[Klickitat] 🖥 Data Centers Come Knocking - Klickitat BOCC 6/30 - 7/21

Four summer meetings of the Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners, in one sitting. The Board maps out how a data center would actually get approved, weighs shrinking where solar can be built, gets its first real short-term-rental numbers, bets on a City of Seattle trash contract, and redraws the map of which rural roads get a painted safety line. Plus fire season, a "hiring freeze" fight, and a mid-year budget check.

In This Episode

• The county's new data-center permitting roadmap, and what "community benefit" could mean
• A Planning Commission move to shrink the county's solar zone
• The first hard short-term-rental data: 143 properties, and sixteen rented illegally
• The road-striping decision: Snowden, Bickleton, and Canyon Road for just under thirty-eight thousand dollars
• Republic Services, the Roosevelt landfill, and a Seattle-sized bid
• The "hiring freeze" that commissioners say is really "a conversation," and a calm mid-year budget report
• A hard fire weekend, new radio agreements, and a new 911 coordinator
• A shrinking public-health contract, a childcare workshop, and Dallesport wastewater rates

Resources & Links

• Read the full written Dispatch at skamaniadispatch.com
• Klickitat County agendas, Zoom link, and meeting recordings: klickitatcounty.org
• Submit written comment: bocc@klickitatcounty.org
• Open Gorge's Public Benefit Lab (mitigations and community-benefit options for data centers, battery storage, solar, wind, and transmission): opengorge.org/public-benefit-lab

