🖥 Data Centers Come Knocking - Klickitat BOCC 6/30 - 7/21

Podcast note: Enjoy the audio edition on Buzzsprout, or look for "Open Gorge" wherever you get your podcasts.

🏛 Klickitat County Commissioners: Late June through July 21, 2026 Round-Up

Quick Facts

• Agencies Covered: Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC). Meetings of June 30, July 7, July 14, and July 21, 2026 (each a morning workshop plus a 1:00 PM regular session), plus a July 16 Forest Service and legislative-priorities workshop.
• The Bottom Line: A string of routine consent agendas carried some big signals. The county is mapping out how a data center would actually get approved, weighing a Planning Commission move to shrink where solar can be built, getting its first real short-term-rental data, betting on a Seattle trash contract to protect its budget, and rewriting how it decides which rural roads get a painted edge line.
• The Vibe: Steady but budget-anxious. Commissioners kept circling back to a three-year math problem, to liability, and to "how do we pay for what we already have." By July 21 the tone was more organized than alarmed: staff arriving with flow charts, tracking sheets, and data instead of just worries.

🔎 What Changed

• The Board redrew its road-striping priorities, agreeing to edge-line Snowden Road along with the higher-ranked Bickleton Highway and Canyon Road for about $38,000.
• Signed 2026–2027 radio and 9-1-1 dispatch agreements with nine fire agencies, the long-promised step toward charging districts for the aging radio system.
• Applied for a $570,000 state grant to modernize a courthouse elevator and make ADA fixes; the county's match adds the building's first fire-alarm system.
• Set an August 4 hearing on a $766,613 supplemental budget and signed a letter backing Republic Services' bid for the City of Seattle's trash stream.
• On July 21, published a plain-language data-center permitting roadmap, appointed 9-1-1 Director Jeff King as County 911 Coordinator, and approved pay estimates for the new CGCC training facility ($211,200.66) and the courthouse repaint ($66,108.50).

⚠ What Escalated

• Public comment sharpened on two fronts: whether a "hiring freeze" should block filling already-funded jobs, and demands that the Board disclose what it knows about possible data centers.
• A state Ecology covenant on the closed Horse Thief Lake landfill will force the county into open-ended fencing and mowing it says it never signed up for.
• The Planning Commission moved to shrink the county's solar zone, and the county's new rental-tracking software flagged 16 accessory dwellings being rented as short-term rentals in violation of code.

🧭 What's Next

• July 28: public meeting on a rezone near Goldendale. July 30: workshop on the vacant County Administrator role and the 9-1-1 restructure. August 2: a Sunday railroad-bridge replacement that may briefly close SR-14. August 4: supplemental-budget hearing. August 18: Dallesport wastewater-rate hearing in Dallesport. August 25: childcare workshop, and the target date for a short-term-rental hearing. September 4: the solar and battery-storage moratorium expires. September: Planning Commission Q&A on the draft solar/battery ordinance.

For the previous chapter of this story (data centers at the old aluminum site, the public-records reorganization, and a $400,000 public-health cut), see our last Klickitat round-up, County Cuts Care as Jail Fills the Gap.

---

🖥 Data Centers: Getting Ready for the Knock

The county has no data-center ordinance, and on July 7 commissioners spent much of the afternoon deciding what that means before anyone applies.

• The governing document is a February 2023 Planning Commission interpretation of the comprehensive plan: data centers fit the county's Industrial Park (light-industrial) zone. Anything outside that zone needs a Conditional Use Permit, and either path runs the full state environmental review (SEPA), which can escalate to an Environmental Assessment or a full Environmental Impact Statement.
• Commissioners expect heavy interest because of the county's proximity to the power grid and the Big Eddy transmission hub. One noted that the data center in The Dalles "has done more than our landfill has done for us" on the tax side.
• A wrinkle from Olympia: the state ended the sales-tax break on data-center server replacements last session, which a commissioner said the state projects will bring it roughly $300 million over the biennium (figure stated in discussion, not a county number).
• Commissioners agreed they should first sit down with Community Development Director Scott Edelman to walk through the SEPA and permitting process before deciding whether to hold a public workshop. None was scheduled.

This is the Board trying to get ahead of a fight it sees coming. The recurring question is not whether the environmental review happens (staff stressed it always does, "we're the lead agency"), but whether the county can attach its own conditions, like noise limits or a community-benefit or impact-fee structure, without those conditions being challenged in court. Commissioners floated impact fees to offset load on the Goldendale police and the county jail, and one raised closed-loop versus open-loop cooling as a water question, an echo of the concerns residents brought in June.

