[Klickitat] 🖥 The County That Didn't Pause Data Centers - Klickitat BOCC 7/28 to 8/18

Three Washington counties hit pause on data centers this month. The Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners took up a moratorium request of its own... and chose a different tool entirely. We get into why that decision is harder than it looks, and what the county's own tax math has to do with it.

In This Episode

• Commissioner Todd Andrews asks for a data center moratorium, and the Board goes another way
• Why saying "no" can seem expensive for a rural county, and why saying "yes" doesn't always fix it either
• The county's land use map still dates to 1979, and a rezone that quietly corrected a 47-year0old error
• A mental health program that is built, funded, and cannot open
• Public health loses about three hundred and eighty thousand dollars in expected state money
• People move barricades and drive across closed bridges, and the liability lands on the county
• The August primary, certified

Resources & Links

• Read the full written Dispatch at SkamaniaDispatch.com
• Our property tax explainer, for the one percent lid behind all of this: https://skamania-dispatch.ghost.io/splitting-the-dinner-check-a-property-tax-explainer/
• Last month on this beat, when the county mapped out how a data center would get approved: https://skamania-dispatch.ghost.io/data-centers-come-knocking-kl/
• Klickitat County agendas, packets and meeting recordings: https://www.klickitatcounty.gov
• Elections and ballot information: https://www.klickitatcounty.gov/1136/ElectionsVoter-Registration

