✂️ Between Budget Gaps & Data Centers - Klickitat BOCC 8/19-9/15

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🏛 Klickitat County Commissioners Round-Up: August 19 to September 15, 2026

Agencies Covered: Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners (August 11, 20 and 25, and September 1, 3, 8, 10 and 15, 2026).

The Bottom Line: About 150 people, by Columbia Gorge News's count, came to a September 3 workshop to ask the county to pause data centers, and the Board took no action, not even a recorded direction to staff. The same state limit bears on both the 2027 budget and any pause on new building: the county's general property tax levy can grow at most 1 percent a year without a vote, plus what new construction and a few other add-ons bring.

🔎 What Changed

• The Board approved a rewrite of Chapter 22.08, the county's RV park code, on September 15.
• The battery storage moratorium was extended a fourth time on August 25, to March 4, 2027.
• Community Development set October 1, 2026 as its target for a draft data-center ordinance, with a possible Board check-in on October 6.
• The county opened its 2027 budget on September 10 with a general-fund gap of $3,752,084, at a workshop for which it published no agenda, packet or minutes.

⚠ What Escalated

• Community Development told the Board on September 15 that under the code as written, a data center is outright in industrial park zones and, because every zone ends in a catch-all clause, "there is a danger that it could be in any zone." Staff added that one next to homes would probably not make it through conditional use.
• At a September 10 budget workshop, the landfill's 2027 requests came in above the revenue budgeted to meet them. The county's general property tax levy was at its legal maximum for 2023, 2024 and 2025.

🧭 What's Next

• The Board set September 22, 2026 for hearings on a short plat appeal and the accessory dwelling unit amendments.
• Department and elected-office budget presentations were planned for September 24 and October 1, 2026.
• Staff told the Board on September 15 that the Planning Commission's solar energy overlay hearing was set for September 28, 2026.
• Public Works told the Board on September 15 it planned a solid waste workshop on October 6, 2026.

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Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners

Aug. 11: the motion the Sentinel reported and the minutes left out

The Goldendale Sentinel reported, in a story by Rodger Nichols, that at the afternoon session on August 11, Commissioner Todd Andrews moved "An interim ordinance declaring an emergency and adopting a moratorium on the acceptance of permit applications for data centers in unincorporated Klickitat County." Before there was any discussion or any vote, the Sentinel reported, the Zoom feed was hijacked by unknown persons who put a video of a man vomiting on the public stream. The session closed in seconds. When the meeting came back, the motion died for lack of a second.

The county's own minutes for August 11 record neither thing. Not the motion, not the intrusion. They mention the subject twice: the Board added a Draft Klickitat County Interim Ordinance to that afternoon's business agenda, and later it had a discussion of that draft and agreed to schedule a workshop on September 3, 2026 at 9:30 AM to discuss data centers and the dog shelter.

Klickitat keeps action minutes, and it says so at the bottom of every set, in the same note that says a digital recording is on file as part of the official record. A motion that dies for want of a second produces no action, so there is nothing for an action minute to record.

Our last edition on this beat, "The County That Didn't Pause Data Centers", published August 24, covered the Board's August 18 talk about Andrews's request. It did not report the August 11 motion or how it died. This is what happened next.

Sept. 3: one commissioner for a pause, two for an ordinance instead

At the September 3 workshop, Columbia Gorge News put the crowd at about 150 and counted more than 40 speakers. Nearly all of the speakers asked for a pause.

Chairman Ron Ihrig set the terms. "In workshops, there are no motions," he said, so no vote on a moratorium was possible. The Board could still move by consensus "to give staff a direction, but it has to be voted on in a regular board meeting."

Andrews, who had proposed the moratorium, argued a pause buys six months and time for public comment. Commissioner Lori Zoller argued for a straight ordinance instead, something the Board could move "quicker than moving through a moratorium that may get mired down." The chair said he did not support moratoriums: "I'm just not." He also said, "Data centers don't belong in residential areas, period."

