City Council - Regular Meeting

There's room in the auditorium as well. This will be projected into the auditorium so you can still be... Sorry, sometimes I don't talk close enough. Find a seat if you can. If not, there are some seats in the auditorium and this is broadcast over there so you can watch the proceedings from over there. Good evening. Before we begin tonight's work session, I want to thank everyone for taking the time to attend, whether you're here in person or joining us virtually. This meeting is also being broadcast in the auditorium on TVC TV channel 30 on Zoom and on the city's YouTube channel. We recognize tonight's topic has generated significant interest and we appreciate the large turnout. I want to take a moment to outline a few expectations so that the meeting can run smoothly for everyone. To ensure attendees both in the room and watching remotely can clearly follow the discussion, we ask that you please refrain from clapping, calling out, or making verbal outbursts. They do interrupt the flow of the meeting and they interfere with the audio for those who are trying to watch this virtually. If you would like to express support for a comment or a viewpoint, we ask that you use a quiet and non-disruptive method such as snapping your fingers. During this work session, there will be no public comment. However, at 7 p.m., we do move to the auditorium. We hold a council meeting and you are invited to speak by filling out a yellow card at the public comment. We know many of you are looking for clarity and information related to data centers and enterprise zones. We hope tonight's session will address many of those questions and provide a clear understanding of the issues. I want to remind us sort of where we are in this process. On April 17th, council agreed to set a work session to consider a pause on data center applications. That is tonight's session. For the last six weeks, our staff worked diligently to prepare for this session. Last week, council held a confidential attorney-client executive session to understand the legal ramifications of potential actions we may take. That's a routine step that occurs several times a year, and it gave council clarity on several issues. Much of the preparation happened outside this room and out of public view, but it did happen. Staff worked hard to prepare for this meeting while continuing to keep the city running, and I want to thank them for that extraordinary effort. This council sets city policy. Staff administers and implements that policy. Directing criticism at our staff for implementing city council policy is not only off target and unfair, it's simply ineffective. Because they don't set the policy, they can't change policy. So please direct your critique and your policy suggestions and solutions to us as a council. Hillsborough's economic development policy spans decades through multiple city councils. The council, The city council unanimously voted to renew our enterprise zones in 2017. And in 2024, the city council unanimously voted to extend the zone. But four of the current council members joined in 2025. And we have not yet had the chance to weigh in on the enterprise zone terms or on additional regulations on these rapidly evolving data processing facilities. The Hillsborough Enterprise Zone will be up for renewal in 2028. The council will have to vote on it in 2027. Three decades of economic development policy have made Hillsborough one of the most fiscally resilient cities in the state. We have modest taxes, excellent libraries, well-funded fire and public safety, abundant parks. Not everyone favors growth, but we should weigh those real benefits as we consider trade-offs in future regulations. Governing is a process. I want to hear how people weigh their economic development the economic development against other values that we all hold dear. Good decisions require a shared understanding of facts, so the sourcing of information really does matter to us. In the meantime, while we engage in this process, there is a state moratorium on data center enterprise zone tax abatement applications for about a year, and our current enterprise zone ordinance, like I said, is up for renewal in two years, but it has to be voted on next year. We'll use this time, to review our current policies and consider new regulations and policies as we prepare to complete a complete review of our enterprise zone ordinance in 2027. I'm now gonna turn it over to Simone Brooks to begin this work session.

Good evening, Council. Thank you, Council President Harris, Simone Brooks, Assistant City Manager for the record. Before we begin, I'd like to let everyone know that there are flyers available on the table to my right over there. That include a QR code that links to the city's data centers and Hillsborough frequently asked questions web page, which was updated yesterday with the most current information available. Staff from our finance, economic and development, water and communications teams have worked diligently to prepare both the FAQ and tonight's work sessions. We have a significant amount of information to cover, and we have worked to present it in a way that is informative, accessible, and responsive to the interests that both council and community members have expressed in data centers, specifically data centers in Hillsborough. So if we can bring up the presentation. Thank you. Okay, there we are. Great, thank you. So in response to council direction, tonight's work session will provide an overview of data centers at Hillsboro and their role in the community, and information on data center development, applicable regulations, community impacts, and potential policy considerations moving forward. Ideally, we will conclude this portion of the presentation and discussion, council discussion, before transitioning to the regular council meeting. After the regular council's meeting, staff will provide an overview of the Enterprise Zone program and its relationship to data center development. As we move through the presentation, staff will be looking for feedback from council on where additional research may be helpful and whether there is interest by the majority of council in exploring specific local policy options or providing policy direction on any of the topics discussed this evening. Chad, do you have anything to add? Okay, then I'll hand it over to Dan Diaz, Economic and Community Development Director.

Thank you, Simone, and good evening, Council President Harris and Councilors. We'll do a quick round of introduction for the first set of presenters this evening, and then we'll jump into the presentation itself. For the record, my name is Dan Diaz. I'm the Economic and Community Development Director at the City of Hillsborough. To my right is... Nikki Iverson.

I'm the Water Director.

And I'm Rachel Marble. I'm the Code and Quality Project Manager in the Community Development Department.

So as we jump into this evening's presentation, as Simone noted, we will start with background. And we want to thank the community for the extensive amounts of questions and inquiries on information. We're hoping much of this background, while some of it may be common knowledge, will help to set a common base of understanding. And then we'll get into the infrastructure and land use components, as Simone also noted, in the agenda. I also want to thank the many staff that have helped and contributed to the information presented tonight, including pulling this presentation together. So we start with data centers and there is terminology as we refer to data centers that we wanted to clarify on the front end of this presentation. Common terminology for different types of data centers include those that are shown on this screen. Co-location data centers are those data centers that usually will have an independent operator and can house many different tenants that use that facility for their data storage, data processing needs. We also see enterprise data centers, which are a data center that is intended and owned and operated really for one singular entity. That could be for a single business or for a single medical facility or something like that. So it's more integrated and usually more single purpose focused. And then there are hyperscale data centers. And while in Hillsborough we don't see a lot of hyperscale data centers, these usually tend to be much larger in scale and size. And it can range in functionality. They can operate similar to that of the co-location data centers where there's multiple tenants that can be located within it doing a whole host of different functions. Or they can also be large-scale data centers committed towards one or only two types of tenants. And we'll talk a little bit more about that this evening. We want to start here because these types of data centers, and the terminology recognizes that Hillsboro, while a location of increased data center activity, can very much differentiate itself from other parts of our state, in our country, and the nature of these type of data centers and how they operate. One last thing that I'll note is that co-location data centers, as we've seen in Hillsboro, oftentimes also are related to the infrastructure. So some have heard about the trans-Pacific cables that connect Hillsboro and the North American continent with multiple parts of the entire Pacific Rim in the world. And so those data center facilities also are a critical infrastructure interface for some of that type of uniqueness to the Hillsboro market, which you would not necessarily find in some of our peer markets.

Excuse me, are we reserving questions for later, or can we ask?

Do you have natural stops here? We will have breaks in between each of the sessions to allow questions and conversations on any of those points with counsel. So we start at a statewide level. This map is a map produced by the State Department of Land Conservation and Development as they track data center activity across the state. And it really seeks to highlight where some of the greatest concentrations of data center investment and activity are happening across Oregon. You can see the blue columns are an attempt to indicate the degree of concentration and activity that is not necessarily the full physical size and scale, but it's more on the number of entities there. At the end of 2025, Department of Land Conservation and Development, also known as DLCD, had indicated that there are believed to be about 123 data center facilities operating across the state, primarily concentrated in central Oregon region, in and around the Prineville area, in the Umatilla Basin, around Morrill County, in the Dalles, and then in the metro region, with Hillsborough being a major DLC in tracking that also provided this information to the governor's data center advisory committee task force in April that sought to identify and make some linkages between data center trends that they're seeing from a state level to land use needs in different areas. On the left-hand side, you'll see that they identified that the total land demand for data centers across the state was upwards of 9,000 acres and Those that are in Hillsborough and Washington County were around 436 to 486 acres. This aligns, while not perfectly, very closely with a lot of the data center information data that we track locally. And I think it's important to note as part of this, referring back to the different data center types I spoke to a moment ago, that when you look at all of the data centers currently known and aware of in Hillsborough and aggregate, that it comes to about 480 acres in total. That is equivalent or close to equivalent one of the hyperscale data centers you see in those other markets in Oregon. So for example, one of the Apple Pridingville data centers we believe to be just around 360 to 375 acres. That is almost our entire makeup of all the different data center sites in Hillsboro. Similarly, the Amazon data center in Arlington, Oregon, we believe is around just upwards of 400 acres there too. One of those data centers in other parts of the state can equate to 20 data centers that we have here in Hillsboro. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. So that becomes important as we think about land use and as we think about comparing and possibly contrasting what we see and hear in terms of some of those other very active data center markets and how that does or does not translate here locally to the data center presence and activity and impacts and constraints that we are seeing and hearing from our community locally. In Hillsborough, so this is now the final set of maps produced by the state. This seeks to, from the Department of Land Conservation Development, show the data center approximate locations in the Portland metropolitan region that they're tracking. Hillsborough is shown in the pinkish red to the left side of this map. Beaverton is shown in blue. Portland is shown in green to the right. And what you can see here is that Hillsborough is not the only community in the region that has data centers by any means, but that we do have a concentration of data centers, especially located within our North Hillsborough industrial area. And so you'll note in the legend that this says probable data center location. If there are questions around this data, I would have to probably check with our state partners and follow up. But what we'll show you in a minute is our data center information that we track locally, and we do believe that there's a pretty close correlation and accuracy of what the state is tracking and reporting versus what we tend to have here at the local level as well. I want to note that in Hillsboro, and this goes back to the last slide as well, the largest data center site is just over 90 acres in size. And so I talked about some of those larger ones in Umatilla and Morrow and Prineville and the like. The average data center campus size of those different points you see on this map is right around 22 acres. So we have some, as we'll talk more about in a minute, as small as under five acres. Many of them are in that kind of mid-size of around 20 acres. And we do have a couple that we sometimes refer to locally as hyperscale that are in that 75 to 100 acres. But again, comparatively speaking, and when you look at it from an industry perspective, nationally, those are not necessarily truly hyperscale as you might read or see in other regions. So this is a location across the region. Now we go to Hillsborough data and information and maps. And this seeks to show a point of a lot of interest and also a point of some pretty significant confusion across many sources and conversations locally. So we want to acknowledge that. And this map seeks to highlight the currently known sites as of yesterday. On this map, the sites that are in green are those data center sites that are standalone data centers, either co-location, enterprise, or hyperscale, as we noted, that are built out to some degree. They can have one building, they can have multiple buildings, and those are single identified sites or campuses. That can be a point of confusion at times in other conversational spaces. The sites that are highlighted in yellow are those data center sites that are at some point of permitting and or construction. And so as we'll talk a little bit later in the presentation, a data center that's coming in to build new there is a pretty extensive development process that they have to go to. Even if a data center is coming in and going into an existing building, say perhaps a vacant call center, there is still permitting and requirements that they have to undertake, both at the city level, sometimes at other levels of government as well, before they can just go in and start operating. So the yellow sites on this map indicate those that, as we sit here right now, are in some form of permitting and or construction. Meaning they're not fully realized yet, but they're definitely in process. And then lastly, sites that are in blue on this map are those that have been recently acquired and or are vacant, meaning that we see that an entity that we believe to be connected to a data center type of a business or operator has likely acquired those properties, maybe has started to ask some questions on those, but they are not yet in the formal permitting process, nor are they built out in terms of an operational facility for a data center. So we did want to flag that too. This becomes especially relevant later when we talk about some of the data center enterprise-owned conversations and those applications, also because we recognize that the community has been concerned and raving that there's more coming This is the full radar of what we see in terms of that, what's built, what's in process, what might be on the horizon and what's not. I want to also note that you'll see most of them are concentrated up into the North Hills rental area. As Rachel will talk about earlier, this is primarily a function of our zoning and the land use policies that you and previous councils have set in that we are seeking to concentrate industry and these more significant facilities and constructions on the northern half of town outside of our urban centers, outside of our neighborhoods and the like with the appropriate buffering and the appropriate infrastructure to serve them. One thing I want to note, though, is there's also sometimes a misconception that the city gets a say in where data centers go in a site. And the zoning allows that. We are responding to developers or operators of the data centers of where they would like to go. We have very little say in terms of a specific site going for a specific use of the data center. That is informed by the policy that you all set. Lastly, I want to note that this map also exemplifies the quite compact and efficient way in which we have planned out, from a land use standpoint, the urban uses across our city. You'll see the airport in the lower left, many of our neighborhoods in the kind of left, bottom, and right, the west, south, and east, respectively, Amber Glen Tampines in there. But you'll also see that these data center sites are intermixed within the broader industrial area. And again, as I noted earlier, some of this is because that's where the zoning allows them. Some of this is because that's where the infrastructure that they need is also available. And some of this is because it's very proximate to other industries of which we see some synergy and overlap between the data center operations and or some of our other target industries. So in Hillsborough, this is updated numbers again as of yesterday. In our frequently asked questions in May, we showed that we had 18 data center sites that were in for development or built. This does not include those prospective ones because there is no assurance or guarantee that those sites may become data centers. So we have 71 official sites that are data centers that are either built out already or in that permitting or under construction category. This brings the total acreage to 470. And the reason why we say gross acreage is that doesn't mean we have 470 acres of data center. There are setbacks. There are natural areas that we have to protect. There are loading areas and equipment yards within that. And so this is the total acreage that the land ownership comprise of. If you want the specific actual data center usage, it will be a bit smaller than that. That's what your staff sometimes refer to as net acreage. So I just wanted to flag that for a clarification point too that can cause some confusion. As I noted earlier, you see the sites of the known data centers that are either permit in permitting or built ranging from about three and a half to 91 acres in size. There is a link here, much like on the flyers that Simone to the updated FAQ for the community. And I did want to just close this slide out with some recent trends. center industry really over about the last five years in Polesboro. Much like the picture you see at the bottom of this flexential data center at Starr Boulevard and Huffman Road, we are seeing nearly all new data center development recently coming in being multi-story. That is more expensive to build because the structural loads and the type of construction can shift, but we do believe that that's a recognition of the land constraints and the space constraints we see here. We're seeing that more efficient building form happening. We've now actually seen was generally coming in as well. We're seeing a blend of greenfield and repurposing of existing building sites. So they definitely are going into some of the vacant industrial lands. That is a piece that we have to monitor very closely because that is a very finite supply resource to our community, to our near-term and long-term growth and economic plans. We also are seeing data fix going into and repurposing some existing facilities. We've seen it in some of the office buildings. We have pretty low vacancy rate there still. We've seen them look at existing call centers that might be underutilized or vacant as well. And then lastly is that we're seeing increasingly the data centers starting to be paired, especially some of the larger ones for us that kind of upwards of 50 acres or so being paired with additional energy infrastructure. We'll talk a little bit more about this later in the presentation, but some of that is coming from state and utility requirements. Other than that, we believe it's coming from also operational necessity. And then lastly is the dynamics of demand, needs, and facilities. Our staff, while we are city staff, tries to track this industry like so many of our other industries, whether it's housing or advanced manufacturing, to see where the industry is going, to see the importance or the impacts to our community. And we try to track those. We are continuing to see that smaller footprint, more co-location style data center coming in. We are continuing to see the need for those type of facilities being proximate to our industrial areas. We'll talk more about that in a minute. And we're continuing to see them having a degree of receptivity to some of our development and design standards that Rachel applied earlier. These might be opportunities for us to respond to even last... council meeting in one of the public comments there was a community member that was raising why are we not looking at more renewable energy generation solar on the rooftops or the design aspects those are definitely things that that we were appreciative to hear the community sharing and asking for that we are continuing to research and try to keep up on as well And then lastly is land price escalation. This is true across all industries, but as we are seeing less and less landed capacity for the demands of this industry, especially as society is continuing to shift more towards digital types of means and needs, we are seeing the price for these projects, both the land and the construction going up, much like we see across many other sectors. So I want to bring us back to the regional map. This is the state's map that shows in the area. And I now want to just take a brief moment to go a little bit deep into some of the correlations we see across our industries. This is not to say data centers are great. This is not to say they're terrible. It's a observational tracking piece when we think about data centers in our community and what that may mean or not. So this is, again, the data center locations in our region. And you can see where they're located. located in downtown Portland in the core, in and around kind of the 217 and some of the tech corridors in and around Beaverton and definitely then in our tech corridor in North Hillsboro. This map comes from some information that our team tracks and is done in coordination with the state that shows the high-tech cluster across the region and especially in the state. So this is not data centers now. This is the location of advanced manufacturing facilities, especially in and around like the semiconductor and high-tech ecosystem. Not to say that there's a direct one-to-one correlation, but what you can see is very similar locational factors starting to arise. In our North Hillsborough area, we see the call out. The blue dots on this map are semiconductor suppliers. The red dots on this map are those that are contributing electronic assembly or certain components into that supply chain. And then the yellow stars are the IDMs or integrated device manufacturers. Those are the entities making the chip. So those would be Intel or Corvo here in Hillsborough or Gyro Semiconductor. It would be analog devices in Beaverton. It would be on semiconductor aggression, as you see over on the right. But when we move forward, with some of those co-location elements, is that just circumstance? Is that just because that's where there's industrial zoning in the region, or maybe that's just only where there's the infrastructure that's scaled industrially? Or is there a bigger story, perhaps of greater importance to other underlying community policies and desires and needs? And so this slide shows independent data that comes from a international consulting entity. They're independent called JLL or Jones Lang LaSalle. And this came out of a data center report that they published last year where they track data center activity in that industry across all regions. This one was particularly tied to major data center regions in the United States. As part of that broader analysis and presentation, the Pacific Northwest here was really couched and framed as it really is primarily Hillsborough. As you saw, there's other pieces around, but this was intended largely to our sub-market here. And the colors in each of these, Northern California was primarily in and around the Bay Area, and then Atlanta was Atlanta Metro, where we see a bunch of data center activity going if you follow national news. So that's great just in terms of, okay, these are different regions where data center activity is happening. The color-codedness of each of this graph, though, is, and it might be a little bit small, especially for those of you online, the tan is cloud computing, whereas that dark color is kind of a dark, tealish green almost dark blue is technology that means that's data center processing capacity that is supporting various technology industries that include biotechnology includes semiconductors as we just noted and many others and then you can go through the rest of them lighter blue is telecommunications things like our cell phones virtual meetings like we're on here and the like healthcare, retail, e-commerce, I won't run through all of them, energy support. But one of the interesting findings that we found and that we continue to explore more deeply is the fact that Hillsborough in the Pacific Northwest was a significant outlier in that 80% of the data center capacity here is apparently going directly into support these different technology industries directly. we were the largest by far at 80%. The second closest was the Silicon Valley at 30%. As you can see there, 30% technology support and then largely cloud support, where we have 50% cloud support and 5% telecom. Some of that also gets back to the point I made earlier about the interface with the trans-Pacific cables. So for us, this continues to reinforce what we hear from some of our other industries that more and more, regions and areas that have significant amounts of advanced manufacturing, significant amounts of high technology type of production or research and development or both are becoming increasingly reliant on this as a core infrastructure, much like they would with the necessity of water or the necessity of power or the necessity of workforce. And so we're continuing to monitor that, but recognizing that's still a very early set of information that we're starting to track. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Nikki to talk a little bit about water and the impacts that we've heard and the questions we've heard around water usage by ditch spinners. We have questions at this point. Oh, we have a few.

