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A push to 1,700 acres of industrial land for Hillsboro is over for this year after its chief legislative sponsor dropped the effort.
“After careful consideration of the feedback received and the realities of a pathway to passage on a narrow timeline, I have decided not to advance the bill,” Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, wrote Tuesday on Facebook.
Oregon tech industry boosters have long sought to add big parcels of industrial land in the Portland area, hoping to secure the future of the state’s semiconductor industry and lure other advanced manufacturers. Hillsboro has its eye on farmland on the city’s northwestern edge, near Intel’s factories.
Changes to land-use designations are among the most contentious issues in Oregon politics, however, and Senate Bill 1586’s proposal to add the 1,700 acres during this year’s short legislative session was always going to be a heavy lift. The bill had three hearings last month but never got a committee vote.
Farmers and conservationists have been critical of Hillsboro for luring data centers with hundreds of millions of dollars in local tax breaks. The industry occupies more than 400 acres of the city’s industrial land but employs relatively few people.
While Sollman’s bill would have barred data centers on the additional 1,700 acres, “except as an accessory to or part of a use” for an industrial operation, critics accused Hillsboro of squandering its dwindling supply of buildable land.
“Economic development doesn’t depend upon huge swaths of land or the destruction of our natural resources - that’s a false choice pushed on us by businesses and landowners who benefit from greenfield development,” said Nellie McAdams of the Oregon Agricultural Trust. “We should invest in R&D jobs that are more insulated from AI, and that require a small fraction of the land used by data centers.”
If the drive to add industrial land is over for this year, Sollman noted that Oregon is in a manufacturing recession and indicated she will continue pushing for economic development.
“The need to grow good paying jobs in our state is real,” she wrote, “and I look forward to continuing that work alongside you.”
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