For readers who want to see what those "asks" can look like in practice, Open Gorge keeps a companion resource, the Public Benefit Lab, which collects the technical mitigations and community-benefit terms (noise limits, water studies, host-community payments, fiber access) that other towns have negotiated on data centers and similar projects. Its own framing lands squarely between the two sides heard in the room: asking for safety or compensation measures "did not mean endorsing a project." The thread advances from our last edition, and runs alongside the state data-center bill (HB 2515) the county flagged back in February.

Public comment pushed harder than the Board. Recurring commenter and local childcare activist Gabrielle Gilbert asked what the county gets in return: "are they buying our love and giving me a daycare so I can look the other way?" A resident who declines to give her full name, citing her right under state law, told commissioners a Conditional Use Permit "is nothing but to do something that shouldn't happen" and urged them to "please be more honest about the data center." Commissioners rejected the premise of a secret deal, with one commissioner saying flatly that any claim of "backdoor deals" is "a bunch of BS... If people have evidence, bring it forth."

Update (July 21): Community Development Director Scott Edelman delivered what the July 7 discussion asked for: a draft, plain-language flow chart of exactly how a data center would get reviewed, which the chair had asked him to build. It maps two paths. In the county's Industrial Park zones (about five of them, with Dallesport and the old aluminum site the ones drawing interest), a data center is an outright use but still runs SEPA review plus a Planning Commission site-plan review, with any appeal landing at the Board of Commissioners. Anywhere else, it takes the Conditional Use Permit route: SEPA plus a public hearing before the Board of Adjustment, with appeals going straight to Superior Court, so the commissioners never touch it. Edelman said an eight-step written version is already on the planning website, and the graphic, with the public-comment points marked in red, would be posted within days. The goal, staff stressed again, is to make the process legible, not to signal a green light.

🛣 Roads: Which Ones Get a Line?

A batch of resident requests to paint a fog line on Snowden Road turned into a county-wide policy question about fairness and liability.

• County Engineer Seth Scarola ranked the un-striped major collectors against the county road-safety plan. Canyon Road ranked first, Bickleton Highway high, and Snowden sixth to seventh.
• On July 14 the Board agreed to stripe the Snowden section along with the higher-ranked Bickleton Highway and Canyon Road segments (four road sections in all) for just under $38,000, change-ordered into the existing striping contract and paid for by cutting back the county's BST (chip-seal) surfacing this year.
• Staff will pursue longer-lasting thermoplastic striping through a 2027 state safety grant, which would move the cost off the county's own budget but not get applied until roughly 2028.
• Separately, the Board approved two pay estimates on July 7: $273,291.50 for the 2026 striping program and $1,776,254.25 for the Snowden Road overlay.

The striping debate is really a liability debate. As one official put it, "you need to be consistent. If you're not consistent, that's a liability." Once the county stripes Snowden, it is hard to justify skipping Canyon and Bickleton, which the safety plan rates as more dangerous. Staff also warned against paying for striping by shrinking surface maintenance: defer the chip seal and "you create a bow wave that is very hard to get out of," where a road slips past chip-seal repair and needs a full overlay. That is exactly the trajectory of Bickleton Highway, now facing a roughly $7 million overlay. It is the same cost-overrun pressure the county has flagged all year.

Bridges, briefly: The Lytle Bridge on Glenwood Highway stayed closed for repairs through July 17 (Public Works joked that anglers could "go there Saturday morning for fishing" once it reopened). Deck and bearing work wrapped on several other bridges, and the courthouse repaint continued around the building to keep lifts away from Goldendale's Community Days crowds.

Facilities and bridges (July 21): The Board approved two more pay estimates: $211,200.66 for the new CGCC AMT training facility (a 10,000-square-foot building by Griffin Construction on a $3.23 million contract) and $66,108.50 for the courthouse exterior repaint. Public Works flagged a BNSF railroad-bridge replacement on SR-14 at the county line, set for Sunday August 2 with possible short highway closures, and a full closure of the Bear Creek Bridge from July 23 through August 13 for its last bearing repair. Crews are now also fog-sealing over fresh chip seal in the urban areas (work they used to hire out) to lock down loose rock and save windshields.

🗑 The Landfill: A Seattle-Sized Bet

The Roosevelt Regional Landfill is roughly half of Klickitat County's revenue, so its contract pipeline is a budget story.

• Republic Services was selected to advance on the Snohomish County contract (which runs to about January 2028), a step commissioners said averted an estimated $2 million hole.
• Republic is bidding the City of Seattle contract, worth roughly 500,000 tons a year, due at the end of July, with room for King County and others to join. On July 14 the Board signed a letter of support.
• A Tacoma contract could go out to bid in August.