You mentioned that there are cables running from here in the Pacific Rim and to China. I heard from Elaine Harvey from the Columbia River and Tropic Fish Commission, and she is their watershed department manager she told me about what's going on in columbia and where data centers are taking water from the not necessarily the banks but a little ways up but they're taking water from the columbia she suggested um she said well uh if that's happening then there's the burden i said what burden i said what burden are you talking about and so if china they is able to use a data center from over here, the water, the energy is all happening here. So I want to know, is the community of Hillsborough bearing the burden of losing water, bearing the cost for energy, and for countries that are overseas businesses? That's just one question. And I have some others. I don't know what you, I came in a little late and I'm sorry, but I was curious about what protections did we list in the data center agreements in relation to water and energy?

So, counselor, are you done? Would you like me to try to respond to this?

I'll give you another one. Okay. Existing data center agreements already established. Do these agreements allow data centers flexibility to change without notifying the city? I'll wait on the others.

Okay, look to Simone chat 1st, but I'm happy to write a brief response to some of those where we can and then move into. Go. So, Councilor, first of all, thank you for the questions. I'll do my best to answer those. There are a couple that I might want to understand further just to make sure we put an accurate answer back to your question and also back into the public conversation. So, Nikki, our water director, is going to touch on the water aspect of this. I do not believe we're losing water, and I would flag to the point of, as Nikki's going to talk about here in a minute, the way in which data centers use urban infrastructure and water in Hillsborough very well may be different than data centers that are located in rural areas up and down the Columbia Gorge. And we are working very actively to try to understand and be informed and help to inform our public of the data centers in Hillsborough. We do look to some of those areas a little bit, but we are not expert in those. So we'll do our best to answer those in the next part of the presentation. The bearing or the burning, the energy burn, that one I'll maybe want to follow up and take offline a little bit to make sure I understand because data centers do interconnect with many other countries and regions that we're using. I mean, think about if you have somebody that's traveling abroad and you're sending them emails, or think about if you have a business operation overseas in here. I mean, you communicate all of that potentially is using the data centers. So we want to understand that a little bit better.

I can tell you now, I talked to somebody who was an electrician who worked at the Google data center out there. And he told me that they were burning so much energy. They had a conversation. Excess energy, can we give that to low income communities? And they did not want to do that. I just want to understand what are we doing when we have excess of energy that's being burned to cool these data centers? I just want to understand the impact of the energy. And are we going to have excessive energy that we can for low income?

Given the power of conversation, let me hold off on that because I think some of that we might be able to get to in the rest of the presentation. Other parts we definitely probably want to follow up and just make sure we get the appropriately requested information. The benefit overseas, as we noted, there is a lot of interconnectedness both ways, but we can try to dissect that a little bit more. The protections and the changes to the agreements, I think you're referring to the enterprise zone agreements. Is that appropriate? So I'll try to address that one briefly now, but I think that might be more appropriate in that part of the presentation.

But data centers.

Data centers in that space, but just making sure that I want to make sure the agreements you're referring to are the agreements in the data centers, the application, the contract. If an entity makes an investment there, they have to basically stay with whatever they show in that application and that investment. So if there are significant changes in the level of investment, as Val will present on later this evening, that could change or disqualify or disrupt the incentive aspect of that. but typically in that enterprise-owned space, there is not the discretion or the latitude, nor really the focus on things like water usage. That's coming out of the permitting, and you'll hear Nikki and Rachel speak to here in just a minute. So that one, I think the answer is no, if I'm understanding it correctly, but it's no because those are not appropriate scopes of review, and there's not that degree of flexibility or discretion for staff when we're processing those enterprise-owned type of requests. I hope that helps to answer that.

A little.

Hey, I'm so sorry. I can't be there in person tonight. The previous slide, Dan, that you shared with the 80%, yeah, thank you, that one. And you talk about the cloud and then technology. With the cloud, are you, is AI included in that? Or is AI kind of a part of all of it? Because I know that's a big, I mean, that's, when we talk about data centers, we're talking about AI these days a lot of the time.

Yeah, that's a great question, Counselor Case. Artificial intelligence can mean a lot of things. It almost warrants its own definition slide like I started this evening out with. What I can speak to is that we have many industries that are employing Tens of thousands of people in our community and manufacturing all sorts of products right here that are using both artificial intelligence in different ways there and using the data capacity that's showing up presumptively in that 80% that's on this slide. So the answer there would be part of the AI likely does fall into that 80%. But there is also artificial intelligence happening into cloud computing and other things, telecommunications, energy sector, that AI will be kind of across these areas. It's not focused just into one, I guess, is the best answer I have without getting into a very deep, deep session.

The cloud is more about the cloud storage kind of data.

Cloud storage, cloud computing, some social media type of programs, things like that.

Okay. Thank you. Appreciate the clarification.

Councilor Sinclair?

No question? Okay. Sorry. Any other questions? Oh, sorry. Councilor Byron, breathe.

Excuse me. So the 470 gross acreage that I was showing, does that include the blue highlighted also?

It does not. Because the blue, those are properties owned. They're not developed yet. And so we don't indicate them necessarily as a data center because they could get sold to somebody else. They could get developed into something else. So we don't want to prematurely categorize them as a data center until we know that they're at least in the permitting phase going towards being a data center. That's the way in which we try to do the same thing like with housing. We wouldn't say, oh, our planning indicates that there's 14,000 potential units out there in the community. We don't say there's 14,000 housing units out there because they're not built yet or not even in for permitting. So that's a little bit of why we categorize and track them the way we do. Does that answer your question? Okay.

I just have one more. Do you have another? Okay. So did we inform the public, I'm just reading this as I wrote it, did we inform the public of multi-decade agreements? And if so, how many agreements has the public received notice about up to the current data centers proposed?

The short answer to that is I believe that's related to the enterprise zone as well. Counselor, I just want to correct that. Is that correct?

And data centers.

And data centers. Yes. Yeah. Part of why I ask is because sometimes in the land use and the permitting spaces, Rachel will talk to me when we get to her part of the presentation, we can approve construction projects that might be phased and take many years to fully build out. So I just want to make sure we're understanding and answering your question.

We're still talking about the same areas. So what about outside enterprise?

So perhaps that question might be best saved if it is enterprise zone specific to the enterprise zone in the presentation.

Dan, if I could just interrupt, please. Councilor O'Hare, before you came in, Simone went over the general outline, and we're trying to get through the land use and sort of normal regulatory processes at the data center before the council meeting. And then after the council meeting, we're going to get into enterprise zone stuff. So there'll be plenty of time to talk about the enterprise zone stuff after the council meeting, if that's okay.

Yes, it is. I just want to say I submitted these questions.

Yeah, and staff has them.

weeks ago, and so I brought them here with me tonight.

No, that's great. We'll do our best to address them. I just want to make sure that you sort of knew the outline of what we're trying to do. So we're not trying to avoid the questions that you're asking right now. We're just planning to address all those after the council meeting.

I have one question, Dan. The map that you showed showing the different locations, the red, the green, the purple, Do we have, are any of those, what did you call them, enterprise centers or are they all co-location data centers? I assume they're not hyperscale ones, although the co-locations.

What's the largest co-location center? How many megawatts? I don't have the megawatts with me this evening. I'm sorry, I don't know if we can follow up with that. But from an acreage standpoint, the larger couple of sites are in the green and the yellow kind of upper part of the map here. But definitely. Part of the answer to your question, sorry, the first part of your question was.

Are any of these enterprise data, so data centers owned only by one manufacturer?

We have a couple. Adobe is one that has their data center here, for example. I'm not aware of many other exclusive enterprise that are standalone like that.

Is that one showing on this map?

That one's showing on this map. It's located just, if you can see the street names, I know they get a little bit small here, I'm sorry, but to the upper right of the airport foot

I see it.

It's a green light. That's fine.

I was just wondering, I wanted to make sure all of the data centers were on this map, just not the co-location. That's right. All right. Thank you.

Yeah. Correction on that point, just for the public. Co-location on here, the integrated one. So if I'm a regional headquarters or a hospital or a research facility and I have a data center component that's really supporting my other use, those are not shown on this map or in these numbers. Okay.

Understood.

I think we have some good questions.

Sorry, who was first? I didn't see it at all. Councilor Segalo.

Yeah, hey, y'all. Thank you for this, for organizing this information for us. Really well done. I actually had a little bit of a tear come out of my eye when I looked at it today because it was just so comprehensive. And I really appreciate it. And I sent in a a QTS case study document, and I also send in my policy recommendations on a PDF form. So a lot of the stuff that I'm going to share is already in that document, so you all can reference it later. But I wanted to ask specifically about the map and locations. And, you know, one of the policy recommendations I'm making is to update land use and design standards for the modern data centers to account for the different types of data centers, because I feel like that's where we need to kind of make the policy change. But curious to know right now, what's driving companies to choose the location that they're choosing? Do you have any insights on that?

Counselor, thank you for the question. I'll try to be brief with this one and we can elaborate perhaps more in the presentation if we want to go deeper. The driver of locations in Hillsborough can be variable depending on the type of data center, but generally it rolls up to, at times, perhaps proximity to customers or infrastructure, the availability of sites, And then incentives can factor into that. Those are what we hear and believe to be some of the biggest decision factors of entities seeking to locate in Hillsborough, as I noted. I can't speak to the data centers that are in Beaverton, Portland, and elsewhere in the region just because we don't have direct engagement or insights into that.

Okay, so it's kind of a mix of close to where they're going to have their business ecosystem partners and then also whatever lands available. Those are kind of like the two

Some, if they do have proximity, they're serving a biotech facility or apparel industry customer. They may have a locational need to be close by. We hear that often across some of our target industries. Others might be here simply because they want to tie into the multiple cable network that's running north-south along the West Coast and or into the Pacific cables. Again, there's many reasons that can vary. But those are the general reasons we hear the most.

Thanks for confirming that, because you know, part of what I found in my research is that, you know, we're probably top five, top 10 for companies choosing location, and the incentives aren't the number one priority, right? It's the ecosystem that's here, it's the cables, it's a lot of things. So I think it's just important information to have for us in the back of our mind, if you think about what kind of updates we want to make to the enterprise zone policy when it's time to change them, right? So thanks again for the info.

Thank you, Councilor Sinclair.

Thank you. Good evening. My apologies for not being able to attend in person tonight. Per the Hillsborough Data Center FAQ webpage and per Director Diaz mentioning at the beginning of the presentation, the city states the staff has no discretion to deny an application that meets state and local standards. However, since Oregon Administrative Rule 123-668-1000 Section 5 explicitly states that the zone manager only has administrative authority, quote, except as explicitly prescribed by the zone sponsor. So my question is, can this council acting as the zone sponsor legally use that provision to explicitly prescribe administrative sign-offs and mandate a public vote on all future enterprise zone applications? Can you please guide council on what steps would be taken?

Council Sinclair, the short answer to your question is yes, but we'll get into that again after the council meeting when we talk about enterprise zones.

Okay. Thank you so much for allowing me the time.

Time check. We've got about maybe 15 minutes here, so I don't know where we're going to pivot to Nikki then.

Yeah. Water is next up.

Thank you.

For the record, Nikki Iverson, Water Director. We've received multiple public records requests on data center water usage, and we've broken that out from our other customer categories for your information. I've learned a lot about data centers this spring, and so I'm learning that there's quite a big variance on water usage depending on your climate and location in Oregon and other parts of the country. It really wasn't on our radar because they don't use a lot of water in Hillsborough. So 1.8% of our annual demand went to data centers. Not only is that for the data center use, but it's also the irrigation of their landscaping in that area. What we've learned as part of the governor's task force is many of the data centers in Hillsborough are using ambient air for cooling. And so you've heard there's other data centers in different parts of Oregon that are using quite a bit of water. And that's just not what we're seeing here. in Oregon. And you can see all of our different customer classes on here as well. Thanks. Wait, did we go one too far? Yep. All right, the other question that we received is really, and this kind of shows about our demand in a different format with the different customer classes, that 0.46 at the bottom is data centers used in 2025. You can see on here the industrial use of all of our industrial customers in the city of Hillsborough and the rest of our customer classes. Our historic peak day demand was 33 million gallons per day. And that 10.7 you can see at the very top is how much remaining in JWC capacity we have before the Willamette comes online. And this question, I think, came up from at the budget committee. There was a question about how much capacity we'll have, not only with our current system, but the Willamette. And our first phase of the Willamette will bring 15 million gallons per day on. And then after that, we have a build-up, total build-up capacity of 36.2 million gallons per day. So the way we built the Willamette is we can phase in the treatment plant over time as growth occurs. Now, the 15 MGD, because the Willamette's primary purpose was seismic resiliency, covers our winter day demand after an earthquake. There has been some, I think, misinformation out there that this was built for data centers. We made the decision to go to the Willamette in 2013 after a three-year alternatives analysis study. And to be honest, data centers weren't on our radar at that time. And when the cost of the Willamette went up about $300 million during the pandemic, we deferred the pipeline that served the industrial area of our city because the primary purpose was serving people, hospitals, and schools after a major earthquake. Some other questions we received from the public. That's a little different than other parts of the state. So that's why I wanted to differentiate how things are a little different here in Hillsborough. Data centers are required to use potable water for their usage. In other areas, they could be using, you know, I don't know if they're using groundwater, reuse water, raw water, things like that. But here they use safe drinking water. So it's already been treated to a very high quality state. All of our industrial discharge goes into our sewer system. So you may have read some articles where things are impacting the groundwater. We do not discharge sewer into our groundwater system. We're also committed to environmental compliance and stewardship of our natural resources. Something that's come up in a lot of questions is just I think it's helpful to understand all the permitting processes that go into place. And this is why we manage our own water supply, because we want to make sure that we're compliant with all these rules. So there's a flyer here that shows all the different types of permitting and tribal consultations, all the different things we went through in our water supply agreement. And here's a great graphic that our public works department put through on really kind of illustrates how stormwater and sewer is handled in the city of Hillsborough. So essentially, the sewer discharges are sent out through a sewer lateral and collected into pipelines, and then they are transmitted to wastewater treatment plants and treated by Clean Water Services. They have an extensive discharge permit that they have to meet multiple requirements. Our stormwater facilities, they collect water in catch basins, and they also go into stormwater lines, and then they go into stormwater treatment facilities. Again, this is to illustrate that we don't discharge to groundwater in these areas. We also do extensive plan reviews in the Water Department and Public Works Department. When these companies come in, we look at how they're going to use their water. They have to tell us if they're using anything on site that we have to inspect. We go onto their properties, we inspect those properties to make sure that anything that we don't think should be happening shouldn't be happening. So the Water Department has their own inspectors and so does the Public Works Department. Building Department, yeah. And so there's a really thorough compliance process when you're inside the city of Hillsborough, and we built that up to protect the environment around the city over time. Anything else?

So, Council, a question perhaps, Council President, for you is we have about five, six more slides to cover the environmental regulations, as well as like repairing areas in the power piece before the next break point for questions. And then we were hoping to get to land use pre-council, but perhaps we can get through that, take some questions and then start post-council with the land use portion of the presentation.

We can get through five slides in five minutes. Do you have a quick question, Councillor Embry?

Yes, sorry. The 1.8%, that is, Uh, the usage for both enterprise and co-location as well for both.

Yeah, I believe it represents about 14 to 15 of the data center sites in our service area. 12 Valley water district serves the remaining. There's been a little confusion in the public. So we've been trying to be clear about that. Um, they've also received public records requests and they're seeing the similar usage, um, with ambient air. So what we're seeing, if you compare just a commercial building, we actually see a bit less water usage than you might a different type of commercial building in this area. That's not true for all data centers.

Do you know why? Is it because it's cooler here? The temperature is cooler? Is that why ambient is sufficient?

Yeah, so we don't have quite as many days over 90 degrees on this side of the Cascades. I do think there's different types of technology, different types of data centers are utilizing. And also, you know, we charge a lot. And so I think they're making business decisions based on that because you'd have to pay quite a bit for the water.

Thank you. So I'm glad that you shared that the water that goes through the data center comes out and it's treated, you said, how does it get treated? Like, just curious.

Yeah. I don't have the treatment process for the clean water services, um, right now, but what we're seeing in Hillsborough is they're using ambient air for cooling. Whereas in like Eastern Oregon, they're using a lot of water for cooling. Um, so I think that's a little different than what we're seeing here. We're just not seeing the water being used for cooling here, but they do have an extensive treatment process. And, uh, I think Raheem's over there. We can give him a call and get their treatment process for you guys, especially what goes to Hillsborough's Rock Creek Center.

