Podcast: Clarifications on the Recent Column about Google Taxes with Commissioner Hage and Mayor Mayes
The Millennial Perspective, a column by Robin Denning
The Dalles, Ore., Dec. 23, 2025 - When I wrote a column on big institutions, government, utilities, and trillion-dollar corporations, I owed readers two things at once: a clear point of view and clean, verifiable facts.
In my recent column about data centers and public costs, I oversimplified a few details, and while they remain true, it’s not the whole picture. This is the clarification: what was missed, and why the core community question still stands.
CLARIFICATIONS
Oregon school funding isn’t a simple “more local taxes = more local school money” equation.
Oregon funds K-12 operating dollars through a state equalization formula, shaped by the post-Measure 5 / Measure 50 era. Under the Legislative Revenue Office explanation, a district’s State School Fund grant is its formula revenue minus local revenue. So when local operating revenue rises, state aid typically falls, because the state is equalizing funding across districts.
That means it is not accurate to imply that every dollar of additional local operating revenue would automatically translate to a dollar of new operating spending in a district. The state school funding formula can offset it.
But while this does apply to ongoing school funding, it certainly does not apply to building or replacing the basic infrastructure that provides the facility for the ongoing school funding to be effective. I address this after the power section.
3) The POWER Act doesn’t directly govern a PUD the way it governs an investor-owned utility.
Oregon’s POWER Act (HB 3546, 2025) targets “electric companies” regulated by the Oregon Public Utility Commission and creates requirements around how large energy use facilities are served and how costs are assigned.
Consumer-owned utilities like our own Northern Wasco People’s Utility District (PUD) are not in the same category as investor-owned utilities under that framework, like PGE or Pacific Power. That doesn’t mean large users get a free ride on a PUD system; it means the POWER Act isn’t the mechanism that dictates how a PUD must structure rates and upgrades.
Northern Wasco County PUD has publicly described its own approach to growing the Google infrastructure: a process for very large power users to cover the costs of new infrastructure they need, alongside cost-of-service and rate review work. Thank you NWPUD
While that’s the end of the clarification section, I believe it left us with more questions than answers, so alas, I continue.
Northern Wasco County PUD is publicly documented as delivering power to Google’s nearby data centers in The Dalles
But Google’s exact “what they pay” rate isn’t publicly available line-by-line (large customers often have complex tariffs with demand charges and confidentiality around contract details).
According to the interview, “The city of TD and NWPUD signed agreements to charge rates that are the same as other users in their classification of commercial users.”
But it begs the question, could NWPUD raise the rate for just the commercial customers above a certain kWh usage and use the surplus generated to support critical local infrastructure?
Broadly, maybe, legally, maybe an optimistic yes, but it’s not simple. Here’s 2 ways they could be doing that.
The PUD can legally create/adjust a large customer class and rates so that a big load pays its full cost to serve, which can further protect residential customers from subsidizing one of the most valuable corporations on earth. That fits squarely within the PUD’s “rates and classifications” power.
City privilege/franchise-style charges (money to the City, not the PUD)
Oregon cities can levy a privilege tax on a distribution utility for using city rights-of-way, calculated per kWh, and it can vary by customer class.
For a PUD, the PUD’s governing body determines how it is collected from customers and allocated across classes.
That revenue goes to the City, which has more flexibility to support community infrastructure.Economic development agreements (limited, but real)
A PUD can enter into agreements to promote economic growth/expansion of business and industry, with some recordkeeping requirements.
That’s not “fund schools,” but it can sometimes support workforce pipelines, infrastructure tied to service territory development, etc.
School Bonds and Google Property Taxes
Here’s the nuance about schools that’s hard to convey
School operations (teachers, programs, day-to-day running) are largely equalized through the state school funding formula.
Bonds and many local measures (buildings, HVAC, safety upgrades, major repairs). Those are local property-tax levies tied to debt payments.
And this part is straightforward math in Oregon law and property tax administration: when a taxing district certifies a dollar amount (creating a bond), the county calculates a tax rate by dividing the bond amount by the total assessed value of the property tax collected in a certain period.
