The Real Story – A Column
With 20 hours’ notice this past Sunday and a 9 AM start time Monday morning, the Hillsboro City Council began a meeting to pass a Temporary Data Center and BESS Energy Storage System Moratorium. As the caffeine began to take effect and the microphones came on, a crowd of about 50 residents came to attention to participate in this meeting. No one had any notice except the Herald, and we were tipped off mid-day yesterday. The City of Hillsboro did not use its social media or engagement channels to notify people either. After 6 months of passionate City Council meetings in which residents have demanded action, from screaming and swearing to passionate science-based testimonies, it was time for something to happen.
Hillsboro City Council Passes Data Center Moratorium – Hillsboro Herald Photo
Many people gave up their workdays; I know I did. And they came from all walks of life. Some were City Hall regulars, while others were shaky and nervous, as this was their first time ever speaking at a public meeting, which can be very scary. Honored more seasoned folks, activists, industry experts, and even a large number of students from Hillsboro’s Glencoe High School made up today’s crowd, and boy did they deliver their thoughts with feelings, passion, and armed with statistics and information. A dozen spoke from home on Zoom, and about 30 took their 3 minutes to state their wishes.
After 2 hours of public testimony, Mayor Beach Pace and City Attorney Chad Jacobs opened with an explanation of the proposed 120-day Moratorium, which was written to stop any new Data Centers and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) for a period of 120 days. During the moratorium, the City staff will commission studies to understand how much land, power, and water Data Centers have taken up in Hillsboro. In addition, impacts to humans and residences, which were never part of the City’s criteria when it approved the first 33 buildings, will be considered. Factors like noise, vibration, impacts to wetlands and people, and more will hopefully be reviewed.
What was missing from the Moratorium- What Sinclair Did
The Herald spent hours on Sunday reviewing all 529 pages of the packet that the City of Hillsboro provided to the DLCD in Salem. This was a required step the City had to do under Oregon law. And it was done quietly and carefully. It was not done fast enough to stop the 7 or 8 new data Centers that have applied to the City in the past few days. Had Councilor Sinclair been granted her request for an emergency meeting in early May, this may have been done before any of these newest projects could slide in. But today she caught two crucial issues that were missing from the Moratorium as proposed, and in mid-meetings she led a discussion to get some very important fixes done before it passed.
- She made sure that Data Centers, as defined, included AI Computing and AI factories in the definitions of how this moratorium applies. You see, she knows, as we do and others working on this, that Data Centers are not the same as those uses. They may occupy the same type of buildings, but they use more power and energy, and they do not really store Data- mostly they handle AI problems and work tasks. So, acting on the information she had gathered and learned, she insisted that those terms be included. If not, the Moratorium may be meaningless- something we wrote about during the previous week.
- Kipperlyn also asked that the Moratorium make it clear what an accessory use is . The Moratorium does allow for “accessory uses” that can be Data Centers to an allowed Primary Use. But the Trojan Horse option was in the draft the City attorney had- a small factory could open, building parts of some kind, and then ask for a massive data center and call it an accessory use. Sinclair insisted on some restrictions based on size, power usage, and the accessory use’s percentage of the land.
City Manager Hammond, Mayor Pace, and City Attorney Chad Jacobs opened the discussion on the proposed changes; there was some debate, and another City lawyer drafted excellent language for Councilors to review. Surprisingly, none of them resisted, and the amendments, after some robust discussion, were included. The Vote was called, and the deal, as they say, is done… for now…