Yeah, it would be good to do that. I spoke with Tualatin River Keepers, Tualatin River Council, and Clean Water Services. They said water is not the problem for Hillsborough data centers. It's energy. That's what we need to have addressed. So water is not the problem.

you confirm that yeah i'm not seeing a huge demand for water at all from data centers when you compare to other data centers and especially in different parts of the country like the south southern like texas or virginia we're just not seeing that here or even other parts of oregon we did complete two public records requests with taunt river keepers as well and i'm assuming that's where they're seeing that data yeah thank you council singler i don't think we're going to get through five more slides at this point council sinclair i'm so sorry i'll be brief um

How do we equate proprietary processes of data centers when treating the water, when these processes are redacted? How are we ensuring what their process is and what they're putting into their water systems?

Yeah, it's a little different when data centers use water for cooling. That's a little different than what we're seeing here. So what we're seeing for data water use is just like human use inside of a commercial building. And then they also have irrigation. So they're actually not using water to cool the servers where they do in different parts. And so there isn't a requirement for treatment. Their treatment of those facilities would be similar to any sanitary sewer from human use that you would see out of a commercial building. We can confirm that, but I don't believe there's any that are using that kind of amount of water. We didn't see it on any of our accounts here. So if there are constituents that are coming out of different industrial customers, Clean Water Services has an extensive pretreatment industrial program where they do testing and requirements, and then some industrial customers have to treat the water to a certain extent before it even goes into our distribution and collection system. But that isn't something that we're seeing out of the data centers in Hillsborough. I hope that answers your question, Councilor Sincair, if I got that right.

Thank you, Nikki.

Thanks. I think we're going to have to kick the balance over to after it because we've got to get everyone over there by 7 o'clock. Thank you. Good evening and welcome to our June 2nd, 2026 City Council meeting. Thank you for joining us. For translation services, please use the QR code on the poster on the left of the room or on the front page of the agenda. To begin this evening, I invite you to join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Amber, can we have a roll call? .

Counselor Sinclair?

Here.

Councillor Case? Here. Councillor Harris? Here. Councillor Ambry? Here. Councillor Salgado?

Here.

And Mayor Pace is excused this evening.

Thank you. The fixed item on the agenda is presentations and appointments. I'm going to call on Councillor Ambry to make that next presentation.

Our first presentation is the Pride Month Proclamation. On behalf of PRISM, the employee affinity group supporting LGBTQ plus employees, I'd like to invite Rachel Marble to join me at the podium, please. All right. Thank you, Rachel. I'm going to read. All right. Whereas our country was founded on the principle of equal rights for all people, but the fulfillment of this promise has been too long in coming for many Americans, including those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning people. And whereas a historic turning point in the movement toward equal rights for LGBTQ plus people occurred on June 28th, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, when LGBTQ plus community members led by people of color and trans members of the LGBTQ plus community rose up and fought back against brutal police raids and discriminatory criminal laws that have since been declared unconstitutional. And we recognize the critical role that intersectionality plays in the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning justice. And whereas the first LGBTQ plus pride parade took place one year later on June 28th, 1970, to commemorate the events at Stonewall, launching what would become an annual nationwide tradition of pride celebrations every year. since then, including presidential recognition of June as Pride Month in recent decades. And whereas LGBTQ Americans, including those who live in our local communities, continue to face hate and discrimination simply for being who they are and who they love, and there remains much work to do to embrace our shared humanity. And whereas the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2015 affirming the right to marriage equality in all 50 states was a historic victory for the LGBTQ plus community and continues to affirm our belief that we are all more free when we are treated as equals. However, today we still face a rise in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, action, and legislation. And whereas the passion and drive in the LGBTQ community who stand strong for their dignity and constant battle for equality and personal safety is reflected in the tireless commitment of those who strive to forge a more inclusive society. Now therefore, be it resolved that I, excuse me, be it resolved that I, Sabah Unbury, on behalf of Beach Pace, Mayor of the City of Hillsboro, Oregon, do hereby proclaim the month of June 2026 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, or Queer Pride Month. And I urge all community residents to eliminate discrimination and injustice wherever it exists, to celebrate the lives of our LGBTQ plus neighbors and friends, and to work together to create a more inclusive society that values all people no matter who they are and who they love.

Rachel, would you like to say a few words? Thank you, Councillor Ann Berry. On behalf of PRISM, the city's employee group dedicated to creating an open and inclusive space for the full spectrum of LGBTQIA2 plus employees and allies to connect. Thank you for this recognition of June as Pride Month. The point of Pride Month is to celebrate authenticity, foster visibility, and commemorate the ongoing fight for LGBTQ plus equality. While it would be easy to focus on the challenges we have faced and will continue to face, it is important to take time to celebrate the beauty, resilience, creativity, and diversity of our community. And ultimately, the joy that comes as a response to the struggles we've endured. I invite you all to join us this Saturday in Chute Park from noon to 5 at Pride Party to do just that. To celebrate joy, to honor resiliency, and to stand with our community as we declare that in Hillsboro, love wins. Thank you, Rachel.

Thank you, yes, thank you. All right, June also recognizes Pollinator and Monarch Awareness Week. Normally, Lori Prince from Jackson Bottom would be here to accept this proclamation. Since she's not available tonight, I'd like to offer you this picture of Lori while I read the proclamation. Whereas pollinators are essential partners in producing much of our food supply, and whereas pollinators provide significant environmental benefits that are necessary for maintaining healthy, diverse ecosystems in towns and cities. And whereas pollination plays a vital role in the permeation of trees and plants in our community, enhancing our quality of life and creating recreational and economic development opportunities. And whereas the monarch butterfly is an iconic North American species whose multi-generational migration and metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly has captured the imagination of millions of Americans, and whereas pollinators have experienced population declines due to a combination of habitat loss, poor nutrition, pesticides including insecticides, fungicides and herbicides, parasites, diseases and climate change. And whereas the city of Hillsborough recognizes that human health depends on well functioning ecosystems and that bio diverse regions better support food production, healthy soil and air quality and can foster healthy connections between humans and wildlife. And whereas in 2019, the Hillsborough City Council adopted Resolution 2638 to become a Bee City USA affiliate, including the commitment to numerous actions that support pollinators. And whereas in 2021, the National Wildlife Federation's Mayor's Monarch Pledge was signed to commit the City of Hillsborough to take meaningful action to protect the monarch butterfly. Now, therefore, be it resolved that I, Saba Anvari, on behalf of Rob Harris, Council President of the City of Hillsborough, Oregon, do hereby proclaim the week of June 22nd, 2026 as Pollinator and Monarch Awareness Week. In Hillsborough, I urge all community members to participate in community activities that support and celebrate conservation of pollinators and monarch butterflies. Thank you.

Our last presentation is an update from our Youth Advisory Council. Welcome to YAC and if you could please come on up and take your seats.

Thank you, Councillor Harris. Good evening, City Council. For the record, Michaela Kennedy, City Management Coordinator in the City Manager's Office and Program Advisor to the Hillsborough Youth Advisory Council, also known as YAC. This evening, you will be hearing from the members of the Hillsborough YAC and a culmination of the fantastic work that they have done on their respective subcommittees over the year. Please note that the information about the program, highlights of the year, and more information about the subcommittee projects are available in your council package. Considering that there are a total of five subcommittees presenting tonight and with respect of time this evening, we ask that you limit your questions and if any questions require further information to email them to me and Assistant City Manager Simone Brooks following tonight's meeting. Before we begin, I would like to thank City Council for your ongoing support of the Hillsboro Yak, as well as the many community partners, city staff, and organizations who have invested their time, expertise, and mentorship into this program. I would also like to recognize our Yak officer board and Yak intern, Itzel Abascal, whose leadership, dedication, and countless hours of service made this year a success. For over 20 years, the Hillsborough YAC has empowered hundreds of young people to learn about local government, make meaningful contributions to their community, and go on to become leaders in their schools, professions, and beyond. These students have spent the past year researching community challenges, providing solutions, and gaining firsthand experience in civic leadership. So thank you to the members for all your hard work, and to you all for your ongoing support to this amazing program. With that, I am pleased to introduce the members of the Hillsborough Youth Advisory Council, starting with the Arts and Culture Subcommittee. Thank you.

Make sure you push the middle button until the light goes on.

Hi, Ellsborough. We are the Arts and Culture Subcommittee for the Youth Advisory Council. My name is Amaya Bishop.

My name is Ian Powell.

Hi, I'm Kinza Arik.

My name is Eson Saeed.

My name is Pearson Jessup.

And my name is Gwen.

This year, this is our first year and we had the privilege of being the first arts and culture subcommittee for YAC. This means we spent a lot of time defining our subcommittee's goals and how we would support youth for our first year doing this project. From our conversations, we decided this year and for our event this year to be a youth arts and culture farmers market. This event focused on establishing an interactive platform to share artistic talents, cultural values, and allow a connection between different peoples within the city of Hillsboro.

This event was made possible by partnering with the Hillsborough Farms Market, which is the group that runs the Saturday Market. By collaborating with the Hillsborough Market and our youth partners, we were able to secure free booths and free tents for our event.

This event took place on May 16th during the Saturday market. We had a variety of youth vendors, including Jupiter's Crochet. We also had a Yak booth. Glencoe AAPI did face painting for kids. Additionally, we had a rock painting and community drawing tables. Student artworks were displayed. And finally, we had the Hill High Mariachi perform for us.

Before working with our youth vendors, our committee came up with a list of requirements for partnerships. All patrons had to have a community involvement activity or be selling non-food items. This led to a variety of opportunities for the community to interact with our youth vendors.

During this event, we had at least 325 people come in, most of which were children and families. We had an estimate of 30 faces painted, 35 community drawings, 35 rocks painted that we hit around downtown Hillsboro. 85 people interacted with the Yak booth, and 85 people watched the mariachi, and then we sold at least 10 items.

This event was so much fun to make, especially as a newly formed committee. Thank you so much for listening to our presentation. And as a subcommittee, we'd like to thank the Hillsborough Farmers Market, its volunteers, and all of the vendors and students that helped make this event a reality. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Hi, Council. Good evening. We're the Climate Resiliency and Sustainability Subcommittee. We'll do some quick member introductions, but this is just kind of our year in review through our end-of-year council presentation. So with that, I'm the chair of the subcommittee. My name is Bridget Harrington. My name is Ozzie Krysiak. My name is Anandi.

My name is Annabelle Bailey, and we also have a fifth member, Parker Brown, who could not be here today. So for this year, our project was creating a plant-based eating webpage for the City of Hillsborough website. And we did extensive research and wrote the text for the website and worked with Daisha Bauckham, the program coordinator, and Megan Etah, the communication specialist for the City of Hillsborough. In our website, we included sections on health and environmental benefits, along with other topics related to plant-based eating that the community can explore. And we chose this project this year because it connects to the Climate Action Plan for the City of Hillsborough, which outlines different steps that can be taken to work towards sustainability in the City of Hillsborough. And our goal was to provide an informative resource for community members about plant-based eating. And on the right side of the screen, you can see an image of our website. It is now live on the City of Hillsborough website for the community to visit. And yeah, that was our project this year.

In addition to this, we did a volunteer event, which we decided on an ivy pool. For this, we partnered with the Hillsborough Parks and Recreation and worked with Scott Crowell, who's the volunteer services coordinator, to plan and organize this event. It took place at Noble Woods Park on April 25th, which is also Global Youth Services Day. Through this event, we were able to teach people about invasive species such as ivy and the benefits of removing this. These benefits include maintaining the native species habitats and protecting the biodiversity of the park. We got a really great turnout at this event and we're very happy with how it turned out.

So just for some future subcommittee goals, in the future, the Climate Resiliency and Sustainability Subcommittee within YAC hopes to continue to provide lots of community members with everyday simple opportunities to get involved in proactive climate action and sustainable action. We also hope to expand and emphasize opportunities for equitable and easily accessible climate education. We hope to host more sustainable community volunteer events, such as our ivy pool, kind of building off of that while also continuing that tradition. And then also working with the environmental side of our city's local government in order to just maximize the community impact that we're seeing and the collaboration through our subcommittee's projects as well.

Thank you all for listening. All of our subcommittee is so grateful to be a part of YACC and to have the opportunities to make a real difference. It has been such a wonderful year working with you all. Councilors, do you have any questions?

It doesn't look like a great presentation. I really appreciate the work that everyone in YACC does, and I should have said that to the first committee too, but thank you very much.

All right, thank you.

Hello, we're the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Subcommittee. My name is Ashley Claire Serafa.

My name is Joe Amonio. My name is Ricky Canoke.

My name is Nicole Ayala-Kangachi.

My name is Akila Chitluri. My name is Dalia Rosas.

As a subcommittee, we had two main objectives this year, the first of which was to make our community more accessible, and the second of which was to expand opportunities for youth in our community.

Our project this school year was also working on making sure that members of our community are able to access accessibility features in our restrooms, such as mapping them out in order to make sure that they feel supported and included in our city.

Now introducing our first project, Access to Success College and Career Fair. This event showcased diverse post-secondary pathways hosting over 30 organizations including four-year universities, community colleges, multiple military branches, scholarships, resources, and local opportunities. We intend to help students feel supported and informed when thinking about their future regardless of their background.

Building on that, our event was designed to directly support equitable access to education and career opportunities by bringing these pathways into one local space for students and families. This year we had about 200 plus attendees, which was a major increase from about 30 attendees at our previous pilot event. This growth shows a significant expansion in outreach and student engagement. Overall, this increase in both participation and representation helped us create a more inclusive and accessible experience for students exploring their post-secondary options.

Uh-oh. After the event, we also worked on developing a website called Access to Success Hillsboro. This website connected a lot of our families and students in our local area to different opportunities and post-secondary opportunities such as college, trades, and career opportunities, informing them about what is available and making sure that they are informed as well as about local opportunities such as volunteering and internships and much, much more to really increase youth engagement as well as family engagement.

Yeah, and I think both the college and career fair and the development of our wonderful website really allowed to foster a stronger sense of engagement among both HSD students and their family members to just have a stronger desire to be able to explore these post-secondary options and know what they want to do after high school. We also really improved our Spanish speaking support and accessibility to that, especially with the development of our website. It really bridged that gap of inaccessibility. because so many of our community members are Spanish speaking. We wanted to improve for next year just a little bit on more participation for the survey that was going on during the college fair and just have a more interactive and engaging student panel for next time.

Our second project this year was to create an interactive accessibility map for the public facing restrooms and city buildings. As with both of our projects, equity and inclusion are central to this project, and so this map will specifically support multilingual users and community members who may have different accessibility needs.

Truly, the goal of this project is to help members of our community feel like they are more easily able to locate accessibility spaces and restroom features. This is meant to help people with disabilities, families, seniors, and others with accessibility needs. Looking ahead, we really do hope that this project can make Hillsborough a more accessible space and make sure that our members of our community feel supported and welcome in all of our public spaces.

So the process of it is that we communicated with the Hillsboro Public Works and we're currently working with Works to make a accessible website that shows a certain way certain like gender-neutral restrooms and other things like it's accessible So we're just giving them data analysis and they're helping us build the website in the Hillsboro website Yeah, we plan to

Yeah, we plan to implement this project through an interactive map onto the website that is shown here on the screen, our map mock-up, with icons representing general neutral status, single-use status, menstrual project accessibility, handrails, and wheelchair accessibility.

With that, we wanted to thank everyone that went into going into our project today and City Council for their time. City Council, do you have any questions for us? Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for your time. I think we have something. I have a question.

We have questions. Council Alcare.

Elizabeth Case, sorry, we didn't see you.

We have Council Alcare here.

Okay. So you had a boost in attendance. How many schools attended it?

We had people from across all schools of the district.

And you hosted it, was it Liberty last year?

Yes, last year we hosted a pilot event at Liberty High School, and then we took it district-wide this year. Okay, thank you.

Councilor Case.

Yeah, hey, thank you. Both projects seem really are awesome and thank you for the work that you guys have done on those for the accessible bathroom map. I love that. Thank you. That is something we've needed. When will it be live on the website and what's the plan for promoting that? Is there a. City social media plan, or will it be available at the entrance to buildings? How can people find the information?

Yeah, so we're meeting with Hillsborough Web Works next week to implement the data that we have collected on all the different locations. And then from there, we'll discuss options to increase the visibility of this information for community members.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much for all your work, you guys. This is great.

All right, thank you. Great job. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Hello, we are the Youth Engagement Subcommittee. I'm Autumn Schneithorst. My name is Anna Kapler.

My name is Sahil Shah.

My name is Ariel Yaroslavsky Acuna. My name is Ethan Hernandez. And I'm Kieran Garrigan.

Sorry, we're having a technical difficulty.

I turned it off.

Mark, can you do that?

Okay, perfect. Thank you so much.

The goal of youth engagement was to help local high school students learn how local government works and how the city of Hillsborough operates.

As an attendee at the event last year, previously known as Youth Takeover, and the event that we will be talking about today, I had the opportunity to learn how local government plays a big role in impacting our daily lives. And that really inspired me to join YAC and continue making an impact in our community. And I also joined the Youth Engagement Subcommittee because I wanted to provide the same opportunity for local high schoolers to gain hands-on opportunities exploring careers in local city government.

So Youth City Day was a full day field trip for students from all four Hillsborough high schools as well as the Oak Street campus. This event focused on creating hands on learning experiences through sessions with various city departments such as Public Works, Police and Fire. In total we had 19 sessions and hosted 101 attendees.

So last year, the Youth Engagement Subcommittee hosted a very similar event branded as Youth Takeover. And when in the planning process for City Day this year, we tried to take in a lot of feedback from the event last year. So some of that feedback we incorporated was that attendees really liked interactivity. So we tried to make a lot more of the breakout sessions have interactive activities. And then in the opening session, we added a Kahoot to get all of the students very engaged before they walked into those individual sessions. And then last year we had fairly low attendance. So in order to try to boost that, we were able to partner with the Hillsborough School District and provide bus transportation to and from the event for students so that a lot more students were able to attend. And then last year we had an open campus for lunch where students were able to leave and buy their own lunch. And this year in order to increase safety and just equity as a whole, we provided free catered lunch at the Civic Center.

