The Land Grab & The Star Player: How Hillsboro Became Its Own Biggest Developer

The Real Story – A Column — The Land Grab & The Star Player (Part 3 of 4)

Editor’s Note: This is Part 3 of a 4-part investigative series examining municipal tax abatements, corporate lobbying contracts, and campaign finance networks across Hillsboro and Washington County. Read Part 1: The Hundred-Million-Dollar Tax Shield | Read Part 2: The Inside Operation.

In Part 1, we examined the 10-year, hundred-million-dollar Enterprise Zone tax shield (Resolution No. 2558) that expires in 2027. In Part 2, we uncovered how Hillsboro’s 91-year-old Chamber was restructured into a regional entity, how over half a million dollars in city tax funds flowed under municipal contracts with Task 4 lobbying mandates, and why a private 501(c)(6) tech league set up its corporate headquarters inside City Hall at 150 E Main Street.

Now that the corporate machinery is housed in municipal offices and financed by public funds, a critical operational question emerges: What happens when industrial appetite runs out of zoned urban land? The answers lead us to a westward expansion that has been fought over for years and a deal Hillsboro made and now wants to break.

To understand how Hillsboro’s borders are pushed outward, you have to understand the most powerful administrative figure in the building, the aggressive municipal development apparatus operating under non-disclosure agreements, and the high-stakes battle over prime agricultural soils along Jackson School Road.

A Word or Two on Dan Dias: The City of Hillsboro’s Star Player

I have watched Dan Dias for years—from his early days in the planning department to his meteoric ascent to the top of Hillsboro’s administrative hierarchy. Dan is brilliant. In any given meeting, he is consistently the sharpest person in the room on municipal code, statutory frameworks, and administrative policy.

It is standard practice for fellow planners, senior staff, the City Manager, and regional officials to defer to Dan. He is a multi-level strategic thinker with exceptional recall and decades of institutional experience. He commands the specialized lexicon of land-use planning, public finance, and economic recruitment like few others in the Pacific Northwest.

He is so talented that city leaders elevated his department within the administration a few years back. A look at the organizational structure illustrates the breadth of departments and operations that he and his Economic & Community Development team oversee.

A prime example of his effectiveness was his 20-minute planning presentation to the State Semiconductor Task Force, which coordinated the connection between the Oregon CHIPS Act (Senate Bill 4) and Senate Bill 1586—the legislative push to expand industrial boundaries westward onto agricultural soils. Watch Dan work a room of state senators, representatives, and attorneys:

In my opinion, Dan Dias is the most valuable administrative asset employed by the City of Hillsboro. He is a primary reason why Hillsboro evolved into a premier national hub for semiconductor support operations, data centers, and advanced manufacturing over the past decade. In private brokerage circles, he is widely regarded as one of the most formidable forces in the Silicon Forest.

I am not criticizing Dan personally. We frequently hear from the Council dais that no one should speak critically of city staff. I respect his relentless work ethic, professional command, and genuine passion for his role. Given the same statutory toolkit at the State of Oregon or the City of Portland, Dan could revitalize their economic development engines. He is that capable.

The issue confronting our community is not Dan Dias’s skill. The issue is the structural paradox of the office he occupies.

The Municipal Developer Paradox: Referee and Principal Player

In traditional municipal governance, a city planning department functions as an objective regulatory referee. Private developers propose projects, submit permit applications, and navigate public hearings. City staff evaluates those proposals against comprehensive plans, zoning codes, citywide goals, and environmental protections to defend the public interest.

In Hillsboro, that regulatory separation has dissolved.

Through aggressive land banking, urban renewal financing, and strategic property acquisitions, the City of Hillsboro has become one of the largest active real estate developers in the Portland metropolitan region. In the past few years, municipal staff and executive leadership have regularly executed non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), negotiated private property options, and assembled multi-parcel industrial footprints behind closed doors. The Herald confirmed the use of NDAs with the City, though specific lists of signatories and dates remain shielded from public inspection.

As an active real estate broker, I have had colleagues and landowners observe that private entities simply cannot compete with the municipal purse when the City enters the market to acquire and develop industrial acreage. And they are correct. According to municipal urban renewal filings and county records, Hillsboro has raised between $150,000,000 and $200,000,000 in purchases through Tax Increment Financing (TIF) bonds and loans. Those loans accrue carrying costs as the City holds the land awaiting corporate end-users. The City paid top-of-market prices for key parcels, with some transactions approaching $1.5 million per net developable acre after deducting environmentally sensitive lands.

KEY POINT: This creates a profound structural conflict within municipal administration: The City of Hillsboro acts as the primary developer seeking to assemble and monetize industrial land, while simultaneously serving as the regulatory authority responsible for evaluating and approving its own land-use applications, utility extensions, and zoning changes.

As Director of Economic & Community Development, Dan Dias can exercise administrative authority over this dual mandate. When an agency acts simultaneously as the land buyer, infrastructure builder, code writer, and permitting authority—frequently under non-disclosure agreements—transparent public oversight becomes nearly impossible.

Following our initial reporting, multiple City Hall regulars, municipal employees, and elected officials have reached out to express genuine surprise and deep concern regarding these structural overlaps. While defenders may view these multi-hat arrangements as standard economic development practice, the public deserves a clear, transparent accounting. Given the gravity of these revelations, the City Council owes residents a comprehensive legal and administrative audit detailing how these internal practices align with standard municipal checks, balances, and public disclosure policies.

The Jackson School Frontier & The Defeat of SB 1586

Because automated data centers and compute facilities consume vast footprints of 40 to 100+ acres while generating negligible employment density, Hillsboro’s zoned industrial acreage has been consumed at an unprecedented pace.