This continues the "import the region's trash" strategy the Board laid out this spring in Could Portland's Trash Be Klickitat's Treasure?. Commissioners want Republic to brief the public more often, precisely because so much rides on it: the county budgets around $8.4 million from the landfill against about $5.7 million from property tax. One selling point for the west-side cities is the "three-legged stool" of Republic, the PUD, and the county, where landfill gas is turned into renewable natural gas and sold back across the Cascades.

Not all the solid-waste news was good. The Board learned that a state Ecology post-closure covenant on the closed Horse Thief Lake landfill now requires a no-public-access covenant, enforced with fencing and regular mowing, an ongoing maintenance cost the county says it was told it would not have. The surrounding state park will not take the parcel until it is cleared. "Nobody stands behind what was said," one official said of the shifting Ecology guidance.

💰 Budget and the "Hiring Freeze"

The county's selective hiring freeze got its sharpest public challenge yet.

• Kaylee Toll of Lyle asked June 30 why department heads must come before the Board to fill jobs that are already funded and budgeted: "When an employee leaves, that funding shouldn't just simply disappear. It remains in the budget."
• Commissioners called the "hiring freeze" label a misnomer: "it's more of a conversation," one said (the captions are unlabeled). Departments now fill out a second justification sheet, and some, like Public Works, have voluntarily left positions unfilled.
• The Board stressed it is not in deficit and not spending reserves, but is drawing down "cash carryover," and warned that a three-year outlook without discipline risks "major layoffs."
• A live example: on June 30 the Assessor kept her funded-but-vacant Chief Appraiser box on the org chart but shifted its money to hire a needed field appraiser, a compromise commissioners praised.

On the supplemental budget (July 14): The Board set an August 4 public hearing on a $766,613 supplemental. It folds in $100,000 for the Columbia Gorge Regional Airport and $400,000 for Klickitat Valley Health (both approved June 16), plus $266,613 for the county's contract-dispatcher agreement. Staff said all of it draws on existing fund balance.

Mid-year check (July 21): Treasurer Greg Gallagher gave the Board a second-quarter snapshot, and the headline was calm: revenues and expenses are both landing about where the budget expected at the halfway mark. Property tax is just under 60% collected, sales tax at 55%, and the landfill has paid two of its scheduled installments with roughly $1.4 million still due to meet the year's budget. The county's new criminal-justice sales tax, tied partly to renewable-energy projects and budgeted conservatively at $200,000 in its first year, has already brought in about $196,000. Gallagher also floated an idea: rather than keep leaning on investment-interest income that can vanish when rates fall, the county could sweep anything it earns above the budgeted amount into a separate fund reserved for one-time projects. A draft financial policy is due at the July 30 workshop.

🚒 Public Safety, Radio, and a Hard Fire Weekend

• The county opened summer with two fires in the last days of June, the Peterson Road Fire near Alderdale (which broke out that Friday and was quickly wrapped up) and the Lyle Fire over the weekend, which commissioners said swelled from 50 to 200 to as much as 1,500 acres before crews and aircraft pulled it back. A Crawford Oaks fire briefly closed State Route 14 in early July.
• On July 7 the Board approved 2026-2027 Radio System Use and 9-1-1/Dispatch Services Agreements with nine fire agencies: the City of Bingen Fire Department, the West Klickitat Regional Fire Authority, and Fire Districts 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9.
• On July 21 the Board appointed 9-1-1 Dispatch Director Jeff King as the county's 911 Coordinator, a designation the state requires for grant administration. It came as the dispatch department's Chief of Operations resigned for a job elsewhere; the county expects to bring options for that vacancy to the July 30 workshop.
• Senior Services manager Sharon Carter reported the department's aging dial-a-ride scheduling software failed about six times in three weeks, and its original vendor has gone out of business. The Board endorsed pursuing a two-state gorge transit mutual-aid agreement so counties can share wheelchair-accessible vehicles and qualify for federal reimbursement during declared emergencies.

The radio agreements are the quiet advance of a long-running fight. For over a year the county has warned fire districts that the seven-figure radio-system replacement will eventually come with user fees, a thread we first flagged in Roads, Radio Silence & Regional Funding. These 2026-2027 use agreements are the framework those future charges will hang on.

🏥 Public Health: Reading the Fine Print

Commissioner Todd Andrews pulled the Health Department's Consolidated Contract Amendment #14 off the July 14 consent agenda just to understand it.