The Goldendale Sentinel named some of the people who spoke, and the three proposals they were talking about, which no county document names: Lakeside Industries, the Dallesport Data Center, and NSC Smelter. None of them had applied, Columbia Gorge News reported.

The county's own minutes list no names. Citizens who signed up were called, numerous members of the public spoke about data center development and the potential need for a moratorium, and the primary concerns raised were water availability and use, electricity and power infrastructure, and noise.

Several speakers raised nondisclosure agreements; the chair said he knew of no county commissioner or employee who had signed one, and Zoller said she did not believe one would be legal for public officials.

Near the end of the morning, the chair said he hoped the Board would tell Community Development Director Scott Edelman to move forward with a zoning ordinance no matter what. No consensus was recorded, and the minutes do not carry it as direction to staff. The minutes close the morning by noting that the Board discussed potential requirements for developers and the need for further evaluation of potential regulations and requirements for data centers.

Staff: a best-case 90 days to an ordinance, with or without a pause

Edelman put a best-case ordinance at about 90 days: 30 to a draft, 30 through the Planning Commission, 30 through SEPA review and Board adoption. "That can be done with or without a moratorium," he said. "We can move forward with an ordinance without one. Moratorium would add extra steps involved."

That cuts both ways. It removes the schedule argument for a moratorium, which is how the two commissioners who opposed one used it. It also removes the schedule argument against one, because the ordinance can move on the same 90-day clock either way, though Edelman said a moratorium adds steps of its own.

Under a 2023 Planning Commission interpretation, a data center in the county's industrial park zone is treated like a warehouse, which makes it an outright use that still goes through SEPA review and a site-plan review by the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission adopted it at a public meeting on February 21, 2023. Anywhere else, Edelman said, there is a potential for a data center to go through a conditional use process, and that is probably his number one concern. The county posts the interpretation, with two process flow charts we first reported in July, on its data center information page.

Economic Development Specialist Keaton Curtice brought his department's "Data Center Ordinance Suggestions," which suggest allowing data centers only in industrial park and general industrial zones, requiring bonds for infrastructure and decommissioning, and using "all available means of capitalizing on development," such as SEPA mitigation fees and voluntary agreements, to pay for the public infrastructure a project needs.

PUD's Gunkel: where data centers go is the county's call

Klickitat PUD Commissioner Dan Gunkel spoke for the utility. The Goldendale Sentinel quoted him: "That is a county zoning decision, not a KPUD decision. The PUD commissioners do not have a vote on where these get sited." He said a data center that wants to be a KPUD customer pays for its own feasibility studies and for every upgrade needed on the Bonneville Power Administration system or KPUD's own facilities, and existing ratepayers do not.

Bonneville feasibility studies alone can take as long as two years, he said. Of the data centers that have come to the PUD, "there is not one of them that I'm aware of that's going to drop a building application in the near future."

The county's minutes carry the core of it, and add that newer cooling technologies may let data centers run without water for cooling.

Quotes from the September 3 workshop in this edition come from a transcript that was circulated publicly; its provenance has not been verified. The county's minutes say a digital recording of the workshop is on file as part of the official record.

Sept. 8: "punt, punt, punt" and the case against another moratorium

Rodger Nichols called in to public comment from The Dalles. Nichols reports on these meetings for the Goldendale Sentinel, Columbia Gorge News and Gorge Country Media, and he wrote the Columbia Gorge News story cited above and the Gorge Country Media story quoted below. He also comments regularly at these meetings. If the Board believes it can write an ordinance in 90 days, he asked, and the only requirement he knew of was a hearing within 60 days, what does a pause cost? "If there's no downside," he said, "if you think they're equal, why not be a good PR and give the public something they want and demanded?"

Gorge Country Media reported Chairman Ron Ihrig's answer as "I believe we have plenty of time to react right now, and we need to be leaders and do the ordinance."

Gorge Country Media reported Commissioner Lori Zoller's second argument: "If we decide moratorium, we have to go the route of legal counsel look at that – yes or no – wait for those answers to come back, and then if it's yes, go ahead with the process you were going to do anyhow, which is address the ordinance."