And then adding on to what Anna had just mentioned, our subcommittee has worked really hard to create a new and improved Youth City Day this year. And something that really helped us increase the participation from students and the quality of the event overall was by collaborating with the Washington County Chamber of Commerce. As she had mentioned before, they helped provide transportation from all HSD schools to our event. They have also helped us with advertising. We gave them a vision of what we wanted for a flyer, and then they fulfilled that vision and created a flyer, which then YAC members distributed across all HSD high schools. And then they also just have a lot of connections which helped us increase our overall, like the amount of sessions that we were able to provide for all of the attendees.

Alrighty, thank you so much for listening to us and thank you to all the city staff who supported in the day of our event. Thank you to everyone who spoke at the event and helped host a breakout session. We'd also like to say thank you to the city itself for letting us use the Civic Center as our venue. If anyone has any questions, we can take them now. What was the participation last year? Do you guys remember? So last year we had roughly 30 students at the event, so this year we increased it to 101. That's awesome, awesome, very, very cool. Thank you so much.

So this event, did it inspire any of you to consider any careers?

um that was my first interaction with yak and this is my first year in yak so yeah i'd say it worked all right thank you very much nice job

Good evening, City Council. My name is Benjamin Barnhurst, and today... No. Good evening, City Council. My name is Benjamin Barnhurst, and I'm the chair of the Youth Welfare Subcommittee. Our members consist of Vihan, Cheyenne, Zio, Piper, Jesse, and Ria. However, the latter two were not able to make it to this meeting, unfortunately. Next, we will move on to our mission statement.

The Youth Welfare Subcommittee's mission statement was... Sorry. The Youth Welfare Subcommittee's mission statement was to improve the well-being of youth in our community through improving youth housing and advising initiatives towards helping support houseless youth.

During our empathy research and quantitative interviews, we found that many houseless youth reported difficulty accessing essential hygiene products through shelters and service providers. At the same time, Home Plate staff discussed challenges in maintaining a consistent supply of these items due to funding and donation limitations. Thus, recognizing this need, we focused on creating a community driven solution that could help increase access to these needs for essential resources.

Next slide. To address this issue, we organized a three month long hygiene drive, where we collected hygienic products through various city locations and organized an Amazon wish list to ensure donating is as accessible as possible. And it was a resounding success. We had 3,872 total hygienic items collected, and we donated it to Home Plate Youth Services. As evidenced in this bar graph, the majority of our donations came from our community partners from local libraries. Furthermore, shower related products made up the significant portion of the donated items. The total cost of this project was $30. And that was the assembly and donation of six hygiene drive drop-in bins. And these will be implemented in future hygiene drive events with little to no additional cost. So this shows with small investments and the power of our community's generosity, we can do great things.

OUR SERVICE PROJECT THIS YEAR WAS A HOME PLATE MEAL NIGHT WHERE WE PARTNERED WITH HOME PLATE YOUTH SERVICES. TOGETHER WE PREPARED AND SERVED OVER 60 MEALS TO OUR COMMUNITY MEMBERS STRUGGLING WITH HOUSELESSNESS. OUR MENU FOR THAT NIGHT WAS SPAGHETTI WITH MEAT SAUCE AND A VEGETARIAN ALTERNATIVE. THIS WAS ACCOMPANIED BY GARLIC BREAD AND SOME SODA AND SOME COOKIES. ANY LEFTOVERS THAT WE HAD WERE PACKAGED AND DONATED TO A LOCAL HOMELESS SHELTER NEAR US WHICH WE FOUND FED 10 MORE PEOPLE TO ENSURE THAT NO FOOD WAS WASTED. and we were able to support Home Plate's initiative to support local youth and address food insecurity. In the future, we hope to continue collaborating with Home Plate to serve our community in any way we can.

Simply put, our work has taught us one thing. Through small investments and the power of harnessing our community, we can create quantifiable, measurable impact on our community. Thank you. Do you all have any questions?

Councillor Kerr.

I don't have a question. I'm on the board of home plate, so thanks for considering them for your project.

Thank you. And Councillor Sinclair.

Outstanding. I just want to start by saying community protects community. And the aspect of what you displayed in putting action to find just is excellent. Good job, and what can we do as a community to continue to support you? How do we access your website and continue forward in donating?

I can take this one. So we're going to continue holding future Hygiene Drive events, and we're going to do it at a larger scale. We've shown that we can do this at a small community model, but we want to do more. And we're going to partner with businesses, we're going to partner with other communities, and we're going to expand this to the Portland metropolitan area. So we need to increase awareness about this through social media, we need to increase awareness through flyers, and we just need to increase awareness.

Thank you so much for your work. Question from Councillor Salgado.

Thank you, we appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I want to recognize Councilor Anvery for a minute.

Sure, so for the Yak, who are the seniors?

Raise your hands, stand up. Keep them around.

We're all going to miss you guys a lot. Thank you for being on the Yak. And thank you for being great leaders. I'm getting a little teary-eyed because it was my first time, too, and I've just gotten used to seeing you guys. And we will all miss you very much. And go get them.

I just have something unrelated, but people want to know if after this meeting, are they able to attend the work session?

Yes, well, after this council session's over, we will be reconvening for work session back in that other room, and you're welcome to attend that and listen in. I also wanted to say that I went to a National League of Cities convention for the first time ever. a few months ago, and we had several members of our YAC team that went with us as well. And there's people from all over the country, city councilors and mayors, governors, everyone from all over the country. And I can't tell you how many times I had councilors or mayors come up to me and say how impressed they were by the youth. By the commitment, they were engaging, they were smart, they knew the issues, and also they were well organized. So I definitely want to recognize them, but also their leader, Michaela, who puts the program together and leads them so capably. And I want to thank you for what you do. And I also want to thank the school district for providing these children, these youths to us, and lending them to us for a few hours every week. to show the work, the commitment, the attitude, the positive attitude they have, the work they have, and the commitment to this community. I really want to thank you, Michaela, and congratulate you, and thank the entire YAC group. Thank you so much. Okay, so the next item That was a good segue because the next item is public comment. Persons wishing to speak will be recognized at this time. If you're here in person and wish to speak, please fill out a yellow card and hand it to the city recorder. I have almost 40 cards. These are three minutes each. That's two hours worth of testimony, not even including the breaks of people coming back and forth, so buckle up. When I call on you, please join us here at the table and speak into the microphone so those on Zoom can also hear your comments. When you come in, you push the little button, the light goes on, and that's when you're ready to go. Because of the translation tool, community members can speak in their language of choice and the recorder can display the translation up here behind us on the screen. We have two people registered remotely, registered to speak virtually and the deadline to register to speak virtually has now passed. If you are unable to sign up to speak prior to the deadline, you're always welcome to mail Email your comments to the city council any time of day. This is called public comment because it's time dedicated to you to inform the city council about your views. Each person will have up to three minutes. Please respect all the others here tonight because we do have a lot of people. Please keep your comments to three minutes. You can always email, send city council written comments if you want to follow up or expand on your comments. I guarantee you council does read them all. As a reminder, if you'd like to express support for a comment or a viewpoint, please ask that you use a quiet, non-disruptive method. Snapping your fingers is accepted. Clapping, calling out, or making verbal outbursts not only interferes with people's ability to hear clearly in the room, but it disrupts the audio for those who are hearing online. If people start clapping, the audio will cut out. They will not be able to hear what's going on for a period of time. Tonight we are pleased to hear from you, and we will begin by hearing from the first person online. Amber, I will let you introduce them.

Okay, that's going to be Charlene Concepcion, and I will go ahead and unmute now.

Are you there, Charlene? If so, you can begin.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Okay. Hello, this is Shirley Conception. I'm a 36 year Hillsboro resident online from Washington. The past two weeks helping my mother here, but I felt strongly to come and add testimony. I'm following from afar. Other city council meetings I've been at, public land use hearing. The city consistently includes the need to create living wage jobs. I agree this is needed. Yet I see on the enterprise-owned program page, Hillsboro's own program requirements for wages are years one to three of the tax abatements, average wage 102% of minimum wage. Then years four to five, 125% of minimum wage. This is not the definition of a living wage. Why so low of a requirement? Next I found the Jackson East final master plan and implementation strategy plan. First concern I saw initially, Jackson East, 550 acres was brought into the urban growth boundary, planned and zoned for employment use. Because of this, Metro designated it industrial. Five years later, the state removed this requirement, employment in this, Document states, final land use is to be determined by the city. Seemingly, again, promised job focus abandoned for what? Details are not given here. Second, in this document, I read about land banking strategy for existing tech companies. I quote, located in the North Hillsboro industrial area, which includes a disproportionate amount of well-capitalized technology firms. tends to support an ongoing strategy of land banking for future expansion, but it also affects the vacant land inventory available to other active users. Now that I've seen the slide with the data centers marked, I'm wondering if this includes some data centers and if there's actually more land that's basically been blocked off for them. Combined with Hillsboro's new information, more data centers are coming. I see no end. Seems like there is a recent shift. Seems like we're seeing data center construction only. I don't know if this is accurate. Are there other industries coming interested, perhaps those who employ larger amount of people and pay a living, a true living wage? I saw in your updated comments, replies for questions, the same response. I saw at the ice impact hearings what the city cannot do. Other states are, for both of these, it can be done. Many people are calling on you to rein this in. I want to say thank you, Kimberlynn Sinclair.

All right, thank you. And the next speaker?

Yes, it looks like our second registered person has dropped off, so we can start in person.

All right, so I'm going to call the first two people up for in-person. The first one sits at one table, the other, the other, so we will rotate as we go through. And the first person is Paul Clemencek.

Surprised, huh?

And the next one will be Mike McTernan. Is Mike here? There he is. Is it Clemencek? Clemencek. Clemencek, sorry. When you're ready to speak, push the button in the middle. The green light will go on and you can begin and the three minute counter will start as soon as you start speaking.

This one here? Yeah. There we go. Okay, three minutes, here we go. I gave you some written comments. I'm going to go over this pretty quick. Hey guys, you guys are doing a great job, but you're doing the job of what the industry should be doing. This is an environmental impact review that you're talking about here, and your staff tried to do it, but it's tough. Let's talk real quick about what's happening in data centers. The compute capability of data centers is exploding. It's going to go up 200 to 300x in the next three years, guys. That means the power demand in those data centers for a given building space is going to explode. Your numbers here on water cooling and all that, that's going to be driven. We've got to move from water cooling, and you've got to go to non-water cooled systems. Again, I have an engineer with 35 years experience in major energy development projects, and your staff, Kudos to them, but it does an excuse for the industry to come in with a full environmental impact review and a full impact of impacts on everything that I've listed in this paper here, all right? It should include mitigations, especially including local solar PV, community energy centers, dispatchable power, all of that. Solar PV is a small fraction of power usage here in northern Oregon. And it needs to go higher. Just listen to Jensen Huang from Nvidia. He talked just recently, just day before yesterday, he talked about things that I translate to community energy centers, neighborhood energy centers, and use close to the, he's talking about more renewable power in the community so they can support data centers. You guys are at the forefront of this. You can't wait for Umatilla or other communities around the state. Oregon needs a much better response to this data center explosion because you're, look at my numbers here, I think in In five to ten years, Hillsborough power use is going to go up 2x to 4x. Are you ready for 2,000 megawatts of additional power demand in your community? If you're not, ask the industry to map that out for you. So I strongly recommend an environmental impact report, industry should pay for that, and a development plan to augment and replace single project by project development proposals. And I guess that's pretty much it. I mean, it's all in this paper. There's a lot of mitigations. I've done a lot of environmental impact reports. You need a real professional environmental impact report, and so does the state of Oregon. Thank you.

Thank you. Louis Garcia, we'll be up next, and you can have the seat here while Mr. McTernan gives his three minutes. Yes, well, yeah, it's on green. Great, thanks.

Hi, my name's Mike McTernan. I'm a Hillsborough resident. I think a lot of people are going to speak to the data center issue and all the concerns that we have environmentally and socially, economically. I kind of came today because I wanted to talk about how I feel betrayed and dismissed by a portion of our city's leaders. The people that I trust to look out for me are not looking out for the people of the city, but maybe the city itself. In the past, we've seen a mixture of disassembling, stalling, and outright hostility to the valid concerns of Hillsborough citizens in terms of this data center issue. You could have had an emergency meeting. You could have announced these applications for new data centers earlier. You could have listened to the community and sought their opinion before you started making your decisions and not afterwards after we had to find out about them. Yet none of these things happened. I want to be proud of my city. I want to settle down and make this my home. But how can I do this when I feel my city isn't looking out for me? It's focused on this myth of growth and what this means and is accommodating industries which provide very little for our community but take so much from it. This is not something that should be rushed, not something you try to sneak in before a deadline. The people have spoken, as with the Senate's ill-conceived proposal to steal farmland from our city, which was supported by leaders in our city's government. You see a groundswell of people who disapprove of your decisions. Act as the elected representatives you are, and look towards how you can honor the will of the people, rather than try to sneak and bulldoze your policies through despite them. Thank you.

Again, just one second. I'd like to remind people, please snap all you want. It really does delay things. It cuts out the noise, excuse me, the sound for people on Zoom. So I do appreciate the support that you want to give speakers. That's important for us to hear as well, but please do it in a way that I'm requesting.

We had a community member who mentioned that it was hard for her to snap her fingers.

Okay, but she can clap.

Okay, I'd just like to see some flexibility there.

Yeah, for sure, that's not a problem. The next person that would like to speak is Elaine Tews. If Ms. Tews would come up here and take this seat while we listen to Mr. Garcia.

Hi, good evening folks. Actually, I was only going to speak on one subject, but now I'm going to add a second.

So can you hear me? Make sure your green light is on.

Now it's on. Okay. I don't know how to turn the volume on. Is this better? Okay, great. Actually, it was based on one of the comments that I had heard earlier with regards to the data centers, and they were talking about the water quality, the testing, and they were redacted, etc. My only ask would be to consider not having testing in some central, distant location, but actually at the data center. As the water comes out, that we test the quality of the water. Now, I've worked in IT for over 30 years, so I don't really trust a lot of the outcomes in the data center, so just a little side note. Second topic. It's one of unintended consequences. I had moved over into this new location and my home. And the home that was behind me, I come to find out it used to be a rehab home. And so it's really large. And in it, they had created not only a bunch of rooms, which I think today houses about, I don't know how many people. There's like nine, ten cars in front of the place now. But in the back, they had placed a fire pit, basically about five foot wide. and it's like right next to the fence. And so I'm sure back then when they were doing the counseling, people would sit around the fire, that sort of thing. Well now the folks that sit around this fire, it's oppressive. the amount of uh... actually the first year they were burning all kinds of stuff i don't know if they were tables in one case i had to call the fire department because it was unintended black fire smoke coming over my fence and uh... black smoke and so the fire department came all the rest of that stuff but uh... but now it's just this this ongoing in the morning in the evening late at night you know i'll have i'll go out it'll be two three o'clock in the morning and the fire smoke's still going I'm not here to say, you know, oh, we have to do something about this for everybody. But I guarantee you that if you were in a condo, you wouldn't want a five-foot fire pit. If you were in a townhouse, if you were in a small home. Maybe in a large ranch thing. But anyway, the only reason why I came here was to go ahead and raise my hand and say, look, if you have someone who works on this area, I'd love to volunteer to work with them. I basically am an expert in process reengineering. Would love to go on ahead and see if we can figure out a way to handle it, handle these fire pits, the smoke. Because for me and my wife, it's pretty oppressive, pretty oppressive. Is that fair?

All right. Thank you, Mr. Garcia. Thank you. Someone from staff may reach out to you and contact you to go over this in more depth. All right, thank you. Elaine Tews or Elaine Tows? All right. Then we have Tiffany St. Clair and then Octavian St. Clair King and Octavian St. Clair King. They could each take one of these seats. The first one I have is Tiffany, and the second one is Octavian. Just push the button in the middle of your console until there's a light that turns green around the microphone area. I can't see if it's on because I'm directly looking.

Hi, my name is Tiffany St. Clair King. I live in the city of hillsborough we own a house we' ve lived here for a while we really like it here and we love this city I want to talk about data centers I' ve seen that they are uniting our community across previous divides libertarians republicans democrats greens independents and undeclared voters that I have talked to they all have issues with the data centers from what I' ve seen what we care about is land use farmland water energy costs, ongoing permanent jobs and heat and other pollution. These are big concerns not just for me but for my children. One of my children is going to speak next. We also care about government accountability and transparency and we vote. just saying that it' s a ministerial duty to rubber stamp data centers under oregon revised statutes 285c.105 and ors 285c.104 doesn' t really land well with those of us that are asking you to do everything in your power that' s legal to pump the brakes on these data centers. I would urge you each every one of you to do everything you can to pump the brakes and I know that you are limited by the Oregon revised statutes because the legislature sets the enterprise data taxes, but there are some things that I found on the Hillsboro Herald article that I think they're submitting written testimony that you can probably do to data centers and that includes utilizing the community development code for example see case file cdca 001-19 for an example of how that was used can use to stop further expansion you can also downgrade data centers from an allowable primary use to an accessory use you can use you can immediately enact an ordinance and direct staff to look at the 2022 Jackson east zoning mechanism to strike data storage facilities from the heavy I would urge you to do is also use the tax code, and if you do that, you could target those uses that draw over 20 megawatts, but you could still carve out an exemption for our large employers like Intel, with an exemption for those that have hundreds of full-time permanent employees.

Thank you. And after Octavian, it'll be Nicole Cook is next, if Ms. Cook is available.

Hi, I'm Octavian and I wanted to also talk about Dana Centers because I grew up here in Hillsborough. I love it here. I want to live here for a very long time. So the communities and the economy and the environment is really important to me as I hope it is important to all of you as well. I'm sure you're already well aware that data centers are notorious for their use of electricity and water. So I wanted to put some facts behind that. A federal study has found that in 2023 alone, AI data centers have used 17 billion gallons of water alone. And in 2024, a record number of households were disconnected from their electricity because they couldn't afford the heightened electricity bills. data centers also produce a lot of air pollution because of the increased amount of fossil fuels that need to be burned in order to power them. All of these, as well as the fact that they much more heavily impact low-income communities because low-income communities can't afford the heightened electricity bills. They happen to be are most often housed right next to the power plants that are burning these fossil fuels and these zatter centers they are the ones who are being impacted the most and all these are reasons that i wanted to urge you that we need to stop these data centers from using our essential resources before it is too late thank you thank you um after ms cook we're going to have lou dreeson or dryson next

Before you get started, I really want to thank everyone for the courtesy they're showing and their interest and actually their excitement about some of this. It helps us when we hear the snapping and everything, and it also lets everyone else really listen and understand what people are saying. So I really do appreciate that. Ms. Cook.

