The Real Story – A Column
Over the weekend, a bold duo of candidates for Public Office (Kipperlyn Sinclair and Myrna Munoz) threw down the gauntlet and announced a petition to leaders in Washington County and the City of Hillsboro, Oregon, calling for a moratorium on all data centers from this point forward. The petition has just been put online with a call for supporters to sign it and stand behind the call to action. It is taking off, sending a warning shot across the offices of the status quo, who allowed upwards of 30 Data Centers into Hillsboro, weakening our city and sending our power rates soaring.
Kipperlyn Sinclair, a sitting Hillsboro City Councilor, is known for standing up for our community’s residents and not being a typical lackey of the large corporate interests that dominate politics and agendas here. Kipperlyn is one of seven candidates for Washington County Commissioner, District 4. Sinclair declared her intentions on Sunday at two separate events. Myrna Munoz, Candidate for Oregon State Senate District 5, stood with Sinclair and joined in the call to action. Munoz is a newcomer who has been raising eyebrows for her platform and endorsements as she runs against powerful sitting Senator, Jaeen Sollman. Sollman is seen as the champion of Data Centers and big industry, which have rolled over Hillsboro into rural Washington County. The Senator sponsored Senate Bill 1586, which would have opened the door to many more Data Centers and manufacturing factories to fill thousands of acres of farmland, clearly causing our power rates to skyrocket and threatening farmland and our natural areas.
Sinclair and Munoz are being supported by a panel of leaders running for Washington County offices; a group that has centered its attention on the hardworking people of our County, and turned its back on the “Corporation First” mentality that has brought Washington County to our current state of affairs.
Hear from Sinclair and Munoz in this Video. The Herald is the first to break this story. This is leadership that no one else has brought to the table so far; these candidates should be very appealing choices to anyone who sees what is happening to our power rates, schools, and infrastructure.
From the Petition-
To: Washington County Board of Commissioners, the Mayors and City Councils, and our Oregon State Legislators representing Washington County.
Washington County Data Center Moratorium Petition
Campaign created by Kipperlyn Sinclair – Sign Here
Data Center Moratorium Petition
We support a moratorium on data center development in Washington County.
The unchecked proliferation of data centers is already causing, and will continue to cause, irrevocable public harm to our communities across economic, social, and environmental fronts. Despite consuming vast public resources, these developments may actually result in a net financial loss for Washington County residents. We are seeing residential electricity rates rise by nearly 50% while data centers pay less than half the rate per kilowatt-hour that households do, forcing families to subsidize corporate infrastructure like the $200 million Hillsboro substation.
Furthermore, the environmental toll is staggering, with large-scale facilities consuming as much as 4.5 million gallons of water per day and creating heat islands that warm land by up to 16 degrees. We need to understand the full economic, social, and environmental costs of data centers before any more are built in Washington County.
Why is this important?
“The unchecked proliferation of data centers is already causing irrevocable public harm to our communities across economic, social, and environmental fronts. We need to stand together because state and county leaders continue to incentivize and approve these projects without a full accounting of their true costs.
This is a matter of fairness for every resident. While our residential electricity rates have risen by nearly 50%, data centers continue paying less than half the rate per kilowatt-hour that we do. This gap forces our families and small businesses to subsidize infrastructure like the $200 million Hillsboro substation.
Our schools are paying the price, too. In 2024 alone, the Hillsboro School District lost $128 million due to data center tax abatements. These facilities generate among the lowest number of permanent jobs per acre of any industry, yet they are being gifted enormous tax breaks. This is not economic development—it’s a giveaway.
Beyond the money, the environmental toll is staggering. Large-scale facilities can consume as much as 4.5 million gallons of water per day, straining our supplies and driving expensive new infrastructure costs that will be passed on to you.
Data centers are the investment of human demise. These are the most polluting of air and water, noise on record scales and wasting precious habitat for species. Absolutely NO to data centers
These around the country are trading human life and species for technology that will be the end of us. AI is absolutely coming for all of us and it needs to be stopped now before it’s too late.
You are 110% spot on! Thank you for commenting!