Nichols answered that the two processes could run at the same time. A speaker replied only that some people believe a moratorium would stop data centers, and it would not.

A third argument came after public comment closed. Asked what a moratorium's downside is, a commissioner pointed at the county's own battery storage moratorium, extended for the fourth time two weeks earlier. "It's punt, punt, punt," the commissioner said. Then a commissioner had the last word: "We shouldn't manage by, we should not manage government by moratoriums. Manage government by leading."

Sept. 15: an Oct. 1 draft target and a dispute over how the request arrived

Community Development told the Board that Keaton Curtice was leading the draft, with a target of October 1, 2026 and a possible Board check-in on October 6 before it would go to the Planning Commission. Staff called the target quite ambitious. A commissioner said, "I think it's going to take more time than that."

One speaker said, "I don't know of anybody applying for a permit." Staff said an application would be reviewed under the code in place when it is deemed complete, which means the ordinance and any application are in a race with each other. Asked where a data center could go under the code as written, staff said it is outright in industrial park zones and, because every zone in the county ends in a catch-all conditional use, "there is a danger that it could be in any zone." In the next breath, staff said one probably would not make it through conditional use next to homes.

The meeting closed on a disagreement about how the moratorium request was brought forward. One voice said the reason for an emergency moratorium is to not give advance notice to parties when there is a shortcoming in the county's zoning, and that the document had been sent weeks in advance. The other said that on the 11th the Board was "blindsided" with a moratorium that had not been through legal counsel, and that what was presented "put us in a bad situation and made us look like villains because we wouldn't do a moratorium. But there wasn't a moratorium for us to adopt because it hadn't gone through the process. There was nothing there." Legal review, that voice said, is meant to keep a moratorium from drawing a challenge that costs taxpayers.

Battery storage pause extended a fourth time, to March 4, 2027

On August 25, in a hearing that drew no testimony, the Board extended its moratorium and interim zoning controls on battery energy storage systems for up to six months, to March 4, 2027. Andrews moved, Zoller seconded, and it passed unanimously. The county's findings say the Planning Commission was waiting on outside legal review, and that staff anticipate a recommendation for the Board in early 2027.

So the county that would not start a data-center moratorium had, on August 25, extended one on batteries into 2027. One commissioner gave it as the reason not to start another.

Sept. 10: the 2027 budget starts with a general-fund gap

At a September 10 budget workshop, Finance walked the Board through the 2027 preliminary budget and landed on a general-fund gap of $3,752,084, with every other county fund described as balanced. The county published no agenda, packet or minutes for that workshop.

The gap is a status-quo figure: no cost-of-living adjustment, no discretionary asks from departments, and none of the landfill requests. It also looks bigger than it is, because the roughly $1.3 million insurance transfer out of Fund 125 that was built into the 2026 budget has been taken out. Adjusted for that, the Board's own comparison put it close to where it stood a year earlier.

The landfill's 2027 revenue budget sat at the 2026 placeholder of 8.4 million against 9.3 million in requests. The Board's one real direction was to raise the revenue assumption by the previous August's cost-of-living figure, on municipal solid waste only, worth a couple hundred thousand dollars by one estimate in the room. That was described as deliberately conservative. 911 Communications alone asked $1,654,860, described at the workshop as about a fifth of landfill revenue.

The Sheriff's request for two more patrol deputies was set aside until after the November election, since the county would have a new sheriff. No budget action was taken.

The landfill is one big source of the county's income. Another is the county's general property tax levy, which the law lets grow at most 1 percent a year without a vote, plus what new construction and a few other add-ons bring. That is where the budget and the data-center question meet.

2025 levy: new construction added nearly as much as the 1 percent did

The 2027 budget gap is a general-fund figure. The county's general property tax levy is one piece of what pays for that fund, and it has a legal limit of its own, Washington state's 1% Tax Levy Cap. Under this cap, a county can collect no more than 1% more than the prior year in property taxes, no matter how much assessment values go up. Exceptions can only be made, per taxing district, by the voters for a "levy lid lift."