Thank you. I want to first thank you for serving our community. I imagine that the reason you serve is because you care about our city, Hillsborough. Please don't take my composure for complicity as I'm deeply concerned by the explosion of data centers in our area. I'm a lifelong Hillsborough resident. Often, doing the right thing is usually the hardest. It usually means breaking from the fold and stepping out on your own. For you, this may mean challenging existing policies, using internal channels and processes, asking questions that unnerve others. The claim that these developments are legal and just not up to you is a mentality that does not lend itself to a thriving society. I would ask you, can you do more? What can you do for us? AI data centers serve a very small group of concentrated people, not Hillsborough. Data centers do monopolize our natural resources. They do cause noise, water, and air pollution. They do raise temperatures. They do take up room for new tax paying companies to come to our city. They don't provide long-term jobs, they don't provide revenue, and they don't improve our lives. As children, we are told that one voice can change the world. So I ask and I implore you to hear mine and that of our city. Thank you.

Thank you. Next, Ryan Sayag, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, to the right. And Mr. Driessen, it's your turn.

Yeah, so I agree with everything that's been said up to this point. For me, the bottom line is I've lived in Hillsboro a very long time. And what I've seen over the years, and particularly very recently here, is that I don't trust your people anymore. I don't trust the city of Hillsboro. for the enterprise zone that they've managed up to this point. I don't think that you should have the right to create these type of zones. I think that ought to be up to the public. I think it ought to come through a vote for the citizens of Hillsboro for these enterprise zones. You squandered 470 acres to the data center. Our rates for water has increased tremendously over the years. And you have no control, you certainly have control over that. You have no control over the electricity that we're having to pay for. But that's gone up astronomically also, particularly for folks who can't really afford it. I've seen you leaning more and more towards businesses, industry, instead of the people here in Hillsboro. I have airplanes flying over my house daily, all the time. You don't seem to be doing squat about that. So I'm real frustrated. I hope you're going to do something about it. Thank you. Thank you.

Is it Mr. Sayag? Yes. Okay. And the next person to speak after Mr. Sayag is going to be Brown. So Brown, you can have the seat over here.

Good evening, Councillors. So this is more of a rhetorical question to those Councillors who denied the emergency session request from the other two Councillors. As a just normal, this is my first city council meeting actually because of this. It makes it look like you have hundreds of millions of dollars of possible tax revenue over decades getting turned away due to rubber stamping policies and instead of going, oh yeah, let's go ahead and have an emergency session, you go, oh no, no, don't worry about it, it's fine. Chill, it's okay, don't worry. It really feels like you have ulterior motives for this than the good of the city and the people i mean i was almost late putting my two-year-old daughter to bed who i want to go to hillsborough schools but these are this is tax revenue that is supposed to go to these schools that will be non-existent for 50 years and it's disconcerting um Data centers don't bring jobs. I've been working in IT for 20 years. They're lights out operations. At best, you get somebody who is a contractor that gets paid $40,000 a year through some temp agency firm to go in and change out hardware if something fails. All of these sysadmins, network admins, infrastructure admins, they're in a corporate headquarters somewhere, possibly not even in the US. So I just don't understand why we go, no, no, data centers are great, and let's give them 50 year tax rebates in a program that doesn't really look like it's supposed to be used that way. Thank you.

Thank you. You guys are doing so well. Martin Lehman would be next if Mr. Lehman wants to take the seat over here to the right. Mr. Lehman, he's coming up.

All right, so if data centers were actually good for us, why are they not being built in wealthy neighborhoods? I've already asked that before. And for too long, we've been tricked into thinking that there's only one way to bring change and that's their way. They say that we need to be civil when they wouldn't think twice about using the police to commit violence against us if we do something. as simple as speak out of turn to express frustrations when we're being lied to our faces. They demand respect from us while they disrespect us by ignoring the working class. They trick us into thinking we need to fix the system, but the system is not broken. It's working exactly as intended, and we cannot change the foundation while standing on it. We cannot keep feeding into a system that only rewards the ones who don't ask questions. And a lot of people don't know the American model of education is based off the Prussian model used when they annexed Poland. They taught kids to submit to authority, which happened to be the Prussians. The Canadians and Americans saw that and they've been applying that to us. They don't want us asking these questions. The fact is 60% of people were living paycheck to paycheck. Back in December, that number is projected to have increased. But it's hard to tell when all the agencies that track that have been slashed. When a majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck, it's not because of them, it's because the system has failed the people. We have record levels of childhood, childhood houselessness, food insecurity, and poverty. We have more empty housing than houseless people. We need revolution. We need change. We, the people, are much more capable of taking care of ourselves and each other. They want us to believe the lie that it's every person for themselves when history has shown us time and time again that we've always lived in communities. Archaeologists have found people with missing limbs that lived to older ages. The logical thing would have been to rid themselves of someone who was more of a liability than an asset. But humans are so compassionate that they kept them around. By educating ourselves and being open-minded, we are challenging the system and taking our power back. In a system where ignorance is bliss, being aware is resistance, and it takes more energy to create than to destroy. Regardless of what your background is, it is up to us, the working class, against the rich. They say they love the school district while cutting 20 million this past year. They say they want to help the local economy, yet they give billions in tax breaks to Intel. They tell us they love immigrants, yet they fund the police department that works with ICE. They say all these things, but talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. It's time to stop relying on these rich dickheads to decide for us when they never prioritize the working class and are unaffected by the impacts of their decisions. They'll never be the ones to initiate resistance. Mayor Beach Pace is always talking about how the state is deciding these things and she can't do anything about it when she hasn't even tried. She didn't call for an emergency meeting on data centers until after the deadline passed. If these people were patient, to be here, they wouldn't even be here. They want to make us feel like mediocrity and compromise our victories when we deserve more. It's up to us to take things into our hands. Right now they're installing AI flaw cameras that report us without our consent. Yet a rich neighborhood in North Oaks, Minnesota threatened legal action against a YouTuber that legally flew his drone to map out the area on Google Maps because they hadn't been on it since 2007. And apparently privacy is only for the rich, I guess. John Deere had been arguing that when... Farmers buy their products, they're paying for access to their products, not to own them.

And wrap it up so we can get on to the next people.

I have more.

The next, personally, Pamela Camacho. If Ms. Camacho would take the seat over here on this side. And Mr. Layman, it is your turn.

Good evening, Mayor Pace and members of the City Council. My name is Martin Lehman. Tonight, as you discussed, the data center and enterprise zone, I'm presenting what I believe to be the only viable solution to the fiscal imbalance they create. The commercial resource impact surcharge Our residents are drowning in utility debt with 70% of a low use residential bill consisting of fixed service charges. These charges exist specifically to service the debt for massive infrastructure expansion such as the $1.6 billion Willamette water supply system built to meet the 24-7 cooling demands of industrial data centers and industrial use. Item 7.1, ordinance number 6517 highlights the tension in our land use. IT CORRECTS THE 20-YEAR-OLD OVERSIGHT WHERE INDUSTRIAL ZONE LAND SAT INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE SURROUNDING RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITY. IT'S TIME WE APPLY THAT SAME LOGIC TO OUR FISCAL POLICY. INDUSTRIAL RESOURCE IS NO LONGER COMPATIBLE WITH RESIDENTIAL RATE STRUCTURES. Now the current model is a wealth extraction machine. Under the enterprise zone, single facilities avoid millions in property taxes, starving our schools. My ordinance ends this subsidy by establishing a targeted capacity fee that follows actual resource impact. This is more urgent than ever given ordinance number 6518, item 7.2 on your agenda. While framed as alignment with state law, this ordinance moves critical housing and zone changing decisions to a type two procedure, meaning they will be decided without a public hearing. As the city reduces the public's right to be heard on development, the CRIS provides a necessary counterbalance by mandating absolute transparency and verifiable telemetry for industrial resource extraction. The CRIS is the only mechanism that legally guarantees the residential utility dividend. It mandates that surcharge revenues be used first to nullify 100% of residential fixed fees. It closes the private well loophole and prevents captive utility secession. You're currently rushing to sign 20-plus deals before the June 6th state meritorium. But I'm reminding you that the county assessor has the power under ORS 285C.130 to deny exemptions that violate the intent of the law. As you consider streamlining your own procedures through ordinance 6518, I ask that you do not streamline away the financial security of your residence. I request you consider the commercial resource impact surcharge for a formal public hearing. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. And after Ms. Camacho speaks, it will be Sherry Boitano. Ms. Boitano could have the seat over here. Ms. Camacho, it is your turn.

First, I want to declare that I have had a brain injury. That's why I'm wearing a sun hat. I have a severe light sensitivity, and I might stumble a little bit. I wasn't planning to get up here, but after I saw that slide graphic about water usage and that data centers were only going to take a sliver, That really, that, I said, nope, something's wrong there. My husband, I'm a city volunteer, I volunteer for the public library, and I also manage, adopted a tiny branch library, so I'm very involved in my community in that aspect. I'm also a wife. My husband was one of the former water quality specialists with the Department of Environmental Quality, specifically in the water quality department. His emphasis was in groundwater. He helped start the Children's Groundwater Festivals here in Portland and in Tillamook. And he's now retired, but he was the liaison between the EPA and which back when we had a working EPA, and water quality within DEQ. Now, I heard in the presentation you say you don't discharge groundwater in Hillsboro, and I'm going, hmm, okay, well, what about the data centers? And where is the discharge of them going? Is this truly being monitored? And I can almost guarantee you that these data centers are drawing from the aquifers that are underneath the farmland north of Hillsboro. And there's three principal aquifers. The Columbia River Basalt Group is the main one. Our city gets it from, I think, Hag Lake and the Tualatin River. But for centuries, wells have been dug, and we have aquifers here. And in case anybody doesn't know what an aquifer is, the biggest one is underneath the state of Nebraska. And it's... supplies a lot of water for all the Midwest. And so, I hope you guys research Grand Water and find out. But I can almost guarantee you that the data centers are drawing from under the ball salt groups and other sedimentary, sedimentary, Layers, thank you. I think it's called, but the most principal one is the Columbia River Basalt Group. I don't think the youth have left, but I want to say that they really give us hope. And I want to thank Olivia. I think she's the only one that asked questions to the group as we were meeting in there. I had to leave because the lights were really bad in that other room. And I didn't even see them, frankly, being addressed. But I want to thank you personally that you asked those questions. And it seems like that was really a fake work section. session, because you're now saying you're going to have your real one afterwards. And that's kind of bothersome to me.

Okay, thank you, Ms. Camacho. After Ms. Boitano, Pamela Code will be the next. So if Ms. Code would like to sit up here. Ms. Boitano?

Good evening, councillors, and thank you for your time this evening. My name's Sherry Boitano. Long time Hillsborough and Washington County residents and I'm here because I'm concerned about the proliferation of the data centers, which has happened in the last few years. I see this as a city, county, and state issue. I guess the overarching question is what benefit do these data centers provide to the community? And in all the data, all the stats, everything, I have not heard that addressed at all. And I've spent two evenings at these meetings. And I don't see it in the papers either. And I don't see it, period. So I'm frustrated with that, but The second question I have is, is this the best use of our land resources? As part of the industries here, is a data center the best use of that land? I think we all need to ask ourselves that. And why are we subsidizing the data centers with tax incentives? Across the country, citizens are rising up against these data centers, and yet we're offering tax incentives to bring them here. They offer very little employment. They take up valuable land. They take up resources. These are simple questions that I think we really need to take a hard look at. The land was brought into the urban growth boundary for the purpose of generating industry and generating jobs. The data centers generate very few jobs. And so I think we're left to really question, is this the best use of our land and our community resources? One other thing I wanted to mention was the proliferation of the data centers in the disproportionate location here in Hillsborough as described as the Pacific Northwest. To me that was scary, that Hillsborough is described as the whole Pacific Northwest. Why are we trying to attract these centers?

Thank you.

Yeah, I'm the trailing spouse.

So state your name. Since you did not sign up on a yellow piece of paper, I will give you one minute.

Thank you. My name is Greg Boitano. Thank you for the minute. I appreciate that. The rush to get these data centers through specifically before the deadline seems like we're trying to deal with some real long-term environmental issues, really long-term issues for this city and really for rate payers of PGE, frankly, throughout the Portland metro area because rates are continuing to go up. And yet, you know, we're signing agreements in some cases that go out multiple decades, I think in the 2050s, actually, for one particular company. So it's like stacking these agreements sequentially. We're making long-term decision, excuse me, short-term decisions without really adequately considering the long-term data. And I'll stop and say... The gentleman who spoke previously about the issue of power consumption, you brought up the fact that data centers are going to be stacked multiple stories. NVIDIA and others are cramming more GPUs into a server. They're just going to simply draw more power and draw more than we have.

Thank you, Mr. Bartano. Thank you. The next speaker will be Tino, and Tino can take the chair over here. Ms. Cote, it is your turn.

Hello, City Council. I'm a Hillsborough resident living near Noble Woods where the Century Boulevard extension project is set to begin construction this month. And yes, I am here this evening to urge you to act swiftly to oppose and or request a pause on this project until its planning assumptions, research validity, fit with Hillsborough values and community impacts have been fully reconsidered. The Century Boulevard Extension project is intended to connect Main Street to Lois Street. It will destroy green space and trees and noble woods and disrupt the forest that currently in shrouds a portion of Rock Creek. Please also answer me one question. Why isn't this area in SNR? However, also, the neighbor nestled around where the construction is to begin, my neighborhood, is also where a lot of human activity happens that would be deterred and diminished with this extension. Neighbors utilize the streets so much and in such great numbers that people who do not even live on the same street know each other just from seeing each other outside so much. Our streets are lively, energetic, and have Hillsborough's diversity on display. This is all only possible because our streets are free from traffic risk. Human activity should not be crowded out for traffic flow, especially when the plan is decades old and reasons for the road are no longer compelling. This project exists because Hillsborough has supported it for decades, but the council should call its validity into question, starting with the grounds that data collection methods for resident attitudes would need to be inductive and phenomenological to be valid. Open houses about the extension are not. Next, it is very likely that the road plans do not meet modern research and design practices that have emerged since the project's genesis. I ask the council to call for the reexamination of plans according to modern urban design research. A key point here is that the assumptions that appear to guide the plan for this road are now understood to be lacking justification. Hillsboro deserves to have what other cities have, a progressive aspirational mindset toward outdoor design that centers green space preservation and resource efficient transportation systems. I believe that my neighborhood in particular, which has not been offered anything in exchange for the sacrifice to our lifestyle for this extension, deserves a distinguished innovative final product if something must be built. One of the City of Hillsborough's values is innovative and sustainable planning, and that resonates with this vision that I am talking about. I am so sorry to the county, genuinely, to the county and contractor that the project has taken so long to get funding. But this passage of time has rendered the assumption that it's a good, necessary plan, uncompelling. So to reiterate, I urgently and ardently request that the council oppose and no data centers.

All right, thank you. Before Tino speaks, Robert Bailey would be up next. Mr. Bailey, if you'd want to take this seat. Tino, your turn. I'm just a local carpenter that works here. Is he turned on? Mr. Tino, yeah, push the button until the green light comes on, on your microphone.

Boom, boom, test. My name is Tino, and I'm a local working carpenter in the area. And I just want to first off say I acknowledge the concerns that are in this room, and I definitely believe there's something worth having a conversation. But as a carpenter and a tradesman, one thing that always kind of As we look at, one thing that gauges the market for us is how many cranes in construction and things that are going. And for maybe not for a lot of people, but I know for me, my household and those that I see, that construction is how we support our families. And if we were just to entirely just stop, there would be a lot of people like me, regular people, working people that would be out of a job and would be hurting. While in my view as a tradesman, as a carpenter, and a fellow union member, I understand what this can do to the construction industry. However, I do see some concerns as I was looking up the data centers and on your Hillsborough website. And especially the concerns about tax exemption benefits that the companies receive and the developer. And these companies are literally given tax exemptions and receiving tax benefits on the front end before construction even begins. And you're talking that they're going to establish generational wealth for their kids' kids. And I was looking at the website, it says that the workers, the average employee, their pay should be 125% above the minimum wage. That is literally like $20, come on. And it says that there should be training requirements on those projects. And let me tell you something, not all those contractors that are working on those jobs are providing those opportunities to the people. It is my firm belief that any contractor, developer that is benefiting from tax breaks and from our valuable resources as a city, there should be requirements, stronger language. That requires contractors to be responsible to provide a livable wage, 20 bucks. Come on. Provide a livable wage, training, local hire, and diversity. I think there is a conversation that needs to be had, not just on this data center topic. And I believe personally that no one should take advantage of loopholes, take advantage of tax breaks, all while benefiting on the back of the local workforce. Thank you. Real quick, guys, for the gram.

Mr. Knudson, you can have this seat up here. Mr. Knudson. Dirk. You didn't recognize when I called you Mr. Knudson. My hearing is going wrong.

I can't hear very well.

Mr. Bailey, go ahead. I'm Robert Bailey, a member of Save Helvetia. We were the group that appealed the urban and rural reserves back in 2012 along with a thousand friends of Oregon. The settlement that was reached in your work session room in 2014 with your Mayor Willie at the time made an agreement that Your North Hillsboro industrial area could move on. Your South Hillsboro residential area could move on. And in exchange, the protection of rural reserves in Washington County, which the city of Hillsboro has repeatedly breached over the last four or five years. I want to direct your attention to your citizen involvement. You've heard tonight the pent up citizen angst about what's taking place here. At the same time, you have a youth advisory committee where you're instilling in your young people the importance of involvement. in my estimation each application for data center under goal one of our state land use policies should be subjected to citizen involvement and there should be notification per permit and there should be public information per permit and there should be citizen comment on what's taking place if this is the sum total of your citizen involvement for these many data centers that is not state law right thank you

You're done, right? If you would have a seat back there so we could have the next speaker, I'd appreciate that. Thank you. The next speaker is Ms. Clark Lumpa. Is Jody here? No, I'm sorry. It was not Jody Weiser. It's Jody Clark Lumpa, the other Jody. Okay. Well, we'll just call up Charlene. Charlene here.

