The Real Story – A Column
BREAKING NEWS: Once again, the Hillsboro Herald is first to break a story, and this is a big one. At 9 a.m. Monday, the Hillsboro City Council will meet in special session to vote on Resolution 2932, a 120-day moratorium on new data center and battery energy storage system (BESS) development. Council was notified of the meeting less than 24 hours before it convenes. The public got even less. This is the moratorium meeting that Hillsboro Councilor Kipperlyn Sinclair, Myrna Munoz (Oregon Senate Candidate), and Dr Tammy Carpenter (Oregon House of Reps Candidate) asked the City of Hillsboro for on May 1st, 2026, along with a petition in support that is nearing 5,000 signatures. Mayor Beach Pace, Councilors Harris, Anvery, Case, and Salgado refused to call for a special meeting at that time.
YOU, RESIDENTS OF HILLSBORO HAVE BEEN GIVEN 20-Hour NOTICE TO SHOW UP AND TESTIFY – HERE IS THE INFO AND READ ON FOR THE FULL ANALYSIS WE HAVE DONE FOR YOU!
The City Council will hold a Special City Council Meeting on Monday, July 27 at 9 am. Public comment will be taken as part of a public hearing prior to Council making a decision.
Special City Council Meeting Agenda Packet – PDF
Special City Council Meeting Agenda Packet – Splitscreen
Community Members can attend in the following ways:
- Listen to the meeting, and provide public testimony, from the Civic Center Auditorium. To provide public testimony from the Civic Center, fill out a blue card and hand it to the City Recorder.
- Listen to the meeting, and provide public testimony, by joining the Zoom Teleconference. To provide public testimony via Zoom, email council@hillsboro-oregon.gov by 8 am on Monday, July 27
- Listen to the meeting live on the City’s YouTube Channel.
- Listen to the meeting live on TVCTV Public Access Channel 30.
Zoom Teleconference
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85148639488?pwd=RzNHQ0ZzVFBNN3h5Q04xQnJjaGJsQT09
(continued coverage)
I want to be upfront about where I land on the substance: Hillsboro needs this pause. The city’s own numbers, laid out in the resolution’s findings, show data center development consuming industrial land at more than double the pace the city’s 2021 Economic Opportunities Analysis projected over a full 20-year horizon — and that was before accounting for the roughly 143 additional acres currently under review. A city that has spent two decades building an economic-development strategy around a diversified industrial base is entitled to ask whether one land-extensive, low-employment sector is quietly eating the foundation out from under the rest of that strategy. That’s a legitimate question, and Monday’s resolution is a reasonable way to buy the time to answer it.
But the way this has arrived at a vote deserves scrutiny — precisely because I want it to hold up.
The math of the notice period. State law requires 45 days’ notice to the Department of Land Conservation and Development before a city can hold a moratorium hearing. The city’s notice went to DLCD on June 10. Forty-five days later is July 25 — a Saturday. Monday, July 27, is the first legal business day after that. In other words, the city didn’t just move fast; it moved on the single earliest day state law would allow, via a special session called with barely a day’s public notice, rather than folding the vote into a regularly scheduled meeting where the community would have had weeks of advance warning. As recently as July 20, city staff were telling DLCD they were still deciding between that emergency track and simply waiting for the next regular meeting. They chose the fastest option available.
The size of the record versus the time to read it. The evidentiary record behind Monday’s vote runs to 569 pages (we reviewed it all)— a mix of city planning documents, an economic opportunities analysis dating to 2021, and roughly a dozen academic and agency studies on data center noise, air pollution, waste heat, and battery fire risk, none of them specific to Hillsboro. It is, by design, a serious and thorough record. It is also not one any resident, or frankly any councilmember, could reasonably absorb between when it became available and 9 a.m. Monday. A process built to survive legal challenge on the merits shouldn’t have to also survive the criticism that almost nobody could read it in time to weigh in.
