Members of XRPDX have benn actively following the Governor’s Data Center Advisory Committee. Below are the transcripts of their public testimonies made at the June 26, 2026 meeting. Read the agenda and meeting participants here. A recording of the day’s meeting can be found here.
Leslie Kochan
Oregon is currently faced with multiple environmental crises: drought, water shortages, a warming climate that requires more grid capacity, loss of farmland, degraded air quality and more. Data centers in Oregon are exacerbating all of these crises and foreclosing on our dream of meeting our state climate goals. At the same time, data centers are adding to the affordability crisis by raising utility costs and creating price competition for material inputs that our communities depend upon, for instance to build schools and affordable housing. And Oregon’s excessive tax breaks deny us additional resources to support our schools and other community needs.
Aside from questions about what we should require of existing data centers, we need to ask some broader questions about any form of data center expansion: What is the real need for this rapid build-out? Who will benefit from the tech bros AI dreams? How do data centers affect the quality of our rural and urban lives in both the short and the long-term? How do they impact the health of the ecosystems that we depend upon and that support a diversity of non-human life?
Oregon needs to have a serious conversation based on these questions. Only then should we move forward, if we see the need for limited expansion and any new development, to develop a transparent, robust, community led evaluation system for data center proposals. This can’t happen in a few months through a process designed primarily to create some guardrails for data center expansion. I urge all of us who value greater economic and ecological well-being in Oregon to consider the need for a several year moratorium on all data center expansion and new construction in Oregon.
annie
My name is annie, I use she/her pronouns.
I am a climate activist and a humanitarian.
I am not gonna throw scientific facts or statistics at you.
I am just gonna remind you that data centers are hurting our communities.
And people hate them. And with good reason.
We don’t need the AI that they are creating. In fact, the AI is adding to the problem.
We don’t need more AI and more data centers,
but we do need the tax money, water, electricity and land that they are stealing from us.
Please remember that your job is to serve the people of Oregon, not to protect the profits of data centers (profits that won’t stay in Oregon)
And don’t get confused and think that more is better,
or that growth is inherently good
or that relentless consumption is necessary.
Oregonians want livable communities and sustainable lifestyles.
They want security, connection, creativity and meaning.
They want affordability, less stress, more time to relax, more time with their families, and good medical care.
Data centers don’t provide any of that. They don’t even provide many jobs, once the construction is done.
And, the bottom line is that Oregonians hate data centers.
Please listen to Oregonians. Respect the opinions of the people who live and work in Oregon,
the people who experience the suffering caused by data centers, honor their needs and priorities.
Remember that data centers don’t give life meaning, they don’t make us better people or a better society.
They won’t be what you will think back on fondly or proudly when you are on your deathbed.
It is time for a moratorium on data centers. It is time to end tax breaks for data centers.
It is past time for data centers to pay their own way for the resources they take from us.
Put Oregonians first.
Lynn Hanlon
When will we hear the conversation from the committee about whether or not we actually need more large data centers? The seemingly forbidden elephant in this room, climate change, is a big affordability issue: costs to respond to increasing weather related emergencies and disasters, cost to deal with increasing worldwide and local crop failures which will increase greatly as the planet continues to heat up, cost of negative health impacts, cost related to business disruption, etc.
Data Centers use massive amounts of energy and no matter how you slice it there is a major climate impact. Any green energy used for data centers could be used for all the rest of our energy needs, not wasted on the unnecessary and harmful expansion of generative AI related data centers.
We need to help people who can’t afford it with weatherization, heat pumps and the like to meet climate goals and help them mitigate for climate change without the nightmare addition of large data centers.
The direct health impacts of data centers including noise pollution both audible and infrasound, concentration of pollution of water supply, destruction of farm and wild land, light pollution and more put financial strain on people as well as hurting their quality of life.
Research has been done showing that without data centers, Oregon is projected to meet our climate goals; with increased expansion of data centers that becomes impossible.
We need a moratorium now on new construction of data centers until there is a guarantee that there will be no climate impacts, direct or indirect and no negative community economic and health impacts.
And in the Q&A at the meeting in response to the committee co-chair telling us there will be no discussion of moratorium I put this:
From the governor’s guidelines: “while ensuring utility costs, infrastructure investments, and environmental impacts remain sustainable and equitable for all residents”, where does it say that a moratorium would not be in order to accomplish this?
We can not have this conversations without considering whether or not we should have data centers in Oregon. It is very much in line with the goal of the committee.
Diana Meisenhelter
My name is Diana Meisenhelter and I volunteer with a global climate justice organization-XRGS. We’d like to propose a moratorium on data center development in Oregon until thorough public discussion has taken place and adequate guardrails have been created to address the multitude of public concerns around data centers.
Currently, we cannot afford data centers. We can’t afford their land-grabbing, their high energy and water consumption and associated rising costs to consumers; their raising the costs of key materials needed for housing and other community resources; their tax breaks resulting in less public funds for education, health, public services and other critical needs; not to mention security concerns and their involvement in surveillance and military applications that could potentially be harmful to our democracy, our neighbors, and other countries.
Data centers add to pollution and emissions fueling the climate crisis and the lack of guardrails around AI may lead to yet another serious existential crisis. Their massive energy consumption will make the State’s clean energy goals an impossibility. While they claim to create jobs, they employ relatively few long-term employees and many of those are not high or living wage positions. We need to focus our scarce public resources on creating a well-being economy with fully funded education, public services, affordable housing, public transit and transportation infrastructure, quality health care, meaningful family wage jobs and support for small farmers and sustainable agriculture.
Those deeply familiar with this industry have made clear that these data centers are likely to be obsolete technologies within a decade or so and so these may become stranded assets, but the farm or public lands that have been paved over will not be easily restored. Listening today, I’m quite appalled at how one-sided this conversation has been. Put a pause on data centers until all serious public concerns are fully addressed.
Jennifer Krauel
My name is Jennifer Krauel. I’m a scientist based in Portland. Thank you for these amazing informational sessions, I have learned so much about data centers and specifically how they are affecting Oregon.
I’m concerned about what is not being addressed in these sessions. The committee and almost all speakers are working from the assumption that data center buildout in Oregon is going to happen, and we’re just here to figure out how it should happen. If you’re really thinking outside the box, there’s another obvious way to reduce costs: just don’t build the data centers. I am asking you to acknowledge this framing, and to open a space to consider a future where data centers do not dominate our state.
If that is difficult to imagine, then that’s a flag for you that you may not be doing your job of examining all options for Oregon’s data center planning.
Rising utility rates are already causing Oregonians to choose between freezing in their homes or eating. As an organizer, I’m seeing widespread alarm and anger about data centers. As we heard earlier, people are hungry to understand this topic! And as your committee has thoroughly demonstrated, there is so much to understand even for those of us with the luxury of time to study it! If you do not present options that protect us, and what the tradeoffs are for all Oregonians, people will understand that they’re not really being represented and that anger will grow.
I strongly urge you to consider a state-wide moratorium on approving new data center development until we have an understanding of all the options we could be considering. Be clear on exactly who is driving the sense of urgency to make decisions right now, and who profits from rushing this. I assure you they do not have the best interests of our state as a priority.
Thanks for listening.