Kind of ironic, don’t you think? And short sided of this politician, if she wants to get anywhere. You seen, lots of Hillsboro / Washington County residents make their high incomes by supplying these datacenters with essential computing parts. Intel, KLA, others.
Actually I think it is policy about the real people of Hillsboro who live here- and not the big corps who do not pay any taxes here. Any short term profits are just that. What parts does Intel sell to Data Centers? Do you have details on that?
A CPU might go into each server in a rack, which datacenters house – many, many racks of servers, each with at least one Intel (or other) CPU. I’m sure Intel makes other server or networking components for DCs too.
Oh, Dirk. Mike’s comment is a deeply unserious one and I doubt that he will respond to you. Local tech workers will not be thrown out, because there isn’t a 31st data center here.
His false equivalent bit of sophistry seems to be premised on tech = good, always, because reasons and of course, “jobs” and so us plebs shouldn’t question it too much (here is where I could go on about the misguided public policy of tech exceptionalism and its impact on thought and culture). I’m surprised he didn’t call you or Sinclair a Luddite.
Starting to think about that Oregon Business piece from a couple of years back and Rogoway’s earlier reporting around data centers and local tax incentives. Would love to go back to the timing of both approval and construction to see how much of what eventually came into the acreage west of Brookwood and north of Evergreen benefited from the cover of the pandemic and its ensuing economic crisis.
I work in a data center. I’ve worked in data centers my whole adult life. My adult son is working in a data center. Many of the people I grew up with make their living in the tech industry, many in data centers or in data center adjacent fields.
Some of your claims are false or misleading though. In particular your claim about water use. You imply that data centers use huge quantities of water. A previous days center that I worked in was 100 percent water cooled, but those cooling systems are a closed loop, with almost no demand beyond the initial filling of the system, as well as minor amounts to account for evaporation.
The data center I am in now is deploying liquid cooled systems, but they are not even connected to an external water source, and are filled with a non-conductive water/chemical blend in a completely closed loop.
Why don’t you publish the actual water use figures instead of a weird inaccurate hypothetical?
I would, but the City of Hillsboro will not release the water numbers. Maybe give them a call and ask them too. I do not rail against water much- I am aware of all you just said and then some. It it the outright theft of our communities money and power that I have the biggest issues with. I am glad you are one of the few who has a job. Your job however, when compared to the tax break, is most likely costing the peole of Hillsboro about $500K in lost property tax revenue! Glad to hear you and your Son are benefitting! Are they hiring? There are a few thousand folks here looking for work.
My job is costing the people $500k? Is that number per job or per data center?
Yes, we are hiring. So are many other data centers in the area. There are also hundreds of people employed in the building of new data centers.
I am contacted almost daily by recruiters trying to fill data center positions in this area. It is frankly baffling to hear repeated claims that there are no data center jobs.
We can agree on power, I guess. I assume you are in favor of increasing power infrastructure and production to meet the demand, right?
So, Derrick, are you involved in building data centers, site preparation, installing servers or HVAC? I would like to know what your role is and which one you work at if possible. I value input from hardworking people. I know people who are thriving and making serious money working on the Data Center infrastructure and build up- that is an industry that will boom for some time to come and people should take jobs and pursue what they can to succeed in life and take care of their people. No question. Data released from Washington County and the State took the Property Tax Incentives that the Data Center owners are given and divided it by the number of long term jobs, post completion of construction. The outcome was that the average person employed costs the community somewhere between $246,000 and $1 million dollars per job. The specific numbers were :Hillsboro data center property tax breaks
Data centers receiving tax breaks in Washington County through the standard, five-year enterprise zone program, for the 2025-26 tax year.
Data center Tax break Jobs
Adobe $2,410,737 14
CoreWeave $22,801,667 20
Digital Realty Trust $13,799,886 58
Dropbox $1,153,876 4
Flexential $1,546,561 58
LinkedIn $301,641 17
NTT Global $3,553,461 29
QTS $24,687,684 47
Stack Infrastructure $4,930,364 17
Tik Tok $5,544,556 11
Twitter Inc. (now called X) $3,309,002 9