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, and welcome back to Open Gorge. I'm glad you're here. Today we're covering three weeks of the Click Attack County Board of County Commissioners, July 28th through August 18th. These are four regular meetings and a workshop. I'm excited to dig in today because these were some banner meetings for a topic that's sweeping the nation, data centers. And so I want to start with the one decision that everybody's going to be talking about. On August 18th, Commissioner Todd Andrews put a data center moratorium request in front of the board. He had filed it a week before, and the board did not adopt it. So here's the context that I think makes that interesting. In the same three weeks, Yakima County passed a six-month moratorium on data centers. Spokane County paused large data center permits on August 18th itself. Kittitas County Commissioners started looking at a ban, and right next door, Scamania County adopted a moratorium the very same morning that Clickitat declined to. So Klikatat is the outlier here, and the reason that they gave, I think, is worth hearing. One commissioner put it this way on the recording: quote, moratoriums are great, but I also see where they get us into kind of a quagmire that worries me. We can get down that road for a couple of years with the moratorium issues, end quote. What he wanted instead was a policy statement first. Get the commissioners to agree on what they actually believe about data centers, and then write an ordinance. His words, head us towards an ordinance rather than a ton of meetings that we'll be having over the next two years. And when he was asked why that approach would work, he actually pointed at the county landfill. So let's think about that for a second. Click At hired outside counsel to negotiate the landfill. They kept the landfill gas rights, they ended up what he called the highest tipping fee in the state of Washington. And tipping fee is a charge paid by waste haulers or generators to drop off waste at a disposal site, and it's typically calculated per ton. So very interesting. And that's the whole argument in one story. The board doesn't think its leverage comes from saying no to a project. It thinks that leverage will come from conditions that are written before the applications show up. And I really want to slow down because this is where it gets uncomfortable, but sometimes we know that things that are uncomfortable can be the most important and impactful issues we get to talk about, especially in local government. I'm taking a second to interject more context into the data center discussion because this is actually part of a longer-term project that we're working on over here at Open Gorge to center what we think is one of the most influential and unspoken factors in the data center issue nationwide. And that is the difficulty that all rural counties increasingly have in making ends meet, especially without some kind of windfall economy or an extraction economy like oil and gas, mining, as we've talked about in previous episodes, or in this case, compute. We're actually calling this investigative series the levy scissors. So you'll be able to dig into this more in the written edition, but just to say up front, I would say it's easy to hear a county turn down a moratorium and assume that they just aren't listening. But there's a piece of this that often doesn't get said out loud, and I think you deserve to have it. A Washington County's main tax levy can only grow by 1% a year. That's state law. We did a whole episode on it, and it's called Splitting the Dinner Check. We'll link it in the show notes. 1% does not keep up with what it costs to run a county. Even just in the last year of reporting, I have watched the costs of things like wages, insurance, fuel, software go up from 4% to 6% to sometimes 20%. Those all climb faster than that 1% that the levy is allowed to go up every year. And so there's only exactly one legal way to grow the tax base faster than that 1%. That's new construction. So that value that didn't exist last year is allowed to get added on top. So the tax code itself quietly pays counties to say yes to big new projects, new buildings, new housing. And you can imagine where that's all supposed to be a good thing in many ways, but here's what it means for ClickAtat specifically. The county has taken the maximum levy that the CAP allows for three years running. And that means there's nothing left on the table. In our own model that we ran, just holding services flat year over year would take about $140 million of new construction every single year to meet those rising costs. The county actually produces about $64 million. So you can see $64 million versus $140 million of new construction, it's just not going to keep up. We don't often get that kind of offer from various sources of income, be it an energy project, new housing, new businesses, new companies that make any kind of thing you can imagine. So that's a gap of more than double. Only two of Washington's 39 counties are building enough new construction that their taxes are able to keep up with the costs that have gone up for almost every single thing it takes to run a county year over year. So a county in that spot isn't choosing, in my opinion, between money and no money. Often when you're faced with something like a data center project, it's choosing between an unpopular industrial project and the slow squeeze that we've been documenting on ordinary things. Which brings me to the rest of this roundup because the squeeze tells the story all over it. Public health director Aaron Quinn told the board that the department lost about $380,000 in state money it was expecting. She thinks they can absorb it through the end of this year, and the state is signaling more shortfalls in 2027. The county's emergency management coordinator retires September 30th. That job is mostly paid for by a grant. It holds the FEMA contracts, and it's the reason that ClickAtat expects about $200,000 back for winter storm damage. And at the Board of Health, the behavioral health team laid out something that stopped me in my tracks. The county has a mental health outpatient program that is fully designed but cannot open. And it's not for lack of money, but for lack of one hire. Quote, we've just not been able to recruit a staff member to be able to open the program yet, unquote. The same session, it's the related gap. Nobody follows people after they leave inpatient care and the crisis team joins discharge planning, but after that, quote, we do not have anything to support them past that, unquote. So here's the other half of that tax story, and I think it cuts in the other direction as well. One big project is a step, not a slope. On our model that we ran, a $500 million development, so that's new construction, would buy ClickAt County about six years of tax revenue headroom. Then that gap opens right back up from a higher tax base. Nothing about one data center changes the underlying math. Only a permanent pipeline of new construction of any variety of types of projects will cover that gap, which means that a county that balances its budget this way has to keep saying yes to different projects forever. So there's no clean answer here, and I would say that anybody trying to sell you one is skipping a step. So we're moving over now to land use because this is my favorite detail in the month, and I think it ties together so much of that backlog that we're talking about that the county has been dealing with week after week. On July 28th, the board approved a rezone near Goldendale, routine mostly, but while staff were working the file, they found something interesting. About 40 adjacent acres had been zoned suburban residential since zoning started in this county around 1979, while carrying a farm and forest designation the entire time, and those things don't really go together. So the board fixed a 47-year-old mapping error in the same motion. And that's not a one-off. The county's long-range planner told the board that Clickatat's land use plan also dates to 1979. On that map, whole communities show up as a single dot. There's no boundaries at all. So redrawing it is going to be the heart of the work that they're doing now. You can see why when we're working backwards, suddenly new issues like different kinds of construction projects, tax gaps, data centers get us to look backwards at the land use law and the code that we're dealing with that can be often from a long time ago that needs updates. So it's my hope that all of this discussion will inspire you to participate and to follow along as all of us try to bring our ideas of how land should be used into a modern century. So, two more quick ones before we go. Public works reported that people moved barricades and drove across closed bridges during repairs. Three times at three different bridges. And because of it, quote, the county has now assumed any liability for the last two bridges we've done. That's a big bummer, y'all. Please do not go around barricades. Those barricades are there to protect the crews working underneath. And as you can see, moving barricades and driving across closed bridges can have a really big impact on all of us. So on the money side, the board passed a supplemental budget with no public testimony at all. The budget manager described it as $760,000 moving to the airport, the hospital district, and 911 dispatch. That breakdown comes from the recording, not the minutes, so we will update that as we get those in. So last thing, the primary was certified on August 18th for the county. Turnout came in just under 50%, which beat the statewide average by a lot. Ballots accepted, more than three-quarters came back through drop boxes. So auditor Heather Job had one piece of advice worth repeating, in my opinion. Mail early or use a drop box. Of the ballots that got rejected, most of them were simply too late. In the sheriff's race, Dwayne Matilovich finished well ahead of Tony Warren. In the Commissioner District 2, incumbent Lori Zahler led Andy Kallanan. And in the public utility district race, challenger Logan Siebert finished ahead of incumbent Dan Gunkel, who's been on that board since 1990. That one's worth watching because the PUD, not the county, is actually who decides who pays for things like new power lines. So, what's coming up? August 25th this week is going to be a big day. There's going to be two public hearings, one on extending the battery storage moratorium, one on the recreation park ordinance, plus a very anticipated childcare workshop led by frequent commenter and local activist Gabrielle Gilbert. On September 3rd, a workshop on data centers and the dog shelter. September 21st and 28th, the Planning Commission takes up the solar and battery ordinance, then the overlay zone. And of course, we're leading up to the general election on November 3rd. Ballots mail October 14th. All of this with the sourcing and the links and deeper discussion about our levy scissors is in the written edition. So you've been listening to a production of opengorge.org, home of the Schemania Dispatch, and the Click A Tattler. 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 SchemaniaDispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can also find us on Facebook at Facebook.comslash OpenGorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll talk to you next time.