The attorney’s own memo shows the strain. The staff report prepared for Monday’s hearing — from outside counsel -BEH Law and attorney Chad Jacobs, not resolved into final form until literally the day before the vote — misstates its own governing statute, citing ORS 195.720 where every other document in the record correctly cites ORS 197.520, and carries a footer date five weeks out of sync with its cover date. Minor errors, almost certainly typos. But they’re the kind of errors that show up when a legal team is finishing paperwork with hours, not weeks, to spare. I flagged both to the city ahead of the hearing, in the hope they’d be fixed before anyone tries to use them to pick the resolution apart later. I have personally sent a memo this AM to Attorney Jacobs, Economic Development Director Dan Dias, and City Manager Hammond to fix this if needed so this is not a legal issue that stops the moratorium later.
And the timing invites a question the city hasn’t answered yet. This resolution lands within weeks of city planning staff updating their tracking to show that virtually every site that secured an Enterprise Zone tax deal has now filed for permits with the city — meaning the companies who had a financial incentive to get in the door before the door closed have, by and large, already gotten in.
A moratorium that arrives right after the last major wave of incumbents has filed its paperwork is not necessarily a moratorium timed to protect incumbents from future competition. But it’s a fair question, and it’s one the city should be prepared to answer plainly rather than let the coincidence of timing answer it for them.
None of this is an argument against pausing to get this right. It’s an argument that “getting it right” includes the process, not just the policy. Hillsboro residents who care about how their industrial land gets used deserve more than a day’s notice on a decision this consequential — and the city, if it wants this moratorium to hold up to the scrutiny it’s about to get, should want that too.
COMPLETE ANALYSIS OF THE PROPOSED MORATORIUM
- Imposes a 120-day moratorium, effective immediately upon adoption (expires roughly late November 2026 unless Council votes to extend or repeal it before then)
- Blocks the city from accepting, processing, or approving new land use applications for data centers or battery energy storage systems (BESS) as a primary use
- Also blocks expansions of existing data center or BESS sites where the expansion itself would be a primary use
- Adopted as a Resolution, not an Ordinance — meaning one public hearing and one vote, not the two-reading process a permanent code change requires
- Legally grounded in the “compelling need” moratorium provision, ORS 197.520(3)(a)
What it does NOT do
- Doesn’t touch data storage or BESS built as an accessory use — e.g., a data center or battery system subordinate to a hospital, university, or manufacturing site remains unaffected
- Doesn’t affect already-approved or already-built data centers/BESS facilities
- Doesn’t affect projects that had land use applications already submitted before the resolution passed — those continue through review unaffected
- Doesn’t touch housing or general commercial development — the findings explicitly limit scope to DC/BESS
- Doesn’t change the separate state-level Enterprise Zone moratorium (HB 4084), which has applied to EZ tax-abatement applications since June 6, 2026 — that’s a different mechanism entirely
- Doesn’t itself create new permanent zoning rules — those come later via the separate Phase 1 land use code amendment (still on the slower ordinance track, targeting an October 6 second reading)
The city’s stated rationale (the “why”)
- Data centers are land-extensive but low-employment: ~3 jobs/acre vs. ~17/acre for general industrial use, per the city’s 2021 Economic Opportunities Analysis
- The EOA projected data centers would consume 73.5–122.5 acres over a full 20-year horizon (through 2040); the city says 179 acres have already been approved since December 2020, with another 143 acres currently under review – and the data from June’s meetings indicate that closer to 500 acres are now fully committed.
- Clustering of data centers in the I-P/I-S zones is cited as creating unstudied cumulative effects — air pollution, low-frequency noise, waste heat/urban heat island — drawing on out-of-state research, not Hillsboro-specific data. These are the core arguments the Herald and others have been writing about, and that must be considered in all Data Center applications.
- Only two BESS facilities exist in Hillsboro today, but the city cites fire risk and an absence of any BESS-specific development code as reason to act before more are built
- The Governor’s statewide data center task force is due to report in October 2026, and the city frames the pause as buying time to align with that
- City’s stated reason for using an emergency resolution instead of waiting for the ordinary Phase 1 code amendment: that process would let more applications get filed and vested before new rules take effect — the same dynamic seen with the state’s EZ moratorium rush in May/June
The Hillsboro Herald will be covering Monday’s 9 a.m. special meeting. Readers with questions or documentation relevant to this process are encouraged to contact the newsroom.