When available dirt within the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) dwindled, the apparatus turned its sights westward toward the prime agricultural soils along Jackson School Road. That push materialized as Senate Bill 1586 during the 2024 legislative session—a bill structured to grant executive authority to bypass traditional statewide land-use protections and annex roughly 1,700 to 3,000 acres of protected rural reserve farmland.

SB 1586 collapsed under intense grassroots opposition from local farmers, conservationists, and residents who objected to converting high-value soils into server farms and substation yards. That legislative defeat carried immense political consequences: State Senator Janeen Sollman, who carried the legislation, faced widespread public backlash for refusing to guarantee that the expansion would not simply become another corridor for massive data centers—a key factor that contributed to her defeat in the May 2026 Democratic primary to challenger Myrna Muñoz of Forest Grove.

Find out more about Myrna Muñoz and her platform here.

The defeat of SB 1586 stopped that legislative vehicle, but the infrastructure push continues on the ground.

Anyone driving along Jackson School Road today can see the physical groundwork being laid. Major civil infrastructure improvements are actively underway. NE Huffman Road has been widened and stubbed directly out to Jackson School Road, engineered for a future high-capacity traffic signal. Mature trees have been felled, the historic Vanderzanden windmill has been dismantled, and millions of square feet of industrial buildings, prospective compute facilities, and utility yards press directly against the rural boundary.

KEY POINT: The industrial land push was not abandoned—it was merely paused. Every current industrial parcel rezoned for a data center brings the westward expansion onto 1,700+ acres of farmland one step closer to reality.

Mayor Beach Pace: From the WEA Board to the Farmland Table

A land push of this magnitude does not happen through planning staff alone; it requires executive political coordination. And that brings us directly to Mayor Beach Pace.

Following Steve Callaway’s two terms as Hillsboro Mayor, Pace ran for and won the Mayor’s chair in 2024, taking office in January 2025. She stepped into both the Mayor’s office and Callaway’s vacated public-sector seat on the Governing Board of Directors of the Westside Economic Alliance (WEA)—the primary regional lobbying group advocating for industrial expansions and Urban Growth Boundary extensions. As Mayor, she presides over municipal policy and public data center hearings while concurrently serving on the governing board of the very business alliance lobbying to loosen those restrictions.

That executive alignment is actively visible on the ground. Despite the defeat of SB 1586 in the Legislature, area agricultural landowners west of Jackson School Road—whose acreage lies entirely outside city boundaries and zoned Rural Reserve as farmland—have confirmed that they met directly with Mayor Pace this year as regional infrastructure plans continue to press outward.

While the public was told the farmland annexation died in Salem, City Hall leadership has remained at the table with rural property owners. By all accounts, the planning to the East, where NE Huffman has been punched through, appears to be coordinated — the civil engineering, roads. Lights and utility stub-outs are ready for the next inevitable push. This is something she and others do not hide when pressed for answers. If anyone has heard otherwise, please contact us or weigh in below.

Pushing Back on Data Center Limits: CDCA-004-26

The alignment between municipal economic staff, corporate lobbyists, and the Chamber became unmistakable during public hearings on CDCA-004-26—the City of Hillsboro’s Phase 1 Data Center and Energy Storage development code amendments.

Packed hearing rooms of residents testified about humming substations, water consumption, and industrial cooling towers bordering residential subdivisions. They requested basic safeguards: buffer zones from schools, caps on battery yards, and Type III public hearings.

In response, the Washington County Chamber of Commerce and the Westside Economic Alliance (WEA) submitted formal testimony and coordinated lobbying to resist those community proposals:

• Opposing School Buffers: They lobbied against requiring a 1,320-foot (quarter-mile) separation buffer between data center yards and neighborhood schools, arguing that setbacks would “sterilize valuable employment land.”
• Carving Out “Accessory Compute”: They advocated broad exemptions ensuring that multi-story enterprise servers and proprietary compute halls located on advanced manufacturing campuses would be exempt from dedicated data center caps and conditional-use scrutiny.
• Resisting Battery Storage Caps: They pressed to remove restrictive acreage ceilings on Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), facilitating larger lithium battery installations adjacent to commercial and industrial zones without full discretionary review.
• Resisting Broad Notification: They opposed expanded Measure 56 public notification requirements, asserting that expanded mailings create unnecessary regulatory delays for industrial recruitment.

This illustrates the operational cycle:

KEY POINT: Taxpayers fund the Chamber through municipal contracts, city planning staff coordinates on policy under Task 4, and when neighborhood families request livability protections, business advocacy groups lobby to maintain flexible development standards.

Now that the land has been primed and the regulatory framework preserved, the final arena is the ballot box. Whoever you vote for will carry a banner. Will it be the banner of unchecked data center expansion, or the banner of residents, sensible growth, and fiscal accountability?

Coming Tomorrow in Part 4: The 2026 Election Special & Follow the Money

To protect hundred-million-dollar tax abatements, prepare for the 2027 renewal, and advance industrial boundaries onto 1,700 acres of prime farmland, the corporate lobby cannot afford independent voices in elected office.

In our final installment, Part 4: The 2026 Election Special, we follow the corporate money directly to the ballot box. We pull back the curtain on the State of Oregon’s ORESTAR database to show who is backing big business, Pam Treece, the Hillsboro City Council slate, and the high-stakes battle between Steve Callaway and Kipperlyn Sinclair.

Most importantly, we provide the Hillsboro Herald’s voting scorecard and endorsements so voters can make informed choices about who will protect our community and who answers to “The Machine.”