Klickitat County's government has some cash on hand. In 2022 it raised about $1,562 a person from its own local sources, mostly taxes, fees and charges. But Washington lets a county's regular property tax levy grow at most 1 percent a year. For a county of 10,000 people or more, the cap is the lesser of 1 percent or inflation, unless its board finds a substantial need. New construction and improvements, plus increases in state-assessed value, such as utilities and railroads, come on top, taxed at the previous year's rate. Voters can approve more. We explained the basic 1 percent rule in "Splitting the Dinner Check."

Klickitat levied exactly the most the limit allowed on its general levy for 2023, 2024 and 2025, with nothing banked. For the 2025 levy, the draft general levy resolution for the county's December 2024 levy hearing put the 1 percent increase at $55,482. New construction and improvements added about $54,905 on top of that, nearly the same again. A rise in state-assessed value added about $20,760 more.

New construction also swings. It added $171.2 million in taxable value for the 2023 levy, $64.2 million for 2024 and $52.6 million for 2025. And a new building enters the levy once, then grows at 1 percent like everything else. When costs grow faster than that, the added money buys a little less each year, and the arithmetic points to a need for counties to look for the next project. A single big project is a step, not a slope.

The Economic Development Department's posted "Data Center Ordinance Suggestions" says that if data center development is appropriately sited, with its impacts mitigated, it "will provide high-paying jobs, enhance public infrastructure, and significantly increase revenues for local municipalities that are increasingly unable to afford maintaining their existing services." The document puts no dollar figure on those revenues, but they are a clear and often priority consideration for nearly any county looking at proposals.

At the limit, a pause on any kind of new building can delay one of the few ways the county's general levy grows faster than 1 percent without a vote. That holds whoever proposes the pause, and whatever anyone thinks of data centers. The 1% levy limit is state law, and it bound Klickitat's general levy for 2023, 2024 and 2025, before the Board's 2026 data-center discussions. Commissioners gave their own reasons, reported above: process, legal review, time, cost and the battery moratorium's record.

Fees are a separate question. Staff told the Board on September 15 that the county's outside counsel would prepare a memo on what fees the county can charge energy projects, and that staff had raised the landfill tipping fee as one example. That picks up the fee question our August edition left open.

RV park code approved, with a workforce-housing path past 60 days

On September 15, at the continued hearing on Chapter 22.08, the county's RV park ordinance, the Board voted to approve the amendments and then closed the hearing. The ordinance itself was set to come back on a consent agenda, so the county's record through September 15 carries no ordinance number for it.

The amendments move the county's sign-off on roads, water lines and septic systems to after they are built. They also open a discretionary path past the 60-day occupancy cap on RV and tent sites, for workforce and emergency housing. The driver is in Director Edelman's August 20 memo, and it is the only staff estimate in the county's record of the scale of what is coming: 500 to 2,000 workers needing short-term housing at peak periods over ten years, from pumped storage, solar and wind farms, and data centers. The same build-out that could add value to the tax roll arrives first as workers who need somewhere to stay.

The memo says state law sets no limit, so the 60-day cap is the county's own choice. Staff told the Board on September 15 that Prosecuting Attorney Rebecca Cranston's review cut an initial approval from five years to three.

Pat Arnold, for Friends of the White Salmon, told the Board the anticipated workforce housing had not been documented in a way that allows projection. At the first hearing on August 25 she had said the Goldendale pumped-storage documents alone point to a far larger figure. The chair of the Trout Lake Community Council thanked staff for taking up the council's recommendations. Later, speaking for herself as a county resident, she asked about unpermitted RV parks. Staff answered that the county is complaint-driven.

Also: Sleepy Hollow Road, Dallesport sewer rates, falling health money

Road points. On August 25 the Board put its 20 local agency points in the state's Rural Arterial Program toward Sleepy Hollow Road; the minutes record it as "the Board agreed," with no motion or vote.

