a month.
• Proposed Year 1 Total Bill: $153.89 a month (A jump of $4.18 or 2.8%)
• Proposed Year 2 Total Bill: $160.46 a month (An additional jump of $6.57 or 4.3%)

The city points out that the first-year increase is lower because the regional Clean Water Services rate increase took effect on July 1.  But by Year 2, when the city’s compounding 5% local hikes merge with regional baseline cost increases, local families will be paying over $127 more per year out of pocket just to keep the water moving. All of this occurs while the upstream industrial giants driving these capacity issues escape localized infrastructure fees.

The Drivers: The $23.8 Million Bottleneck

Why is our system under such severe flow pressure? Look no further than the Glencoe Swale project.

The city’s staff report explicitly admits that Hillsboro’s stormwater system is in “poor overall” condition and faces a massive $120 million investment backlog just to stabilize it. Astoundingly, a single project, the Glencoe Road crossing, is priced at $23.8 million. That means one single bottleneck accounts for nearly 20% of the city’s entire high-priority stormwater deficit.

The city notes that this 50-year-old, 3×5-foot wooden box culvert running beneath the BNSF railroad embankment has “insufficient capacity to convey the stream during large storms,” resulting in severe upstream flooding.

To prevent local rates from absolutely skyrocketing by 11% annually, the city had to secure an $18 million federal FEMA grant just to bail out the project’s budget. But this raises a multi-million dollar question the city completely ignores: Why is there suddenly so much water pushing through this bottleneck?

Look Upstream: The Industrial Influx

The city’s documentation treats this purely as an “aging asset” problem. But as the Hillsboro Herald previously tracked, the storm basin that feeds directly into the Glencoe Swale originates to the east, running right through Intel Jones Farm, the Hillsboro Airport expansions, Genentech, and the massive stack data center campuses that have fundamentally altered the landscape of North Hillsboro.

Key Point -How much pressure and time did it take for the State to step in and realize that Data Centers were driving up our power rates?  Years of it.  Well, just as power rates are tied to Data Centers, we are certain that large Data Centers and the industry in Hillsboro are the cause of our systems being stressed beyond their limits.  They were paid for and maintained for our residential farm town.  Now that Industrial growth has effectively broken them, we are all expected to pay an equal amount for their upgrades and replacements.  That is wrong!

Here is our story from Feb 2024 after flooding closed Glencoe Road for a few days when the box culvert failed to handle the flow from the East.

High Water In Hillsboro Closes Roads And Parks

These tech-industrial giants have covered acres of land in completely impervious surfaces. When heavy storms or ice-melts hit, tens of thousands of gallons of accelerated runoff bypass the natural soils and surge straight down the basin toward Glencoe Road.

Furthermore, this infrastructure strain isn’t limited to rainwater. Inside these massive data center buildings and semiconductor factories, millions of gallons of industrial wastewater are continuously generated and dumped directly back into our regional sanitary sewer system.

KEY POINT – Industrial users are driving peak demand on our infrastructure, yet the city is loading these remediation costs onto flat, citywide residential rate structures.  There have been NO new housing uses in this critical storm basin that we can find.  There has never been a more direct link to one user group.  Industry led by data centers has done this.  We have seen no signs of flooding in the many years since the unbelievable build-out of the ancestral natural areas and farm lands that these industrial giants have executed.  Cause and effect, and the City must ask the real questions.  Why did this happen, and who is responsible?  Until we do that, there will be no equity between us residents and our new corporate interlopers.

The Herald’s Take: Time for a True “Flow Audit”

The city’s equity framework focuses on delaying projects and expanding low-income bill relief programs (offering $300 to $500 a year to qualifying families). While assistance is vital, it treats the symptom rather than the cause. True equity means making the entities that create the burden pay for the infrastructure required to handle it.

The Hillsboro Herald is calling on the City of Hillsboro to conduct and publish a comprehensive Flow and Capacity Audit.

The city must explicitly identify the percentage of total system flow, both stormwater basin runoff from impervious industrial acreage and total sanitary sewage volume from industrial processing, that is directly attributable to mega-users such as data centers and tech manufacturers.

If data centers and industrial expansions are responsible for accelerating the failure of our basins and overloading our treatment capacity, their utility rates should be loaded accordingly. Regular families, senior citizens, and local small businesses should not be subsidizing the infrastructure strain caused by multi-billion dollar tech corporations.

Get Involved: How to Make Your Voice Heard

This is a work session, meaning the City Council has not yet taken a final vote. There is still time to push back and demand that industrial growth pays for its own downstream impacts.

• Attend the Work Session: The Sanitary and Stormwater utility rate work session takes place on Tuesday, July 7, 2026.

• The Public Comment Window: The official public comment period will open for the entire month of September 2026 via the Engage Hillsboro platform.

• The Final Vote: The first reading of these rate adjustments is scheduled for the City Council meeting on November 3, 2026.

Don’t let these increases slip through under the guise of standard municipal housekeeping. Contact your city councilors, utilize the Engage Hillsboro platform in September, and demand that the city hold industrial developers accountable for the real costs of their growth.

It is past time for residents to control this town, not Corporate interests.

What are your thoughts? Have you experienced the flooding around Glencoe Road or Harewood Drive? Let us know in the comments below!