So when a community’s taxable value is smaller than it otherwise could be, because a large share of industrial land/value is being exempted or capped through long-term incentive structures, the bond payment ends up not being shared equally, and the price goes up for the people who are paying their fair share.
That’s why so many residents’ frustration isn’t just about “schools losing money.” It’s about bond affordability: in a tax base with lots of tax abatement, the “per $1,000 assessed value” rate needed to fund local building projects costs more for homeowners and businesses that own property solely because of this abatement of property taxes.
An unrelated but interesting fact: Google made roughly $100 billon dollars in profit in 2024.
Updated table: what it shows, and how to read it
Below is the comparison table we’re working from. The “Loss per pupil” figures are based on public reporting by districts and compiled in Good Jobs First’s analysis of Oregon tax abatements and school impacts.
A quick guide for readers:
“Loss per pupil” is a way to compare the impact of the tax abatements between districts. It is not the same thing as “cash removed from the classroom,” and it does not automatically translate 1:1 into operating dollars due to Oregon’s equalization formula.
It does show the scale of foregone revenue associated with abatements and helps highlight how concentrated these deals are in certain host districts.
| County | Host School District | Data Center/Campus Name | Owner/Operator | Estimated Build/Launch Year(s) | Primary Tax Incentive/Estimated Value | 2017 Loss Per Pupil Per Year | 2019 Loss Per Pupil Per Year | 2024 Loss Per Pupil Per Year | Total +% Change (2017-2024) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wasco | North Wasco County SD 21 | Google The Dalles Data Center Campus | Google LLC | 2006 (Original) - Ongoing | EZ / SIP. Deals valued up to $260 million on older centers. | $1,140 | $1,483 | $2,764 | 142% |
| Morrow | Morrow School District 1 | Amazon AWS - Boardman | Amazon Web Services (AWS) | 2010 - Ongoing | SIP & EZ. Latest deal (2023) valued at $1 billion in tax breaks over 15 years. | $1,688 | $2,987 | $10,380 | 515% |
| Crook | Crook County SD | Meta Platforms (Facebook) Data Center | Meta Platforms, Inc. | 2011 (Original) | EZ / SIP. Estimated $20M+ per year in property tax exemptions. | $2,236 | $4,082 | $8,576 | 283% |
| Crook | Crook County SD | Apple Data Center | Apple Inc. | ~2012 (Initial) | EZ / SIP. Millions of dollars in annual property tax abatement. | (Combined with Meta) | (Combined with Meta) | ||
| Washington | Hillsboro School District 1J | Digital Realty PDX10 | Digital Realty | 2014 | Hillsboro EZ Program. Up to 100% property tax abatement for 3-5 years. | $3,283 | $3,681 | $7,648 | 133% |
| Washington | Hillsboro School District 1J | Flexential Brookwood (PDX-02) | Flexential | N/A | Hillsboro EZ Program. Up to 100% property tax abatement for 3-5 years. | (Combined with Intel & others) | (Combined with Intel & others) | ||
| Washington | Hillsboro School District 1J | QTS Hillsboro Data Center | QTS Data Centers | N/A | Hillsboro EZ Program. Estimated $6.8 million in annual savings (2024). | (Combined with Intel & others) | (Combined with Intel & others) | ||
| Umatilla | Hermiston School District 8 | Amazon AWS US West (Oregon) Region (Hermiston Sites) | Amazon Web Services (AWS) | 2015 - Ongoing | SIP & EZ. Part of Amazon's massive regional abatement agreements. | $895 | $1,733 | $3,076 | 244% |
| Multnomah | Portland School District 1J | Digital Fortress Downtown Portland | Digital Fortress | N/A | Likely utilizes local Enterprise Zone incentives. | $162 | $170 | $319 | 97% |
| Multnomah | Portland School District 1J | H5 Data Centers Portland Data Center | H5 Data Centers | N/A | Likely uses SIP or local EZ incentives for capital improvements. | (Combined with others) | (Combined with others) |
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