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey there, and welcome back to Open Gorge. Today we're catching up on ClickAttack County. Four meetings of the Board of County Commissioners from the last day of June through late July. A lot of it was routine on paper, but underneath the routine, the county was making some big bets. So let's walk through them together. Let's start with the one that's everybody's asking about. Data centers. Here's the thing, Click-Attack County doesn't currently have a data center ordinance, and on July 7th, the Commissioner spent most of the afternoon getting ready for a knock on the door before anyone actually knocks. Right now, the rules come from a planning commission interpretation back in 2023. In plain terms, a data center fits in the county's industrial zone as light industry. Anywhere else, it needs a special permit. And either way, it has to go through a full state environmental review. That review can get very deep very fast. Commissioners expect a lot of interest because the county sits close to the power grid. One commissioner put it bluntly. The data center over in the Dalles, they said, has done more for that county's budget than its landfill has. So the real question isn't whether the review happens. Staff were clear, it always happens. The question is whether the county can attach its own conditions, things like noise limits or water studies or payments back to the community, and whether those conditions would hold up if a community pushed back in court. Or whether those conditions would hold up if a company pushed back in court. If you want to see what those asks can actually look like, over at Open Gorge, we actually keep a companion resource called the Public Benefit Lab. It collects the real terms and model legislation other towns have negotiated on projects like these. And the guiding idea fits this moment perfectly. Asking for safety or for fair compensation does not actually mean that you have to endorse the project. You'll find a link to what that means and how that works in our show notes. So let's go back to the public comments, which pushed harder than the board did. One resident asked, are they buying our love with a daycare so I can look the other way? Commissioners push back on any talk of secret deals. One said flatly, if you have evidence, bring it forward. And this past week, the county followed through. The community development director brought back a plain language flow chart showing exactly how a data center would get reviewed step by step. It's going to go up on the county website. The message is simple. Here's the process, it's public, it's not a rubber stamp. And at Open Gorge, we're big fans of stuff like that. Making these processes public by default and putting up documentation is better for everybody, both government, resident, and of course companies alike. Okay, let's move on from the data centers for the moment. We'll get back to those, I'm sure, in a future episode as this develops, to something a little bit more down-to-earth. Right on the earth, that is, road striping. It started small. Neighbors kept asking the county to paint a fog line, which is that white line at the edge of the road, along Snowden Road. But it grew into a bigger question. If you stripe one road, how do you tell the next neighborhood no we can't? So the county engineer, Seth Scarola, ranked the county's major roads by safety, and Snowden wasn't even at the top. Canyon Road was number one, Bickleton Highway was high on the list too. So on July 14th, the board decided to stripe all three. That's about $38,000, folded into a contract they already have. The catch? They're paying for it by trimming other road surface work this year. And that's actually the quiet tension in this whole story. As one official said, you have to be consistent because inconsistency is a liability. And if you skip basic road maintenance to pay for something else, you create what they call a bow wave. Costs that don't just rise, they multiply. That's how Bickleton Highway ended up needing a multimillion dollar overlay. So speaking of the roads, the Lytle Bridge on Glenwood Highway stayed closed for repairs through July 17th. Public Works joked that folks could just go fishing that Saturday morning once it reopened. Now let's talk trash, because in Clickitac County, trash is money. The Roosevelt Regional Landfill actually brings in roughly half of the county's revenue. That might be surprising to some people listening. I know it sure was for me when I first looked up this figure. So its contracts really do matter. And there was good news. Republic Services was picked to move forward on a big Snohomish County contract, which Commissioner said saved the county from an estimated $2 million hole. Even bigger, Republic is now bidding on the city of Seattle's trash. That's roughly 500,000 tons a year. The board signed a letter of support on July 14th. But not all the landfill news was good, and certainly you might feel differently about some of that last update, depending on how you feel about the county being paid to hold other cities' garbage. The county found out that a state agency now wants it to fence and moat a closed landfill near Horse Thief Lake. Forever. That's a cost the county says it was told it would never have. As one official put it, nobody stands behind what was said. So let's shift to the budget because it came up again and again and clearly was underpinning the context for everything from the data centers to the garbage discussion. So a resident from Lyle, Kaylee Toll, asked a sharp question on June 30th. If a job is already funded and already budgeted, why does a department head have to come beg to fill it after somebody quits? Commissioners answered that question. Commissioners answered that the phrase hiring freeze is really the wrong word. It's more of a conversation, one said. When someone leaves, they asked, do we still need this job? They were also careful to say that the county is not in the red and not spending its savings, but they warned that three years of drift could mean layoffs down the road. On the money itself, the board set an August 4th hearing on a supplemental budget of about $766,000. And that includes help for the regional airport and for Clickatap Valley Health. Now, this was also fire season, and of course it showed. The county opened summer with two fires in late June. The fire in Lyle grew fast from 50 acres to 200 to as much as 1,500 before crews and aircraft pulled it back. And partly because of pressures like this, the board approved new radio and 911 dispatch agreements with nine different fire agencies. That's a small step and a long-running question about who pays for the county's aging radio system. So let's go to a few quicker items. On public health, Director Aaron Quinn walked the board through a state contract that brings about $1.1 million for foundational health services. That's roughly $380,000 less than last year. This is a squeeze we've been documenting across the gorge, and it's very much continuing, unfortunately. On child care, mark August 25th, the county, along with some local activists who have been working on this issue for months, are bringing in Garfield County to explain how they built a child care program using a state grant. On Dallsport, there's a wastewater rate hearing coming August 18th, right in Dallasport at 6 in the evening. And in public comment, records access stayed a hot topic. One commissioner apologized for an early remark, clarifying he'd meant the number of emails one person had sent, but not the number of formal records requests. A few residents also called the White Salmon Pool District, quote, a sham. Commissioners noted that's a separate district with its own elected board. And one contractor showed up with a 24-year-old bill for concrete barricades he said were never fully paid for. His words, quote, now we're at 24 years, so do the math, unquote. Now, the newest meeting. This past week had a different feel, more organized. Staff showed up with flow charts and data and not just worries. Two things stood out. First, solar. The Planning Commission wants to shrink the zone where big solar projects can go to keep them off the best farmland and away from close neighbors. Nothing's decided yet, but it would be a real shift, especially with the number of projects that are slated to come up in the next few months and years. Second, short-term rentals. For years the county had no hard numbers and now they do. 143 rental properties in the unincorporated county, 105 operating right now, and 16 backyard cottages being rented out that aren't allowed to be. So a draft policy is coming in August. And the last of our quick updates, the board named its 911 director, Jeff King, as the county's 911 coordinator. So they approved the new college training facility and the courthouse repaint. And the treasurer's mid-year budget check was honestly pretty calm. Revenue and expenses both landing right about where they should be. So let's land the plane. Here's what's next. On July 28th, we'll be a public meeting about a rezone near Goldendale. On July 30th, a workshop on the Vacan County Administrator job. August 4th, the supplemental budget hearing. August 18th, Dallas Port Wastewater Rates. August 25th, the child care workshop. And the target for a short-term rental hearing. And in early September, that solar and battery moratorium we covered a couple of months ago expires, with the Planning Commission taking up a new ordinance. You can find all of it with numbers and links in the full written edition. As always, just head over to Schmania Dispatch.com. Yes, we cover Click A Tat too. You've been listening to a production at OpenGorge.org, home of the Schmania Dispatch and the Click A Tatler. We believe that informed communities are stronger communities. To support our work and stay up to date on everything happening in the gorge, head over to Schmaniedispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can also find us on Facebook at Facebook.comslash open gorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll talk to you next time.