Hillsboro & Washington County Make Headlines As Data Centers Abate School Revenues Like No Where Else

The Real Story – A Column

Hey, Hillsboro. Hey, Washington County. Guess what the data center enterprise zone has cost you?  After months of fighting for information and using public records we were required to pay for, the Herald has the numbers on how many millions in property taxes are being waived off.  These numbers and a deeper dive show us all how horribly broken our Enterprise Tax Abatement is.  Here is what the numbers revealed,

The Enterprise Zone, by the numbers:

In 2021, enterprise zone tax abatements cost Washington County’s taxing districts- our city, school, fire district, and library- that rely on property taxes a combined $12.8 million.

By 2025, that number was $95.3 million.

That’s a 645% increase in five years, according to Washington County staff’s own presentation materials. Cumulative five-year cost to the county’s taxing districts: $221.4 million.

(County staff have not publicly disclosed how this total breaks down by individual enterprise zone. The Herald has requested that breakdown and is awaiting a response.)

We can, however, tell you what the data centers specifically are responsible for. Washington County Assessment & Taxation records for 26 property accounts tied to twelve data center operators, including Adobe, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, Dropbox, Flexential, LinkedIn, NTT, NVIDIA, QTS, SI POR03A-C, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter),  show $5.07 billion in exempted assessed value and $83.2 million in abated taxes for the current tax year (25-26) alone.

Do the math, and that means this one cluster of data centers, just some of the roughly 33 data centers now operating in Hillsboro, accounts for an estimated 87% of the entire county’s enterprise zone tax giveaway last year, across every jurisdiction and every industry the program is meant to serve.

These same companies paid $17.7 million in actual property taxes on that same property. That works out to roughly 18 cents on the dollar of what they’d otherwise owe.

What about the schools?

Here’s where it gets complicated. Like it is not already.

Oregon law (ORS 285C.162) requires any enterprise-zone business receiving a fourth- or fifth-year extended property tax exemption to pay a “school support fee” of 15 to 30 percent of its abated taxes directly to the school district where the property sits. Hillsboro School District’s own Board of Education formally set that rate at 15 percent, effective January 1, 2024, in a resolution signed by Board Chair Mark Watson and then-Superintendent Travis Reiman. The City of Hillsboro ratified the same rate eleven days later.

We asked the District directly whether it had billed or collected this fee. Its answer, in writing: none yet — and, per the District, none are owed yet, either. The law that created this fee, House Bill 2009 (2023), only applies it to extended exemption agreements signed on or after September 24, 2023, for property tax years beginning on or after July 1, 2024. A company’s exemption has to run through its first three years before the fourth-year fee can even apply — and for agreements signed right around the 2023 cutoff, that math doesn’t land until the 2027-28 tax year. A nonpartisan Legislative Revenue Office report and the state’s own implementing rule both point to the same 2026-27/2027-28 window as the earliest this fee produces real money anywhere in Oregon, not just in Hillsboro.

So the honest version of this story isn’t “Hillsboro School District is sitting on millions it won’t collect.” It’s this: a law passed in 2023 specifically to guarantee Oregon schools a cut of data center tax breaks was built with a runway that means it will deliver essentially nothing to any school district for at least four years after it passed, years during which the enterprise zone program itself grew nearly eightfold, from $12.8 million to $95.3 million a year in this county alone. Whether that delay was a deliberate, negotiated tradeoff or simply overlooked is a fair question for the legislators who wrote HB 2009, and one we intend to ask.

It’s also worth knowing that not every enterprise-zone dollar is even eligible for this fee in the first place. A separate, older program,  the Strategic Investment Program, which covers Intel’s abatement in Hillsboro, has its own revenue-sharing mechanism that excludes school districts by statute, no matter what rate a district sets. So even once 2027 arrives, this fee will only ever reach a portion of what data centers save on their Hillsboro tax bills.

One more data point worth sitting with while that clock runs: Washington County has not shown the same patience elsewhere in this same program. In a case decided this January, the Oregon Tax Court upheld the county’s denial of a Digital Realty subsidiary’s enterprise zone exemption, worth millions, over a missing second claim form, adding $3.4 million to the company’s tax bill, after the county sent one reminder email. The court’s reasoning: “taxation is the rule, and exemption from taxation is the exception.” Filing paperwork wrong costs a company money immediately. A law meant to route money toward Oregon’s schools gets four years of grace before it has to produce a dollar.

Zoom out, and the picture is bigger than one fee’s timeline. A statewide report released in August 2025 by the watchdog group Good Jobs First found Oregon’s public schools went without $275 million in property tax revenue in 2024 alone because of corporate tax breaks, more than double what they lost just five years earlier. Hillsboro School District’s total loss that year, $143.5 million, was the largest of any district in the state. The same report notes that as these abatements have grown, Hillsboro School District has cut custodial and counseling staff, reduced mental health services, and combined classrooms.

Why did Hillsboro choose the 15% number, rather than the 30% number that the district can receive back through the school support fees?  This will be the subject of one of our next stories later on next week.  Curious, isn’t it?  Our schools were forced to give up hundreds of Millions in revenue that would help fund schools across the state, are allowed to get up to 30% of that loss back, and choose to take only 15%.  We will report back on what we find out this week if the answers come in.

Below you will find a YouTube link to the last Statewide Data Center Advisory Commission as they are “schooled” about the Enterprise Zone, School Support Fees, and how the money flows.  We will report on this later this week as well.

This entire conversation and calculation over getting back some crumbs of the massive cake that was taken from us is ludicrous.  But here we are, and only Governor Kotek and some of her key constituents can fix it.  Here’s hoping they are paying attention.