Hey Rob, before my time starts, I'm not going to tell you guys how to do things, but it seems like a couple more chairs up here with more people in the queue would help. That's just me.

No, I appreciate that. I'll think about that, but you know- You think about it. I'm new to this job, so. You're doing great, man. All right, thank you.

Mr. Knutson, go ahead. Thank you, Councillor Harris, and thanks everybody. Listen, they're laughing at us. Data centers that are here in Hillsborough are laughing at us. I've heard it directly from people inside these companies. They think this is funny. They're having fun taking our money. It has to stop, okay? Number two, we were told we didn't need an emergency special session or a special, how you guys wanna say it? Some of you didn't want one. Here we are over a month later and we were supposed to have answers and that first session was not a lot of answers. That was a sales pitch. So I'm sitting here tonight to tell you that the narrative of a helpless city hall in Hillsboro is a policy choice. That's not a legal reality. That is not the Hillsboro story. We have led our community and the state forward for decades with strong creative policies. We fought the state many times over laws we didn't agree with. Salem might control the enterprise zone tax incentives, but under our home rule charter, this council controls the land and you control the power and the utility. You do not need to wait for the state to come to our rescue. You don't need to wait for more lawyers. We need to take action. And here's two things you can do, and I mentioned both of them in the last time I was here a month ago. Look at the 2022 Jackson East expansion project that Dan Rutzick managed, did a great job on it. That faced with infrastructure concerns, the city put limitations on the fact that data centers could not be out there in Jackson East North, and we limited 65 acres in Jackson East South. We have the code. You could cut and paste that code right now and put it into the IS zone and the IP zone, and you could do it tomorrow. I mean, theoretically you need a reading, but in 30 days we could shut this thing down. And Rob, I know you want a moratorium, but I haven't heard a single word about a moratorium in the last month. So you could do it. Right now, Hillsborough charges PGE 3.5% franchise fee, but under Oregon State Law 221.450, you have 5% you can charge. You've got a 1.5% amount we can go after. We can't do a lot about the deals that were made, and I know that's a legal issue at this point, but for God's sakes, let's go get the 1.5, because that money comes into the general fund. So let's go after big users that use 20 megawatts, draw a line, that's about 15,000 homes. Anybody using that much power, let's hit them. They're just gonna pay it, it's gonna be passed on, and PGE will send the city a check every month, like clockwork, which they're doing now. The community, in my estimation, is tired of hearing that local leadership is powerless. You have these tools, and you have the precedent. We just watched, we've heard that we can't do a lot because of the state laws, right? But now we're looking at you guys. We are watching to see if this council has the political courage to wield its local authority and to protect Hillsborough's future. We're all looking at you to show us the type of leaders you are, and I know what you guys are made of. So let's do this thing. We've got to get some emotion. We've got to shut this down, and all the talk here is great, but we need to see it back from you guys. Have that special session. Take some action. Let's shut this down for a year or more. Thanks.

Next speaker, if I could have Charlene Hochuling could take the seat over here, and Jodi Clark-Lompa, it is your turn.

Okay, I'm going to start out with thank you, Councilor Clark, for remembering that I cannot snap. Think Americans with Disabilities. I withheld my applauding while people were speaking, and I waited till the end for your convenience, not mine. Another thing is, maybe we wouldn't have to snap so much if you were actually listening to what we were saying. Over and over again. Now that's, I just wrote down since all of this started. I want to start out with, in no way do I wish to defame or impugn the work of city employees. They are working at your behest, at your direction. And now I'll point this way. You guys have the power. You're not taking it or you don't care. And we still care and we're going to keep coming. It is the council that is failing us. If these things that we're bringing to your attention were not already there, It is your job to find that information out. We have been waiting for weeks to be able to get some extra information, and what do you know? It came in a 1 a.m. dump this morning, a data dump. I watched that agenda like a hawk, as you probably figured out. Why are we wait, what is taking so long to get this information that we need? You guys should have it. You're the ones making the decisions. And if you're leaving it up to someone else, shame on you. It's time to get busy and take that power back. One of my immediate concerns, and I think it might go with a couple other people here, is how the council is not aware of what the data centers use of our water, our power, our land. Why, when we the citizens asked about these uses, did it take so long to get this information? Why wasn't council asking about this before we were asking about this? Here's my second concern. What is the council doing to keep me safe? My land, my water, my power, my ability to breathe in the Pacific Northwest. This is all information that the council should have been monitoring, and why is it taking so long to get this information? This can't be a surprise to you. We've been talking about this a long time. Why are you not going to the city employees? Again, nothing about them, but you should be. Do you want me to wrap it up?

Just please finish your thought, yes.

Okay. Okay, we're tired of waiting for you to take action on matters. We want to respect our council, but we want to be able to respect our council. If you guys can't do it, bye-bye.

All right, thank you. Jody Weiser is the next speaker, but now we have Ms. Hochulain, ready?

For all concerned, my name is Carolyn Kahoot. You did quite well not knowing me. I'm sitting this way because I assume that this council has read House Bill 4084, which are the rules and regulations for what they're wanting to do. And so I excerpted a few lines, we'll put it that way. So, in section, what is here? Section, whoops, yes, section 10, paren 2 and paren, the little letter D, it says, no, this is letter A, excuse me. regarding flexibility hiring timelines a clear plan for meeting employment triple dot not limited to job retention triple dot over the course of the exemption period and then in section ten two again d It says that material does not apply with respect to qualified property of an authorized business firm used in operating a data center. Okay. Then, where's the other piece? Okay, one, two, three. Okay. section two which is way up the top almost the very first capital b small letter d the governor may not approve an application if there are fifteen projects currently in progress under the fast track permitting program now a couple of weeks ago when i got something via next door I checked out the Hillsboro website and I discovered there are already 15 projects of this nature already. Okay, please check that out. So I want to read you, since I have a few minutes here.

You have 20 seconds.

Section 16, capital B, advanced manufacturing, end quote, does not include activities that are primarily Little i, routine assembly, packaging, labeling, sorting, warehousing, storage, or distribution. Little two.

Ms. Hogan, it's three minutes. Please wrap it up, okay?

Okay, I'm not cool about data centers. I think there's something that is not being said. There are people here who have huge expertise and who have said things that I did not hear in the room in front of the previous meeting.

All right, thank you very much. Antonia Lopez can have a seat over here, and it's Ms. Weiser's turn to speak.

So I have some questions that I think you should be asking and making decisions about. Why aren't data centers paying for the road, sewer, water lines that are serving their facilities? If they were homes, those costs would be in the price of the home. Why is that cost not in the price when a data center buys property to develop it in Hillsboro? Another question, why are building heights the decision of the developers rather than the decisions of the city? Why aren't you setting standards that say, in that data center alley, the buildings are all going to be four or five stories tall? You just approved agreements for more two story buildings. another question why are there nice green buffett areas around data centers when apartment buildings are being built on the sidewalk at major intersections in this county and why when and why did the community service fee jump from a much lower amount to 33, 33, 33% and then 50, 50%. When did that happen? Was the council involved in that decision or was that a staff decision? Why did that happen and why is it set where it is? When staff saw a huge number of applications coming in during the moratorium, They could have come to you and said, we need to change the community service fee to 99.9%. That would have made the appeal of stacking a bunch of applications way less appealing. They didn't come to you. And you could have acted, because the ordinance says that under special circumstances, you can make decisions in a day. It doesn't take two hearings for everything. So I think that, Council President, when we met a month ago and you saw the low wages and the stacking of agreements, you were visibly upset. And it was new information to you, and it's clear that decisions have been being made by staff, not by council, current council members. It is time for you to take back your responsibilities and act on them.

Thank you, Ms. Weiser. So the next person to speak is Simone Campbell. You can have the seat here. And Ms. Lopez, you can go ahead and speak.

Let's see if Rob and Chad can put their legal licenses to use here. I am demanding that the city of Hillsborough enact a state of emergency based on community wellness and health due to the fact that we do not know the environmental effects that these data centers are going to have. Then I'm asking you guys to invoke home rule. And yes, land use rules are going to be a barrier. Then I would like for you to sue the state the way that you did in 2022. You've done this before. and your legal argument, I'm even going to give it to you. We know that laws do not keep up with society's advancements. This happened with the internet. We know that a lot of domestic violence victims and children were even bullied into suicide through the internet. And there was no laws in place to protect them or to hold people accountable. That is where we are again. So I just gave you guys a three prong approach with a legal argument that you can use. I would be embarrassed to have a law degree and have the community continuing to come up here and cite ORS to you. We do not know the irreparable harm that these data centers can bring to our community, but we have evidence of what they've brought to other communities across the country. It is your responsibility to throw anything that you can at this. Set precedent. Maybe you guys can lead the charge to help other communities protect themselves as well. Lastly, the lack of common sense and honestly the level of incompetence is truly astounding by this council. Because if Hillsborough is such a prime place that these people want to be here, why not tax them up the ass instead of giving our shit away?

Thank you. Next up to speak will be Chris Pinkham, but right now it is Ms. Campbell's turn.

I saw the City of Canady Center website today. Thank you for the transparency. It confirms what residents feared.

As of June 2026, Billsboro now has 21 data center sites totaling 407 acres. 16 built, five unpermitted. But the new data shows five more sites planned, another 77, 177 acres that haven't even applied for permits yet. That's 301 acres of new data centers and pipeline. Tonight, staff will tell you that this is a ministerial duty. That under ORS 285C.105, if an applicant checks the boxes, he must approve. They'll say, in their hands entirely. But your own documentation shows the structural reality. Local leadership built this pipeline. This council expanded the North Industrial Enterprise Zone boundary as recently as 2024. You set the rules staff are now bound to enforce. Staff may be bound today, but this council is not bound tomorrow. HB 484 is set this month. You now have discretion to pause new enterprise zone agreements with 301 new acres on the table and contracts stacked to 2051, using that expression as the only responsible choice. So I'm asking you tonight for two things. Direct staff to bring back a resolution within 30 days for a moratorium on new data center enterprise zone agreements, including the five planned sites totaling 177 acres that haven't applied yet. Commission an independent study on water, grid, more deals, excuse me, in state-wide school funding that impacts before any more deals are signed. Because when we abate billions in Hillsboro, it suppresses the state school fund for every district in Oregon, including ours. We can't approve what we haven't measured. And with 301 new acres now public, Hillsboro residents can't afford another decade of misinterior duty.

So after Mr. Pinkham, Carolyn Cohout would be the next speaker.

All right. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm actually not a resident of Hillsborough. I'm a resident of Beaverton, living in the Cooper Mountain area. Why am I here? Well, this is an issue that is bigger than Hillsborough. It's as big as the region and it goes beyond that. The drain of resources that you are signing us up for, for no benefit to ourselves, this community elected you to help them, to represent them, and to better their lives. And instead, you're selling them down the river for what? It doesn't make sense. What do we get out of it? Billion dollar corporations can continue to exploit us. What are they going to do with the data? Really, what benefit does it have to us? It doesn't bring jobs, and at the same time, It drains our water resources. I know you received information today that it would be an inconsequential drop in the bucket. Well, so far, we've only used air cooling. Kind of makes sense when 11 people or less work there that almost no water is coming out. When you build a three-story building full of semiconductors, I'm a semiconductor engineer, by the way, or at least I was at my last job. These things are going to use an enormous amount of heat. They're going to produce an enormous amount of heat by consuming so much electricity. There's no other way to cool them but water. And as the years go by and that resource becomes more scarce, we're passing on that burden away from the companies that you're refusing to tax, you're permitting them to go by without collecting any taxes. Instead, we'll pay more for water, we'll pay more for electricity as they draw more and more from the grid. Rolling blackouts probably could happen as the grid becomes more and more stressed, as we add more and more megawatts of capacity so that Facebook can exploit us and immeasurable ways as we can prop up the surveillance state, clearly I'm not a fan of the data centers or what they represent. Because what they represent is nothing but a terror for this community. Thank you.

We've got about 15 more to go, and I appreciate the passion and everything. I would ask that you please snap your fingers, except for those who cannot. And so everyone can listen in online, people can listen as well. I would appreciate that, and I'm sure online listeners would appreciate it as well. I said if you're unable to, you can clap. That is fine. So Carolyn Kohout, I don't see her. So then we're looking at Aaron Hag and Jacob Roloff.

Well, I'm sort of disappointed that you don't know how to say Haig, because Ray Haig is a long time educator here in Washington County. He passed away. He and his wife Carol are my in-laws or were before they passed away. My husband and I, along with my sister-in-law and her husband, purchased the property to try to save it because it is on the National Historic Registry. It's the Shute Meyer Juergen Farmstead, which is now surrounded by data centers and Amazon. We are... There's nothing we can do. We're completely surrounded by them. There was one question as to how did they get the water and all of this freebie stuff that they got when they bought the property. Well, several years ago, you may not know this, that the city of Hillsboro in its wisdom CONDEMNED ALL OF THAT FARMLAND, THAT PRIME FARMLAND, UNDER URBAN RENEWAL FUNDING. NOW, I ALWAYS THOUGHT URBAN RENEWAL FUNDING WAS TO HELP LOW-INCOME HOUSING IN CITIES. BUT NO, THIS WAS USED TO PUT IN ALL OF THOSE DATA CENTERS AND AMAZON. AND SPEAKING OF BEING BETRAYED BY THE CITY COUNCIL, STEVE CALLOWAY, WHEN HE WAS MAYOR, WAS REALLY WORKING MY IN-LAWS OVER. HE WAS LIKE, THE COOLER. for the city, and trying to get Ray and Carol to donate the property to the city, our three and a half acres. And while the city was buying out everybody else's property, they tried to get him to donate the property. And then Ray Haig was the person who discovered the Methodist Meeting House. It was right across the street. And Calloway was over there at my mother-in-law's 80th birthday party trying to convince Ray to put the memorial on our property. Well, that's not where it was. No, the burial ground of the Native Americans, children of Meek and Virginia, Joe Meek and his wife Virginia, are buried underneath the Amazon parking lot. And we had to fight to get even any kind of memorial at all for that after the city had promised a one-acre memorial. But they did not keep that promise. So we've been betrayed for years and years. The last time I was here, I was objecting to the name of the street being changed for the third time in about three years to Star Boulevard, which, by the way, don't you usually name it after dead people? But no. The city named it Star Boulevard after a guy who had two ethics violations with the state of Oregon. But they went ahead and named the street after him anyway. So we're stuck. We're surrounded now. We've been promised under the table or, you know, through rumor that we might be able to become a... a commercial node when we join the city. But are we going to be eligible for all of this great funding and all these tax breaks? And are we going to be eligible for the enterprise zone and all of that? I sure hope so. Thank you.

Thank you. Meredith Volstek is the next speaker. If Meredith would like to have a seat over here. Mr. Rolloff, your turn.

Yep, good evening. I think it is funny and concerning that the mayor is not here again, despite two councillors requesting an emergency session last month when the mayor was in town. This is the most well attended council meeting that I've seen in many months, and the worst attended by council. It was a nice PowerPoint from our economic development director and staff. A lot of slides, a lot of clever wording while ignoring the glaring truth in front of you that the majority of people do not want these data centers to take over our cities and lives. And I personally would like to see more forests and not the growing abomination of the silicon forest. There are basically two questions, what to do with the data centers we have now and what to do about future data centers. And I think with the ones we have, we need to know, and I think I speak for a lot of people, we need to know who is leasing the ones that we have, the co-location data centers. It's not they serve the cloud. That's not really sufficient, the data centers. How many megawatts per 100,000 people would it require to do normal cloud services, normal storage of photos, or whatever innocuous reasons the company owners claim? Meanwhile, they're getting $22 billion. Companies like them are getting $22 billion and doing Pentagon contracts. We also need to stop giving them, of course, free property tax breaks, screwing the county over. I went to a budget meeting for the county, estimate growth was 4.5% and a single data center forgot to file for the enterprise zone and it increased the estimate by like a point and a half, which is like 25% of the estimates, insane, one data center. And yeah, I noticed the new FAQs on the site and one in particular stood out to me. It asked how many enterprise zone agreements are currently in effect and how many are for data centers. And it said there are 50 as of March 2025, with 17 being submitted since March 2026. It didn't answer how many were for data centers. I assume 90%, let's say, out of the 67, there's 40 or 50 of those are data centers. But again, you should update those numbers. As for who the development serves in general, the current Deputy Secretary of War, Steven Feinberg, owns the company Subcom, which operates at least four of the cables coming into Flexential and QTS sites on Huffman and Evergreen, and Amazon and Meta as well, and they are certainly winning. I don't think any of you that drag your feet and say that your hands are tied should continue to hold elected office, nor appointed positions in council, management, or directorships. You actually do have to represent the people that live and will live with the repercussions of your decision to prostrate the city for this highly extractive and destructive industry. So, get out of office.

Thank you for being here today, Council, for those of you that are here. I have some questions for you. You say the existing data centers aren't water-cooled or for AI. Do you know that the UN declared we're in an era of water bankruptcy? Do we, the community members and voters, get a say in whether or not these data centers change their cooling systems to use our water? Do we, the community members and voters, get a say in whether these data centers want to change the computing they house to support AI? What about when they eventually evaporate all our water and we are poisoned by the high concentrations of nitrates or worse in our potable water? You are giving away the tax dollars we could have to fund our schools and our future. And with the equipment replacement loophole, these data centers could never pay the property taxes we, the residents, are owed. These data centers will have a huge impact on our future, our children's future, and our grandchildren's future. These corporate exploiters must be regulated, taxed, and prevented from consuming our resources and robbing our future generations. You cannot convince us that this is what we want. It's not. Your constituents aren't stupid. I can promise you that if you are not pushing for what your constituents want, your time in this role is running out.