Wildfire insurance. On August 20 a policy advisor from the state Insurance Commissioner's office briefed the Board on wildfire coverage and the Washington FAIR Plan. Nothing was decided.

Dallesport wastewater. On August 25 the Board approved a 10 percent increase and a $6,000 connection fee. Resolution No. 06326, on the September 1 consent agenda, set the rate at $74.88 a month per equivalent residential unit.

Public health money. A health contract amendment on the September 8 consent agenda shows the state's Foundational Public Health Services money to the county stepping down from $2,014,000 in state fiscal 2025 to $1,552,000 in 2026 and $1,172,000 in 2027.

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⚠️ Editor's Notebook: Broader Context

• What a Washington moratorium requires. Two statutes cover moratoria, RCW 36.70.795 and RCW 36.70A.390. A board that adopts one without first holding a public hearing must hold one within 60 days and adopt findings of fact justifying it, either before that hearing or immediately after it. A moratorium can last up to six months, or up to a year with a work plan, and each six-month renewal needs its own hearing and findings. The account given at the September 3 workshop got the start right: no hearing is needed to begin, and one must follow within 60 days. It said the Board could extend it to 12 months at that hearing, and left out the work plan a year requires and the findings. The county's battery moratorium reached twelve months with both. Whether either omission would matter to any particular moratorium is a question for a court, and nobody has asked one.
• On emergency and advance notice. Neither moratorium statute defines an emergency moratorium or says anything about notice to applicants. The Open Public Meetings Act lets a board skip notice of a special meeting called to deal with an emergency involving injury or damage to persons or property, or the likelihood of it, when the notice period would make notice impractical and that harm more likely, or when notice cannot be posted safely (RCW 42.30.080). August 11 was a regular session, for which the act requires the agenda online 24 hours ahead and says nothing in that rule stops later changes (RCW 42.30.077). How those provisions apply to a zoning moratorium is, again, an open question nobody has put to a court.
• Where the region landed in 2026. Snohomish County adopted an emergency moratorium June 24 and held its hearing August 19. Kittitas County adopted six months August 10, Yakima County six months August 11, and Skamania County a moratorium August 18, the same day Spokane County adopted a roughly four-month pause on large data centers.
• The clock under all of this. Staff told the Board on September 15 that an application would be reviewed under the code in place when it is deemed complete, while saying they were not sure vested was the right word. Staff also said Klickitat, as a partially planning county, is not bound by the completeness deadline fully planning counties carry, and said they thought that deadline was 30 days. State law gives those counties 28 days (RCW 36.70B.070). How vesting applies to a data-center application under Klickitat's own code is a question for a court nobody has asked. The October 1 target matters because an application that is complete before the ordinance is adopted would be reviewed under the code the ordinance replaces.

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🛠 Jargon Buster

• Levy limit. Washington caps how fast a county's regular property tax levy can grow: at most 1 percent a year over the most the law let it levy in an earlier year, even if it levied less. Voters can approve more. New construction and rising state-assessed values, such as utilities, come on top, taxed at the previous year's rate.
• Moratorium vs. interim ordinance. A moratorium pauses a type of application; an interim zoning control is a temporary rule while permanent ones get written. Counties often adopt both at once.
• Outright use vs. conditional use. An outright use is allowed in a zone by right, subject to staff review. A conditional use needs its own permit and a hearing where neighbors can be heard.
• SEPA. The State Environmental Policy Act, which makes a government weigh a decision's environmental effects first. It is a review, not a permit.

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How to Join & Learn More

Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners Klickitat County Services Building, 115 West Court, Room #201, Goldendale, Washington Phone: 509-773-4612 · Email: bocc@klickitatcounty.org

The Board meets most Tuesdays starting at 9:30 AM and adds workshops, often on Thursdays. Meetings and workshops are open to the public, each workshop notice says whether it will be on Zoom, and written comment can be sent before any meeting.

To join by Zoom, use meeting ID 586 587 651. Call-in numbers are printed on each posted agenda.