Tina closes down data.
Oregon Is Closed For Business: Kotek Blocks a $5.1 Billion Future as 375 Jobs Cut
Only in Oregon can 84 years of truck manufacturing announce its departure, and before the coffee gets cold, the governor announces she is pulling state land out from under one of the largest proposed private investments in Salem’s history.
One industry heads for the Carolinas. Another gets an Oregon-sized stop sign.
Welcome to economic development, progressive style: lose the factory, fear the future, and issue a press release explaining how deeply you care about working families.
Daimler Truck North America announced that it will end truck production at its Swan Island plant, eliminate 375 jobs and move that production to factories in the Carolinas. The move ends a Portland manufacturing history dating to Freightliner’s founding in 1942. Daimler’s headquarters, engineering and other Oregon operations will remain, and the company says the decision was about optimizing its manufacturing network—not a criticism of Portland’s workers.
No, Tina Kotek did not personally close Daimler. Let’s not manufacture facts while lamenting the loss of manufacturing.
But the timing could not provide a clearer snapshot of Oregon’s economic sickness.
Within the same news cycle, Kotek directed the Department of Administrative Services to terminate the state’s contract to sell approximately 32 acres at Salem’s Mill Creek Corporate Center for the proposed Oakline data-center development.
Then came the obligatory government contradiction:
“I believe in growing Oregon’s economy and welcoming new investment.”
She followed that sentiment by canceling the land sale.
A $5.1 Billion Opportunity Meets the Heckler’s Veto
Verrus proposed a three-building data-center campus and electrical substation on roughly 75 acres in southeast Salem. Preliminary estimates put the private investment at $5.1 billion, with years of construction work, approximately 75 permanent jobs, around $9 million annually for Salem’s general fund and another $1.5 million for the Community Livability Levy. The property is already zoned Employment Center, where data centers are an outright permitted use.
Seventy-five permanent jobs will not replace 375 manufacturing jobs one-for-one. Nobody should pretend otherwise.
But dismissing a $5.1 billion investment because a modern automated facility does not employ thousands of people with lunch pails is economic nostalgia masquerading as analysis. Construction jobs, tax revenue, utility investments and a foothold in the infrastructure powering the modern economy still matter.
Representatives of the carpenters union and IBEW Local 280 supported responsibly developing the project because they understood something Oregon’s governing class increasingly does not: investment creates paychecks before it creates talking points.
Yet after a packed Salem City Council meeting filled with angry residents, signs and accusations of secrecy, Kotek intervened. The council also voted to explore restrictions on future nondisclosure agreements involving data-center companies.
To be fair, Salem officials helped create this mess.
The city entered into a nondisclosure agreement during the company’s site evaluation, while the developer had not yet publicly released firm estimates for electricity and water consumption. Residents had every right to demand answers. Secretive negotiations involving a project of this size are practically an engraved invitation to public suspicion.
But unanswered questions are a reason to demand answers—not an excuse to run the investment out of town before the normal review process has even occurred.
Verrus says the proposed facility would use closed-loop cooling to reduce water consumption, battery storage rather than relying exclusively on diesel backup generators, technology capable of lowering demand during grid stress, and company-funded infrastructure upgrades. Those claims should be independently verified, placed into enforceable agreements and backed by financial guarantees.
That is what competent government does.
Make the company disclose its projected power and water use. Protect residential ratepayers. Set enforceable noise standards. Require it to pay for substations, transmission and other infrastructure. Negotiate community benefits. Demand financial security in case the project changes hands or shuts down.
Regulate the project. Do not regulate Oregon out of the future.
Picking Winners and Losers
Kotek’s press release says state land decisions must reflect “Oregon’s values.” It also says she wants family-wage jobs, stronger regional economies and future investment. Meanwhile, her own Statewide Data Center Advisory Committee is still developing recommendations for handling precisely these projects.
Apparently, the committee can continue studying the opportunity after the governor has helped kneecap it.
The message to other companies is unmistakable: Oregon may have properly zoned industrial land, willing workers, local tax needs and preliminary agreements—but none of that protects an investment when a sufficiently loud political crowd appears.
A complete lack of regulatory certainty, with a dash of government veto.
Kotek is playing winners and losers. The politically organized opponents get an immediate gubernatorial intervention. Construction workers, Salem taxpayers and the next company considering Oregon get another warning that agreements here may be written in disappearing ink.
The progressive governing class has developed a strange fear of prosperity. Every major investment is treated first as a potential environmental crime scene and only later—perhaps—as an opportunity. Growth must survive endless studies, committees, climate tests, lawsuits, rate cases, land-use fights and public demonstrations.
Decline, however, requires no permit.
The Anti-Compute Horseshoe
The resistance is no longer confined to the environmental left. A populist anti-compute movement is also growing on the right, fueled by legitimate concerns about surveillance, automation, corporate power and artificial intelligence.
The political horseshoe is now plugged into the same power strip.
The left fears emissions. The right fears Skynet. Both post their objections using phones, cloud storage, social-media platforms, banking networks and internet services made possible by the infrastructure they oppose.
As I argued previously in Oregon, Skynet, and the War Over Data Centers, compute capacity is becoming national capacity. It supports logistics, cybersecurity, medical research, finance, communications, industrial design and national defense. Refusing to build American compute infrastructure does not stop artificial intelligence. It merely helps decide where that capability will be built and who will control it.
Data centers are not sacred. Neither are multinational technology companies. They should pay their own way, disclose their impacts and receive no blank checks from taxpayers or utility customers.
But fear and loathing of data is not an economic strategy.
Sorry, Oregon Is Closed
In one brutal news cycle, Oregon learned that 375 truck-manufacturing jobs are leaving Portland while the governor pulled state land from a potential $5.1 billion technology project in Salem.
The two decisions are not directly connected. Together, however, they tell the story of a state that keeps losing yesterday’s economy while finding new reasons to reject tomorrow’s.
Oregon cannot close mills, lose manufacturing, constrain energy production, punish industrial development and then act surprised when economic recovery never arrives.
Prosperity is not a contaminant. Compute is not contraband. Investment is not something government should tolerate only after it has been politically purified.
The governor’s job should be to make major projects work responsibly—not to choose which industries are socially fashionable enough to survive.
Perhaps Oregon needs a new economic-development slogan:
Come for the natural beauty. Stay until your employer moves to the Carolinas.
That’s my Viewpoint.
Sources and Further Reading
- Governor Kotek Directs State to Withdraw Land for Proposed Salem Data Center Site
- Daimler Truck to End Production in Portland, Eliminate 375 Jobs — KATU
- Massive $5.1 Billion Data Center Proposed for Salem — KATU
- Salem Council Votes to Explore Banning Data-Center NDAs — Salem Reporter
- Hostility to Data Centers Boils Over at Salem Council Meeting — Seattle Red
- Kotek Orders End to Mill Creek Data-Center Land Sale — Central Oregon Daily
- Kotek Cancels State Land Sale for Salem Data Center — The Oregonian/OregonLive
- Oregon, Skynet, and the War Over Data Centers — Ben’s Viewpoint
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I believe Kotek is so far behind the 8 ball with constituents that she is trying to grandstand in the effort to salvage her election chances. Too many coincidences already with the prosperity committee (imagine that, they told her what we have been saying for several years now) and now a “look I saved y’all from the big bad computer chip! 19 years in key positions to shape, present, and approve a Progressive agenda that has flat failed Oregon.