• Director Erinn Quinn walked the Board through it: Foundational Public Health Services funding of about $1.1 million for July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027, roughly $380,000 below the prior year (figures stated in the meeting).
• The state has also moved WIC and several programs from annual awards to quarterly ones, which Quinn said makes the biennial contract harder to track: "there's just been a lot of change."
• The Board asked Quinn to start attending morning workshops to walk through the biggest of these contracts, the way Public Works briefs its major items.

This extends the state public-health-funding squeeze the county has tracked all year, including the roughly $400,000 in cuts detailed in our last edition.

🏘 Housing, Land Use, and Energy Siting

• Short-term rentals, with real numbers now: By July 21 the county's new RentalScape software had identified 143 short-term-rental properties in unincorporated Klickitat (out of 778 listings), 105 of them currently operating. It also flagged 16 accessory dwelling units being rented as short-term rentals, which county code does not allow. One property staff pulled up, a White Salmon Airbnb, lists at $1,200 a night and has grossed about $27,500 so far this year. Staff plan to bring a draft STR policy for review on August 4 and 11 and to request a public hearing around August 25. The software runs about $11,000 a year, and commissioners stressed no fee or ordinance decision has been made.
• Solar and battery storage: Special counsel Bob Sterbank is folding new solar and battery-storage language into the county's existing energy-overlay ordinance and answering Planning Commission questions, with a Planning Commission session expected around September. The moratorium the Board extended through September 2026 now expires September 4, and staff say they will ask to extend it again in August.

The bigger energy news is a separate Planning Commission push to reduce the county's Energy Overlay Zone, the area where solar can be built. The draft proposal would pull the solar boundary back to roughly Rock Creek Road on the east side and leave wind rules unchanged. Community Development Director Scott Edelman said the reasoning tracks the Board's own instinct: keep solar off the most productive farmland and away from dense clusters of neighbors, so the people who benefit from a project are the ones who bear its impacts. A second goal is to make the ordinance "EFSEC-proof." The state's Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council can approve big energy projects at the state level, sometimes over local objections. Making an ordinance "EFSEC-proof" means closing the gaps a state approval could slip through.

Today the county's map runs an energy-zone line straight through a solar prohibition area, which staff worry a state siting council could read as an invitation; tightening the boundary would force any applicant onto the long, expensive review route instead of an expedited state bypass. One commissioner pushed to also revisit the Goodnoe Hills and Chamberlain Road area before the lines are redrawn, noting that once a boundary is reduced, "once it's changed, to go backwards is a different world." Nothing is decided; the Planning Commission held a workshop and will take it up again.

👶 Childcare and 💧 Dallesport Wastewater

• Childcare workshop set: The Board scheduled an August 25 workshop (10:30 AM) featuring Garfield County, which built a public-health-run childcare program using a state Early Learning Facilities (ELF) grant and a nonprofit, followed by state Commerce staff on ELF grants. This builds on the county's "childcare as economic infrastructure" work and the Bingen and White Salmon land search.
• Dallesport rates: The Board set an August 18 wastewater-rate public hearing in Dallesport (6:00 PM), followed by a separate public Q&A. The county is chasing Public Works Trust and Commerce financing toward a project now estimated near $3.5 million, hoping a 50% grant share can soften multi-year rate increases.