And after Jana, Denise Kerr is up. Is Ms. Kerr here? Jana, go ahead.

Well, I'll explain my shirt. Recall Beach Pace. That's what needs to happen. And why? Because of her inability to act on so much ice. She stood at a parking lot and told me there's nothing we can do. They are federal officers. Although I watch other cities do stuff, she does nothing. Same thing's happening now. Let's also talk about the performance of all of you here today. Back in November, you guys put down seven focus areas on your website about what you were going to do about ICE. Very little is done. The simple things were taken care of. I go through there today, and the majority of the things are showing as in progress, things that should have happened. Why is there not a community advisory committee going? Why? That does not take seven months to make happen. It is nowhere on your website, yet it's under your focus areas of something that you're going to do, and it is in progress. It says there's going to be regular meetings held. It's been seven months, not a single meeting, no notes to read about how ICE has impacted the community. No solutions are being made and you're not sharing accurate information. I go through the police log, there's 74 things noted, only nine of them show that they saw ice there. Secondly. Let's talk about what your city manager is doing in regards to all of this. There's supposed to be training for your employees. That isn't happening. I've talked to numerous Hillsborough School District employees and been told that there's little to no communication. In one instance regarding ICE, This person had received one email and was told if they had any questions, they should seek help from their administration. Doesn't feel the administration in her school is going to help. So where does she go? No other communication is given. They don't feel it's safe to ask for help, so it's very far from complete. Now, how about the kids? The kids affected by ice. All of our children are affected by ice. I was fortunate enough to be given the following from a group of 11 years old. I want everyone to know that every kid should not be scared of their family to be taken. I shouldn't have to be scared to go outside my house with my family. I'm always wondering that if my family gets taken, what will I do? This is my own words. I am scared almost every day that something will happen. I shouldn't have to be writing this. I am too young. Some people think it's okay when it's not. I want everyone to know that I live in constant fear that ICE might harm me or someone in my family or circle of friends. Because of this, I cannot find peace or concentrate on anything else. I want to ask you, if you have the power to change the situation, to please help the community and make every effort to bring about change. I could go on, but they all say the exact same thing. Thank you. They are terrified.

Thank you.

And you're doing nothing.

Go ahead, Ms. Kerr.

President Harris and Councillors, my name is Denise Kerr, a 40-year resident of Hillsboro. The COH's information on data centers is aimed at convincing residents that they need data centers. The COH info supports its position with references to statistics from companies that will profit, such as Jones-Ling, LaSalle, ITU, Open Vault, etc. There's no clean hands there, no neutral third parties, they're all self-serving. They're friends of the fox who want to guard the chicken coop. There's really no credibility in those references. The city of Hillsboro states many jobs created by data centers from 2023. That same year, Intel hit its peak number of employees. What's happened over the last three years? Intel has reduced its workforce by nearly 50%. But the city of Hillsborough continues to quote from the peak. It's misleading and dishonest. The COH wants to emphasize the good the data centers brings by changing the color of text to blue, sometimes underlined and even bold. The COH uses absolute numbers when they want numbers to appear big, very persuasive. They switch to percentages, ratios, to make numbers appear small. It's a deceptive way to manipulate statistics to gain influence. It's what's left out that affects our lives. Where are the impact studies? Environmental, climate, health damage, ecology, habitat, what about the end of the cycle? Are there exit plans? Do facilities stand empty to become a ghost town or rather a ghost industrial zone? There are too many unanswered questions that need to be considered before making decisions that impact our lives and communities for decades. This shift involves more than money. The COH should look beyond their reputations, ambitions, resumes, and monetary worth. This is a we endeavor, not a me, me, me. This requires consensus. I also grabbed a couple headlines. Residents of the Pine turned out in droves against the 20 megawatt data center bid. LA officials have rejected a pitch to bring the data center to their central Oregon city. Now isn't that amazing? Little, little the Pine in the middle of beautiful cascades. What do you think their excuses are to bring data centers there? Are they close to a Trans-Pacific cable? Are they close to the river? Are they close to I-5? None of those. So this is what these wolves are after. They just want the land and the resources. They don't care about the people who live here. And then also Erin Brockovich had a headline too. She shares a new tool to track impact of AI data centers. People aren't being, this is her quote, people aren't being heard. They aren't being seen in their own backyard and they deserve to know what's happening.

All right, thank you, Ms. Kerr.

Thank you. Thank you, council.

The next two are Paige. Thank you. Excuse me, Paige Mendocino and Kari Chisholm are next. Kari Chisholm, Paige Mendocino, Kari Chisholm. Mr. Chisholm's not here. So then it would be Myrna Munez is next. Miss Mendocino, you can go ahead and proceed.

Thank you, good evening. My name is Paige Mendocino and I'm a resident of Hillsboro. I attended the working session earlier this evening and I have a couple of questions and a couple of comments. The first comment is, and this was a throwaway line, and I don't know who it was on the council who said it, but the meeting, the working session was opened with the words, something to the effect of, we're here tonight to talk about data centers because, and I quote, not everyone is in favor of growth. I thought that was a really disheartening and disingenuous way to start what was supposed to be a working session. Disingenuous because to suggest somehow that the people here tonight that you're hearing that opponents of unchecked data center explosion are somehow anti-growth. I think that maybe I have, I won't speak for anyone else, but I'll speak for myself. I'm not anti-growth. I think I might have a very different definition of what a growing, thriving community is than some of the people here tonight on the council who are representing us and our interests. So, to my questions. One of the questions I jotted down was how many jobs exactly have been added to the community based on the data centers that are currently in operation. I have tried to find out that number and it's really hard to find that information, which I find weird because that's supposed to be a key reason for why we're supposed to want these great data centers. Here's my second question. What are the requirements for any of these applicants to do and file any sort of environmental impact report prior to their application being approved? And if, in fact, there is no requirement for them to do any sort of environmental impact reporting, why on earth not? which sort of connects to my larger point here which is that as i'm listening to all of this and i really hope by the way that some of this is sinking in because y'all are losing the trust of this community It does not appear to me as though the city, in their handling of this issue, has really got any sort of a proactive plan. Most of this seems to be reactive. I keep hearing things like, well, that wasn't really on our radar. We weren't really, really thinking about data centers back then. Gee, maybe that's something we should start looking into. My point here is this, what is your strategic plan to manage this development? What sort of measures or mechanisms or process do you have in place that could reassure this community that the explosion of data centers in the last ten years won't simply continue for the next ten?

All right, thank you. The next speaker, well, Ms. Munoz, but the next one I'm going to call up is going to be, I'm not sure I can read this right, is Annabelle or Allall, Allall Bell? Does that ring any bells?

I'm going to start with help with my name, since I'm probably going to be your next senator, you should probably learn it. It's Myrna Munoz.

Thank you. No problem. Reclaiming my time. Is Tonya Golden, she can take the next seat over here. Ms. Munoz, Munoz, go ahead.

You got it, thank you, Rob. I want to start with gratitude to Councillor Alcaide and Councillor Sinclair tonight for their outstanding leadership on this council. I wanted to make sure to recognize you for your outstanding listening, for your responsiveness, and for your resilience as you have stood for us voters to get our questions answered. especially amongst a spread of horrifying examples this spring. I wanted to take the time to thank you for showing us all how to listen to the people that entrust us with meeting their needs as a collective. So thank you so much. I am here to beg you. to hear our questions and answer us. I find it odd that as your constituents, we are having to beg you to be transparent about these data centers. I appreciate your guarded answers and the appearance of some movement around what you are responsible for this afternoon. But I hear nothing about evaluating the impact of data centers on our health and safety and our way of living. Please require data centers. to study their impact on people. Please study and transparently share with us the findings. Please help them make themselves safe for us all. Our children should be safe at school. We should be safe at work. Please stop using observational tracking to protect profits and start using observational tracking with human impact. Please commit to health and safety for us all. Thank you.

Thank you. And what's your name, ma'am? Yeah, button in the middle, the green light will go on. Yeah, what's your name, ma'am?

Tanya Golden, I live outside of North Plains.

Did I call you up?

Yep.

Okay, go ahead.

I'm intergenerational here. My great grandmother's people came off the Grand Rondres. My grandma grew up homesteading, more or less, through the Depression. My grand folks settled in Hillsboro farming after my grandpa retired from the military. I was raised farming. I came back to Oregon to raise my children to farm. I've been semi-subsistence, living the majority of my life. And I'm really wondering why you would take the very essence of what keeps us alive, of life, away from us. Water, air, land. Why? And then icing on the cake, you take away the money that will feed education, that will feed democracy. You're cutting yourselves and all of us off. All of us off. Do the right thing. We elected you to represent us. But it's sounding and feeling like you're bought. Step up. All of you step up and do the right thing. Do what you were elected to do and protect our future generations. Thank you.

Thank you. And then we have Kelly Dunlap can come up and Sandra can come up. Ms. Dunlap, just go ahead and push the button in the middle there. The green light will come on and you can start speaking.

Good evening.

My name is Kelly Dunlap. I am a resident of adjoining Tigard. I'm not a resident of Hillsboro. But like the gentleman from Beaverton who spoke just a few minutes ago, the deployment of data centers is not just a Hillsboro issue. It's an issue for all of us in surrounding areas. So that's why I'm here, that's why my husband is here, my friend from Lake Oswego, we care, and we're watching you. We're watching you. First of all, I want to ask, is the mayor even here? I thought I had heard her come on quickly, maybe answer a few questions. She never came on?

It was AI.

Okay. So I thought for momentarily that she had come on. Can I stop you?

Just stop you for a minute. You'll get your time, but I just want to interrupt for a minute here. I think that was Brown that made that comment. We'll not tolerate disruptions that preclude us from being able to conduct our business. Your actions are causing a disruption, precluding the council from conducting this business. That has an impact on every person in this room and online. Please refrain from causing any additional disruptions. If you continue to cause disruptions, I may have to ask you to leave the meeting. I do not want to do that. but I may have to and discontinue the meeting until you do. So that is your first warning. Thank you. Go ahead, ma'am.

So the mayor not being here tonight is a complete embarrassment and travesty, seriously, for her and for you all. If I were you guys, I would be quite embarrassed tonight. I mean, unless she's laying in a hospital bed, I really don't understand why she's not here. A lapse in leadership, to say the least. She must be held accountable for that. You all need to hold her accountable. That's what leadership does. Just because she's the mayor doesn't mean you can't step up and lead when you need to. And now is the time that requires that. We're all here, not with our families. It's 9.30 at night. We're here because we care. She should be here. We need courage. I wanted to tell Mayor Pace, you run to the roar, Mayor Pace. You don't run away from it. All these people here wanting you out of your job, run to it. Find out why. Answer their questions. Be authentic. Be honest. We don't see it. The people feel it. We know when you're not honest and authentic. And we know when you're hiding. The other thing I wanted to say, I agreed with most everything that...

It's been three minutes, so if you could wrap it up.

No, you took our time. You took our time. Nice try. Nice try. You were talking. No, sir. 20 seconds. No. Right. No, you never paused. 20, 30 seconds more. I was saying that... Mayor Pace and the rest of you need to run to the roar. This is the roar right here. Fight this fight with us, not against us. You're a part of this community too, and you were elected to do a job that is to represent us, not to represent private equity. Private equity is not here for us, they are here for private equity. I know that. I retired from companies within this community. I know what that is about. And Councillor Anvery, I specifically want to call out you this evening before I close. And that I know that I see on your bio that you currently work for the Intel Foundry. And I would really, I found that quite, quite shocking, honestly. Because I know all about Intel. And I know all about the foundry. And if you are involved in choices and decisions and recommendations about AI within this community, that's wrong.

You should have excused yourself a long time ago.

You get off. You're talking about data centers? That doesn't concern you, Ms. Anvery. Not as an Intel employee. Do better.

Thank you. Sandra, you're our last speaker, your turn.

Okay, so first of all, I wanted to say that you are interrupting our time by saying those things during our time. Second of all, I'm just so mad. So I want to remind you guys that this is native land, this is not your land, okay? I am going to recite this Native American proverb for the remaining of my time in hopes that you can just grasp even a little bit of what the people here are trying to tell you in the simplest form that I can tell you, since I'm really not sure you're understanding what the people of Hillsboro are trying to tell you. So, beach pace. Only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned, and the last fish been caught, will we realize we cannot eat money. Again, Rob Harris. Only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned, and the last fish been caught, will we realize we cannot eat money. Saba Avery. Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money. Elizabeth Case. Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money. Again, appointed counselor, Christian Salgado. Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money. Rob Harris. Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money. Saba Andre. Only... When the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned, and the last fish been caught, will we realize we cannot eat money? Appointed counselor Christian Salgado, only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned, and the last fish been caught, will we realize we cannot eat money? Beach Pace. Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money. And I hope you guys are understanding that.

Thank you. We do have one more commentator. I could not read his name. I apologize. Mr. Al Weibel. Mr. Weibel.

Christian Salgado hasn't even been looking at the screen.

Hi. It is on. My name's Al Weibel. What a crowd to play to, my God. You guys have been very patient, it's admirable. And I'm going to assure you that I'm not here to talk about what your client's developments are going to do to Weibel Creek. There's an excellent presentation, graphs and charts and everything. But in a presentation, one of the things that stands out the most is what's glossed over or what's omitted. So there's a few things in form and then in substance I just want to comment on. One of the things is I heard no mention of hard stops if one of the organizations, one of the companies, goes beyond the permit boundaries. The only thing I heard was, well, there could be something happening. And I think people would be more trustful of you if there were hard boundaries that if this is violated, it stops. I don't have much time here. The other thing is some laws. Things are going according to technical ordinances and everything. But there's some laws that are hard to avoid. And one of them is the laws of thermodynamics. And some of the stuff that was presented just doesn't make a lot of sense. It's admirable that it's not going to use water. They're going to be air-cooled. But you get above 25 degrees C, you're not doing air cooling. And we've seen temperatures in excess of 40 degrees C here. And so are they gonna shut down? Are you gonna shut them down? Or all of a sudden, massive amounts of water are gonna be needed? And that also goes to the use of electricity. We're talking about, your chart showed nominal amounts of electricity. These companies right now, the little ones, are out signing forward contracts for hundreds of megawatts. The medium and large sizes are signing forward contracts now of multiple gigawatts. some of that i you may want to find some outside sources to substantiate what you're being told and what's going into the graphs i think it would be to your benefit and i think it would go a long way toward proving to your audience here that you're deserving of trust i'll i'm out of time i'm going to skip the rest of what i was going to say thanks for putting through all of this. My hat's off to you.

All right, thank you, Mr. Weibel. All right, that's the completion of the public comment. Thanks for everyone who spoke tonight. We're going to move on to the consent agenda now. We've only one item to consider on the consent agenda. Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda?

So moved, Ann Marie.

Is there a second?

Second, Elker.

Is there any discussion? First, what's the consent agenda? Is there any discussion? Let's take a roll call.

Councilor Elker? Aye. Case? Aye. Avery? Aye. Sinclair? Aye. Harris? Aye. Salgado?

Was that an aye?

I believe Sal got it, I'm sorry. Thank you.

All right, thank you. The motion passes. Yeah, go ahead.

I wanna thank everybody for coming tonight and having this discussion with us. It's important for you to stay engaged I can't speak for everybody who I represent with, but we keep coming to the meetings. We're showing up and we're committing ourselves, but continue to ask questions. Please continue to show up. It has an impact. Thank you.

Thank you. There are no public hearings or unfinished business. We do have two first reading of ordinances to consider as well. Going down to item seven on ordinances. First reading, 7.1, Hillsborough Comprehensive Plan Amendment 002-26. Holmesmith, consider the Planning Commission's recommendation to update the comprehensive plan map to change designation from industrial to residential low density on 0.94 acre property. located at 1055 Northeast 47th Avenue. Ordinance number 6517 is available. Do I have a motion to approve the first reading of ordinance 6517?

So moved, Anbury.

Thank you, do I have a second? Is there a second?

Second case.

Thank you, any discussion? Please, may I have a roll call, please?

Councilors Allcare?

Nay.

Case? Aye. Anvery? Aye. Sinclair? Nay. Harris?

Aye.

Salgado?

That is four that I count. The motion passes. The first reading of ordinance 6517 passes. The second reading in consideration of final adoption of the ordinance will be June 16th. The next first reading is 7.2, Community Development Code Amendment 003-26, Zone Changes, Planned Unit Developments, and Adjustments. Consider the Planning Commission's recommendation to approve an update to the Community Development Code to align with new state regulations from Senate Bill 974 and House Bill 4037 regarding zone changes, planned unit developments, adjustments, and housing applications. Ordinance 6518 is available. Do I have a motion to approve the first reading of Ordinance 6518?

So moved, Dan Murray.

Is there a second? Did you second?

Yeah, I was just asking, can you hear me?

Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yeah, I'll second. All right, we have a first and a second. Is there any discussion? May we please have a roll call?

Councilors, I'll care. Aye. Case? Aye. Avery? Aye. Sinclair?

Abstain.

Can you state the reason for your abstention?

For the lack of public engagement and awareness for type two.

I think under our policy we do accept that as a reason. Continue with the roll call.

Harris?

Aye.

Salgado?

The motion passes. The first reading of ordinance 6517 passes. The second reading and consideration for final adoption of the ordinance will be June 16th. There is no new business. Next item is number nine, the city manager report.

Good evening. There's no city manager's report this evening.

Thank you. Any council comments? This is the time for council comments. They have up to three minutes to make any general comments that they would like to.

I would like to make some.

Go ahead.

Today I became a doctor in education leadership. I've done research before. I've done research on destruction of a rainforest in southern Mexico. And it was a social history, and it was a look at all the entities that had an interest in this land that was under the stewardship of the Lakandon Mayans, who didn't sell out. And that story talked about the impact of the decisions on that place and the people who stood by to protect the land. And non-governmental NGOs, researchers from around the world who would come there and study. about Mayan culture and look at a rainforest, look at the biodiversity, look at the ecosystem and the people connected to it. So when I think about what's happening with Hillsborough, it affects everything. It will. We need to be stewards and make sure it doesn't. I am supporting environmental impact studies for everything that we do. That's what I'm going to push for and hopefully other people on this council are going to have concerns and want to protect the environment too. I've been talking to a lot of agencies and I didn't know this. There are coho salmon in McKay Creek. That's something. I don't know what other habitats could be disturbed. What other wildlife, protected wildlife, I don't know. And I feel stupid as a city councilor because I don't know that. But I'm going to continue to do my research and ask questions and talk to people and try to have answers. Thank you.