---

🗳 The Civic Notebook

• Election forums: The League of Women Voters held a Klickitat County Sheriff candidates' forum on July 14 at the Mountain View Grange in White Salmon, co-sponsored by Columbia Gorge News and the Goldendale Sentinel. A final candidate night, this one covering both the sheriff and the county commissioner races, was set for the evening of July 21 at the Grange in Goldendale. Check out our coverage here.
• A 24-year-old bill: Dallesport contractor David Harris told the Board on July 14 that the county paid only half of a roughly $15,000 order for 600 concrete stop-log barricades back in 2001-02, and he now wants 24 years of interest at the county's own 1%-per-month compounding rate: "Now we're at 24 years. So do the math." Commissioners referred him to Public Works.
• Gorge fire recovery: Public commenter Roger Nichols reported that the Columbia River Gorge Commission has eased rebuilding after the Burdoin and Rowena fires, one year on, crediting Klickitat's Gorge Commission representative Valerie Fowler.
• Records and a pool: Public-records access stayed a running theme. Commissioner Todd Andrews, whom a resident had named, apologized for an earlier remark, clarifying he had referred to "the number of emails received by someone, not actual public records requests." The county's new Public Records Administrator job reportedly drew 28 applicants. Commenters also called the White Salmon pool district a "sham" and "a pool that doesn't exist," which commissioners noted is a separate junior taxing district with its own elected board.
• A rezone near Goldendale (July 21): The Board set a July 28 public meeting on a request (ZON 2026-01) to rezone about 56.84 acres just south of Goldendale from General Rural to Suburban Residential. No specific project is proposed yet; the Planning Commission has recommended approval.
• Appointments and housekeeping (July 21): The Board reappointed David McNeal of Dallesport to the county Board of Equalization, opened a search for a vacant District 1 seat there, and approved a petition annexing several parcels (a single owner) into Fire Protection District No. 3.
• Grants worth watching: Staff reported a $125,000 state brownfield grant to keep investigating cleanup at the old Klickitat Millsite, a $125,000 application for a county-wide parks and recreation plan, and a rare cross-state swap that let the county's salmon-recovery "lead entity" fund all five of its habitat projects by trading a restricted funding pot with the Chehalis Basin group on the coast.
• Making county records ADA-accessible (July 21): County Clerk LeeAnn Burgin walked the Board through a coming federal web-accessibility requirement (deadline around April 2028). The county's website host, CivicPlus, offers an add-on to meet it for about $7,700 a year, against an estimated $42,000 to update roughly 5,851 documents by hand. No decision yet; it heads into budget talks.
• A veteran's reminders: Lifelong resident John Miller, whose father was once a county commissioner, asked the Board to finally replace a faded county "points of interest" sign south of Goldendale that has sat on the priority list for years, and to move a poorly placed Highway 97 World War II Memorial sign to the safer side of the road. Of nine local WWII veterans honored when the highway was named, he said, about one is still living.
• Forest Service check-in (July 16 workshop): District Ranger Erin Black told the Board that Tom Shultz has been named the new Forest Service chief and that the agency is reorganizing, including closing its Portland regional office while pushing to increase timber production around Trout Lake. Forest Supervisor Johanna Kovarik said the Johnston Observatory is on track to reopen in spring 2027 with WSDOT's help, and that the agency is running a tunnel safety assessment.

---

⚠️ Editor's Note: Broader Context

The permitting path a data center actually follows in Klickitat is set by a 2023 Planning Commission comp-plan interpretation, not a dedicated ordinance. Inside the Industrial Park zone, a data center is treated as light industrial; outside it, it needs a Conditional Use Permit. Both routes trigger SEPA environmental review, where a project can be bumped up to a full Environmental Impact Statement. Any extra county conditions must survive a potential legal challenge.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• BST / chip seal: "Bituminous Surface Treatment," a gravel-and-oil road-surface layer. Cheaper than an asphalt overlay, and what the county trims first when money is tight.
• CUP / SEPA: a Conditional Use Permit is county permission for a use that needs extra review; SEPA is the State Environmental Policy Act, the environmental study every major project must pass.
• ELF grant: the state's Early Learning Facilities grant, which pays to build or remodel childcare space (you generally need the building first).
• Lead Entity (Salmon Recovery): the county's role coordinating local salmon-habitat grants funded through the state Recreation and Conservation Office.
• Energy Overlay Zone (EOZ): the mapped part of the county where large wind or solar projects are allowed. The Planning Commission is proposing to shrink the solar portion of it.

---

📌 How to Join and Learn More

The Klickitat County Commissioners meet most Tuesdays at the Klickitat County Services Building, 115 West Court Street, Room 201, Goldendale, with a 9:30 AM workshop and a 1:00 PM regular session. Meetings are on Zoom (Meeting ID 586 587 651) and recorded at klickitatcounty.org. Written comment can be submitted before any meeting to bocc@klickitatcounty.org.

Going deeper: Open Gorge's Public Benefit Lab is a plain-language toolkit of mitigations and community-benefit options for heavy-infrastructure proposals (data centers, battery storage, solar, wind, and transmission), with model ordinances and contact scripts for planning commissions, PUDs, and fire districts.

On the calendar: July 28 (public meeting on the Goldendale-area rezone, 1:30 PM) · July 30 (County Administrator and 9-1-1 restructure workshop, noon) · August 2 (Sunday railroad-bridge work, possible SR-14 closures) · August 4 (supplemental-budget hearing) · August 18 (Dallesport wastewater-rate hearing, in Dallesport, 6 PM) · August 20 (budget and wildfire-insurance workshop) · August 25 (childcare workshop, 10:30 AM, and the target for a short-term-rental hearing) · September 4 (solar/battery moratorium expires) · September (solar/battery ordinance Q&A).

---

Want to help keep the Dispatch running?

The Skamania Dispatch is a community-powered public service. Every meeting summary and audio briefing is free, and always will be. If you've been finding value in this work and want to help offset the costs of document requests and software tools, you can now join as a Community Supporter for $5/month. Zero pressure to upgrade (your readership is support enough) but if you'd like to help fuel the mission, you can do so here.