Thank you. Councillor Case?

Thank you, Councillor Harris.

So today I just wanted to say, I listen to every public comment and read every email that comes to us on council, including everything tonight and the emails we received earlier today. Amongst the concerns, I've heard a lot of concerns about school funding when it comes to tax abatements. And throughout this, I also inquired about this, about the city and the school district. The City of Hillsborough FAQ page about data centers has now been updated with information that specifically addresses the questions we heard most often, as well as details about the State School Fund for Public Education, which is determined at a state level. I'm grateful to have this information as we continue to discuss our options. We as counselors can't make informed decisions without an accurate understanding of their effects. Because the funding formula is dictated by the state, I encourage residents with concerns about our public schools to reach out to your state representatives, as I am doing, to push for change. I want to thank the city finance and communications team, along with HSD's finance and communications team, for their work to get our FAQ page updated with this information. Thanks.

Thank you, Councilor Salgado.

All right, I got closer to my mic. Can you hear me better?

Yes.

Yes, okay, good. I have three things I want to say. Number one, yeah, I appreciate everybody coming in here and raising concerns. I think that, you know, I encourage you to follow up and join the work session because there's going to be more data.

The recording has stopped.

Hold on one second. Hold on one second. We're trying to restart the recording, counselor. This meeting is being recorded. Okay, there we go, go ahead.

Yeah, no, I was just saying, you know, I think that I appreciate everybody coming in and speaking up about data centers. I encourage you to go to the rest of the work session because there's going to be a lot of information and data shared. I think there's a misconception that the trends that happen in other parts of the nation are happening here in Hillsborough, and I think that's part of what you're going to find in the work session. I do feel like we need to raise the fees and taxes on data centers full stop. I think that When you look at the way where digital infrastructure is going, in the next three years alone, we're projected to increase capacity by 30 megawatts. at the global level is 3x that right so this is the new digital infrastructure this is stuff that we're uh uh you know using on a daily basis and you know we want to focus on the local jobs like the construction and actual maintenance jobs but we don't talk about the e-commerce we don't talk about the entrepreneurs we don't talk about pinterest people we don't talk about the shopify stores those are all jobs that data centers enable those are all jobs that digital infrastructure enables so We should not be against that because a lot of people are living off of that and that's the new economy. What we should be doing is increasing the prices, coming up with new fees so that we can recuperate some of that resource that they're taking away. Because it's not fair that the people that have been living in Hill Grove have been invested for decades to build the infrastructure that's here. for a data center to come in and completely benefit from it without giving reciprocal uh benefit back to the community so when 2028 comes around maybe even sooner i feel like we do need to do that and i encourage everybody to i also want to encourage folks that don't live within the city of hillsborough that feel compelled to go and speak up around dangerous things to pay attention to the VSS battery in front of the West Indian Elementary School. That's actually a real threat to the environment and a real threat to students and I don't hear anybody in this room speaking up about that. So I encourage you to show up and try to stop that because that's actually a real threat and if you talk to firefighters, there's not a lot that can be done around lithium ion battery fires, right? So I mean focus on that, pay attention to that, especially if you care about the safety of the environment. And lastly, I just want to say for Latino community and Spanish speaking community, I heard some really awful stuff that was happening during the primary. There was a person that ran for office who was part of my community who was trying to encourage folks lie about a person's racial status, and I really don't think that it's safe for people to try to coerce our undocumented community to come in and speak up and make up lies. I think that's very irresponsible, and I'm really upset about that. And I really want to encourage people that run for office to leave our undocumented community alone. That is all. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Hey. This is... This is... This is the time for the Council to comment. Councillor Sinclair.

Good evening. I want to convey again I'm out of state right now with family and I would have loved to have been there in person. I am so grateful for every resident who civically engaged and who continues to show up. Thank you for exercising your civic rights. I also want to say um i'm grateful for our council that we're here and we're listening we hear you we see you um to our community and our residents um i want to encourage us as a body to continue to exercise our governing authority and setting regulations um it is about smart growth and people I'm proud that our community showed up and spoke out because it helps us create new policy. And so there is more work to be done moving forward, but I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who showed up.

Thank you, I'll just take a second to say running these meetings is harder than it looks from over there. I appreciate that. I also want you to know that I've lived in this community for decades. And that when they did the first enterprise zone in 2006, I lived here and I met with both the mayor and a council person with my concern over the way it was set up. They used the North Hillsboro industrial area, but they used the residence of Southwest Hillsboro where I live. Because it's the two lowest census tracts in the county at the time in order to qualify because enterprise zones were limited in numbers at that time. You could only have like 28 or 29 in the entire state. And in my meetings, I really advocated for reaching out and doing employment in the low income houses. Because if they use them to get the enterprise zone, they should prioritize them for the jobs that came in. I had some success. In 2012, 13, I became aware of the first data centers. That's over 12 years ago. I met with the mayor and the city council to talk about that and talk about the place and our manufacturing area was concerned over our limited resources and our limited land. And again, I wasn't on city council, but I was just a concerned citizen, so I showed up and I made my concerns known. And I was informed largely by a writer from the Oregonian who's still writing about data centers today. In 2014 or 15, I worked with a person who testified here today on what we call the Taxpayer Return on Investment Act, which was to require any large company that received tax incentives would have to have a minimum, I think it was 150% of median, a median income or something. I can't remember, but it was more than minimum wage. And it was based on how many jobs, the incentive would be based on how many jobs they produced, not just one, they would have to show multiple jobs. We got a legislative concept, we went down to Salem, we lobbied for that, we talked to several legislators. And I think some of those concepts were eventually incorporated. into some of the the work programs and work requirements that you're now seeing in today's statutes so i i do want to let you know i do listen i do understand the concerns about limited resources tax abatements Helping our community, this is not lost on me. So when you talk to me about this, and I do listen, and I want to rest assured this isn't the end of the story. This is sort of the start of what we're doing. We have a moratorium now in place on data center tax abatements from the state statute. So we have some time. The enterprise zone of Hillsborough has to be renewed. We're not renewed, but it runs out in 2028, so we have to take action as a county again in 2027, which actually coincides pretty well with the governor's moratorium. So we have about a year now to work on this, and I find people can learn a lot more if they listen instead of talk usually. But it is helpful to listen to you, and I appreciate your words today. And I do want to encourage you to listen to work session and look at the slideshows at least. You may not agree with it, you may think it's not reliable information, but the more information you do get, and you could test it, go out and check it out. But I would encourage you to continue to get information and then pass on your concerns. So thank you very much.

I have a question for our city attorney. the city attorney yeah go ahead and ask it i'll find out if it's out of order or not okay chad so we have as a council we have an option not to continue with the enterprise zone that's an option that we have i'm not i think that's a larger question i'm not recommending it but i am just stating it that it is an option

Do you want me to answer that?

Can you say when we have to renew, what the process for renewal is?

Yes, there's two options. One is that the current zone terminates in 2028, and the city council will have to decide in 2027 whether it wants to seek reauthorization. If the city wanted to terminate the existing zone pre-2028, it could make a request of that to the state.

Thank you. Sorry, it's that dang microphone. I told you it was harder than it looked. Community members who want to be informed and engaged on City Council matters can sign up to receive the Happening in Hillsborough email. Spanish language updates are also available through our Creciendo Juntos email newsletter. And with that, City Council work meeting is adjourned. We'll resume work session at 10 o'clock. Hanging out with us. Now's the time for the post council work session after consulting with. with our acting city manager. We discussed possibly, because it's now 10 o'clock, normally do a 9.30 check in to see if people are willing to go to 10 for our work sessions, but we're already at 10 o'clock. So we talked about options and one of the options is, plus we've lost a lot of people here who are very interested in this, who might wanna hear this information. They were at the work session and they sort of went away after the council meeting. We talked about basically set up a work session So a special work session so we can go through this information with a little more time and a little less tiredness, and also so more people can attend this actual session. So Acting City Manager Brooks, what are the options here for us?

Can we talk about it?

Well, we are going to, but I just want to know if we could do a special session. If so, then we're going to open up to council conversations.

So if you were to continue, we have five more slides, but that's still quite a bit of information to get through. We could go ahead to Council President's suggestion or thought. We could either call it now. We could work on scheduling a special work session, so a special meeting being called, have a work session where we could just focus solely on these topics. So as a reminder, that was talking about employment community impacts, land use, regulatory options, local policy options, enterprise zones. So we would cover all of that material, but it would be very focused. So that is an option. We could look as early as next week, but it really depends on what your availability is. So we could certainly discuss that. And if you wanna go longer, staff are certainly prepared and ready to do that.

And I think the five slides is just the energy

Uh, energy and environmental, um, regulatory layers.

Okay, so I don't know how many notes we have left to present here tonight. Dan, do you know.

So, to finish up the background section, as, um, as Brooks noted would be the environmental, uh, overlay section and the limited power information section we have. After that, we would go into the land use options, the policy options that the council has requested. That's a section. And then after that, we have the enterprise zone section.

So the land use and enterprise zones, how long are those projected to be?

Each of those are lengthy. The enterprise zone is a bit longer based on the request and the public comment. The land use one, if you're looking for a number of slides, is about six or seven. I can confirm that number here in just a moment. seven slides in the land use piece if you wanted to try to get through that section this evening.

Okay, so we got the power, environmental, the land use, and then the enterprise zones.

Right. Do you have an estimate on how all of that would take together? It really depends on the degree of conversation and questions and responses, but it is numerous slides, so it would, I would say, at least be our you know, for presentation and some degree of conversations, if not longer.

Okay.

The enterprise zone section is selected because we are clicking and responding to some of the health bill 478. Item two is basically two parts, but one enterprise zone section overall. Sorry, Chad.

Sorry to interrupt, but also we want to be built in time for you all to discuss and give us guidance on things that you may want to see, both in the land use context and in the enterprise sale context. So there's the presentation itself, and then there's sort of the amount of time that you all want to be able to take to have a discussion among yourselves and provide us with direction. So I just want to make sure that that's part of your thought process.

Thoughts? Yeah, I think if we do... The next five, like if you do everything but the enterprise, I think that might be a good stopping point. And then do the enterprise in a separate one. So that would be the land use, environmental, and one other thing.

Yeah. Okay. Councilor Slocato?

Yeah, I mean, I think the really important piece about tonight was the conversation around how to move forward. And I feel like there's just not enough time for that. And, you know, it's just unfortunate. I mean, we could spend the next hour, hour and a half going over more details and information. But in an hour and a half, are we really going to be up to having this conversation, right? It's a really complex conversation. So I would opt out not to continue the meeting. I did send in my policy recommendations earlier. Um, to you all, so you already have my feedback. Uh, I am going to post another document online. That's going to have more kind of suggestions for you all to follow. So I feel like I've submitted my piece. Uh, so I feel good about moving it to another day. Um, but like I said, if the whole point of part of this meeting was to decide how to move forward, right. You made a lot of this information already available online. Uh, it's publicly accessible. So, for me, I was really looking forward to the meat of the conversation. I just feel like we can't have it at this time of night.

Councillor Case.

Yeah, I tend to agree towards what Councillor Salgado was suggesting. I think at this time of night, a robust and productive conversation will dwindle with each passing minute. But I think we got a lot of good information from public comment tonight that I think if we were able to continue the presentation and then have the conversation next week, I think that might be the most productive, especially since I'm out for medical reasons. Kipper Lynn's out of town traveling for family like that, that maybe we could all actually be in the same room, which I know is more helpful for all of us. So. But if council wants, I can rally for another hour.

Councilor Sinclair or Al Care, your thoughts?

Do you want to go, Kimber? I'm here for the meeting. In my nine years of experience, yes, stuff has gone long and late and been hard to have conversations. I want to share that, yes, we've gotten information I don't feel I've got an opportunity to have conversation. I feel frustrated that that we have met. I'm just not sure how far we're advancing towards any direction. So I can't make you want to stay. I can't make you want to have conversation. I would like to have a respectable conversation where we can ask questions and tell you information. I'd like to tell you information of what I have found. And I feel like if we're going to postpone this to another meeting, how much time is council going to have to talk That's my question. We've been here for a few hours. So I just want to know how much time will council have to talk if we agree to meet again, or are we talking about counseling out the next meeting or setting up a new meeting? And I'm guessing is that for next week that we're considering that?

Yes, counselor, that is what we are considering. And we would have to find out your availability, obviously, but not just yours, but council's availability. But that would be our goal so that we could maximize the time that council can have those discussions and provide us with feedback on next steps.

Okay. I would propose that we get through the next slides that you have for tonight and that the rest of the content that we would meet and have that meeting. And it should be a public meeting. It should not be a closed-door meeting.

Go ahead.

No, go ahead. I'm sorry. Councilor Sinclair.

In not being there in the room, is majority of residents who were participating gone? Yes.

There are people here. I would say there's about 20 people here.

being away and only having awareness of the FAQ this morning, and that's on me, that's on me. I would like to go over that further. And I'd also like to have the opportunity for council to have a copy of the presentation to look at that in its entirety and truly come prepared. I know we came prepared, but truly get in the nuts and bolts of, I have not seen Councillor Salgado's piece that he submitted. I would like all of us as Council to have that opportunity. I know I've submitted questions to staff, but I would like to see other aspects of what Council has provided so that we can all put our best foot forward and get some real work done if we were to postpone to a special meeting.

So are you in favor of a short postponement? Is that what I'm hearing from you?

A short postponement.

Okay. And I heard Councillor Case also agree. Councillor Sagato agreed. I wasn't sure where you guys were on this. Councillor Xavier, you're out there. After listening to everybody, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, that'd be okay. We would just want to have a longer session, just... Next time, yes.

I want to be sure that we're going to have conversation and that it's going to be a public meeting. I had prepared a lot of questions too and submitted them two weeks ago and I don't have answers. I'm not expecting things overnight, but I would like to get my questions out. I'd like to get answers.

So what does, just out of curiosity, next Tuesday, the 9th, between 6 and 9 p.m., which would give us a good three hours to have a meeting. I don't know what that looks like for everybody.

Do we have a finance meeting? We have finance committee and we have audit committee next Tuesday.

Monday, yay.

I will still be out of town. I return on the 8th.

I'm out of town Wednesday. Thursday the 11th.

Wednesday works for me. Thursday does not.

Wednesday is better for me. Wednesday works for me. Did you say Wednesday does not work for you, Rob? It does.

Wednesday does not work for me. I couldn't make it work. You just have to drive to Bend at 4 o'clock in the morning the next day.

So Thursday, and I could make Wednesday work, but Thursday works.

Thursday doesn't work for me.

It does not work.

But Wednesday works.

Well, it looks like Wednesday is the day we'll just have to make it work. Does everyone else work on Wednesday?

Hey, Rob, sorry, what about later this week? Is that too soon? Oh, sorry.

Could we do it after finance?

After what?

We have audit.

I don't think we will start much before 7 or 7.30 because we have finance and audit committee that night. Yep. On Tuesday.

Tuesday.

Yeah.

After audit and finance. So I would still get a 730. We still go to 1030. We could still do three hours.

We could. We could. We could.

Or however long it takes.

Yes. But I don't know how long audit might last.

Michelle's there.

Yeah. I think it's our kind of kickoff of audit. So, oh, I'm sorry. I thought I was on. It's the kickoff of audit. So we won't be going over any reports. We'll just be talking about the plan for the audit and the process. and things like that. So generally, if there aren't a lot of questions, we can get through it pretty quickly. I think they're usually like half an hour or something like that, as long as you don't go into an executive session with them or anything. So we have to counsel. And we can make sure we can tell the auditor to get through it fast.

That might be a good option.

You could work with that? Okay. So it looks like Tuesday, next Tuesday.

Is it possible to start earlier?

Do we start Finance Committee at 5.30? I have a board meeting from 5 to 6 on Tuesday.

Okay. So Tuesday, if we start at 7.30, looks like the earliest possible date that we could all have availability. Sorry, Councillor Sinclair?

No, go ahead. Once you're done, I'll make comments.

Okay, so it looks like that would be the date that would work for everybody. So if we were to postpone this and just have the balance of the presentation preserved, I'm not sure what's happening there, conversation, that would be the date. Okay.

We're talking about Tuesday.

Yes. Yes, Tuesday. Tuesday. Sorry, Tuesday the 9th, I think this is the 8th. Yes, Tuesday the 9th, 7.30 p.m. would be the date that we would move this all over to.

I just want to do a quick eyeball check with staff. Are all of our presenters available? Okay, there's not any of that. Okay.

Okay, so if that's what we want to do so people can get home, we'll have fresh minds on Tuesday to go over this and have enough time to go ahead and have a full discussion that we all would like to have. me just sort of a general thumbs up consensus it looks like everyone has a thumb up so that is what we will do so we just adjourn this meeting or do you need to do anything else today chair if you just want to continue everything then you don't do anything we just adjourn this meeting if you wanted to go over those five additional slides we could do that tonight still i wasn't sure where you ended up on that we just um Is there somebody that is here for the five additional slides that will not need to be here for Tuesday? No, we can do it that time, okay. So with that, we will continue this meeting until 7.30 on June 8th, that's a Tuesday, and we will continue with the presentation, and then we will have debate. So that, I'll call this meeting adjourned. Oh, sorry, sorry.

President Harris, just be right before you end. To be clear, can we get the presentation in advance of what currently has not been finished? And can we get all input, like all questions from our council body to maybe look those over in advance also?

I think that's possible. Is it possible to get the slide deck?

The slide deck is posted online with tonight's council agenda. That's probably the easiest way to access it. If we need to send it separately, we can do that as well. All right. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Anything else? Then we're in adjournment and we will see you Tuesday at 730.