Last week, OPB published an investigation into The Dalles’ efforts to expand its water reservoir in the Mount Hood National Forest at the same time that Google expands its footprint in the north-central Oregon city.

OPB’s reporting covered two agreements signed between The Dalles and Google in 2021. One would guarantee Google’s access to a certain amount of water every year to help cool two new data center buildings. In a second deal, Google agreed to transfer about $28.5 million in water infrastructure to The Dalles.

OPB’s reporting showed how Google uses a third of the overall water consumed by the city.

The Dalles officials are now lobbying for a bill that would transfer 150 acres of the Mount Hood National Forest to the city so it can triple the size of its reservoir. The Dalles gets much of its water from the Dog River, a low-flowing river that drains down the eastern Mount Hood foothills toward Hood River then into the Columbia River. Federal agencies and environmental groups say this river system is an essential cold-water refuge for threatened fish as they migrate between fresh water rivers and the Pacific Ocean.

The city has a pipeline that diverts water from Dog River into a stream that empties into the city’s reservoir. Environmentalists worry that enlarging the reservoir will pull too much water away from Dog River, potentially endangering threatened fish.

City officials told OPB the expansion is for a growing population, not to quench Google’s thirst for more water.

The Dalles has added about 1,700 people since 2012, bringing its population up to about 16,200 people — a 12% increase.

Google’s annual water use has gone from 104 million gallons in 2012 to 434 million gallons in 2024 — a 316% increase.

The bill in question, if passed as written, would allow the city to acquire 150 acres of national forest that immediately borders its reservoir, so the city can increase that reservoir’s capacity to 3,000 acre-feet. That’s 52% more than the city originally planned in a 2006 water master plan that projected water use over time.

The Dalles raises concerns about OPB’s reporting

This week, The Dalles Mayor Richard Mays raised questions about OPB’s reporting in a Facebook post that included a four-page letter from the city’s retired public works director Dave Anderson.

“I haven’t posted on social media in a few years but I have to make an exception now because of inaccuracies in the OPB article,” Mays wrote, before directing his Facebook followers to read Anderson’s letter.

In that letter, Anderson called OPB’s reporting “egregiously misleading.”

“From my reading of the article, I believe that it would have been more appropriately presented as an opinion piece rather than a news article,” Anderson wrote in a letter addressed to Rachel Smolkin, OPB’s president and chief executive officer.

An in-depth, line-by-line review of the article in response to Anderson’s letter found one error, which OPB has corrected and noted in the original story.

OPB incorrectly reported that projected monthly residential water rate are expected to climb by 7% by 2036. However, The Dalles 2024 Water System Master Plan forecasts that rates will climb by 99% by that year. OPB regrets the error.

The table below shows the increase in the projected residential water bills.

The error was not mentioned by The Dalles officials and doesn’t change the foundational points made in the original article. OPB stands by that reporting.

Anderson’s letter also provides additional details about Google’s 2021 decision to transfer water rights to The Dalles that OPB did not have when OPB published the original story. OPB has clarified the story to explain that Google only transferred part, not all, of a former aluminum smelter’s water rights to The Dalles.

OPB addresses below the other key points raised by Anderson in his letter.

How OPB reported the story

During this investigation, OPB reviewed 2,675 pages of public documents, as well as 22 hours of public meetings from the last six years.

OPB asked detailed questions of public officials — including Mays and The Dalles’ current public works director, Dale McCabe — as well as Google staff and conducted follow-up interviews over the course of five weeks.

The Dalles, through retired public works director Anderson, said that OPB’s reporting was “incorrect to imply that their [Google’s] water demands are the driving force for the City’s plans to increase its watershed reservoir storage capacity.”

The article stated clearly that the city’s elected officials repeatedly denied to OPB that they are seeking more water to serve Google. Officials with Google likewise said they are not behind the push to transfer federal land to The Dalles so the city can expand its reservoir.

These statements were included at the top of the story, as was a quote from the mayor.

OPB also quoted environmental groups who are concerned about the impact of Google on water supply in the region. And OPB dug into the data — reviewing city council minutes, internal documents and correspondence — to provide a more complete picture of the history of Google and water in The Dalles.

OPB’s goal was to allow readers to draw their own conclusions about an issue critical to the future of the community.

The Dalles’ plans to expand its reservoir

The Dalles has had an unfulfilled reservoir expansion plan on the books since 1991. In his letter, Anderson called OPB “egregiously misleading” for focusing its report on 2021, when city officials changed their characterization of the city’s water needs.

Most cities and counties craft water master plans that estimate their long-term water needs. Before 2024, The Dalles had last published a water master plan in 2006. The 2006 plan projected the city would eventually need to raise its dam so its reservoir could hold more water.

At that time, the city estimated that future water demands would require 850 acre-feet of water storage in the reservoir. The plan said it was feasible to raise the dam by 35 feet so the reservoir could hold 1,970 acre-feet.

Here are excerpts from The Dalles’ 2006 water master plan.

Despite those plans, the city didn’t expand its reservoir. The subject wouldn’t come up again until 2020, 14 years later.

That’s when The Dalles was rebuilding its pipeline that diverts water from Dog River in the Mount Hood National Forest. As OPB noted, environmental groups worried the larger pipeline would pull too much water out of the basin and endanger fish, and it would pull out even more water if The Dalles decided to expand its reservoir in the future.

The U.S. Forest Service consulted with city staff, including Anderson, who told federal regulators in 2020 that the reservoir’s current water capacity met the city’s needs “for at least another 10 years.” The federal agency concluded that “any such plans to increase the reservoir’s capacity” were “an unforeseeable action at this time.”

These are excerpts from the Forest Service’s response to public comments during the pipeline expansion environmental review process.

The Dalles gets much of its water from the Dog River in Mount Hood forest

OPB’s reporting stated that The Dalles gets 85% of its water from the Dog River. This figure appears to vary in public documents.

A press release about Rep. Cliff Bentz’s bill to transfer federal land to The Dalles says the figure is 80%, but it quotes Mays’ testimony in support of that bill that says the figure is 85%. In an interview with OPB, Mays said the city gets “probably 80%” of its water from the Dog River. A House Natural Resources Committee report about Bentz’s bill says 80%.

The Dalles’ 2024 water master plan says, in recent years, the city has “obtained approximately 78 percent of its water” from surface water and the rest from groundwater.

Google pays for water studies in The Dalles

In 2021, Google announced it intended to build two new data center buildings in The Dalles.

That year, The Dalles staff presented three studies to city councilors showing how the city needed to expand its water infrastructure if it was going to meet future demands, including those of Google’s new data centers, according to city council documents from Nov. 8, 2021.

According to minutes from that meeting, Google covered the costs of those studies.

A future industrial water user

In 2024, the city undertook its first master water plan — a document that spells out future water use — since 2006. In it, The Dalles mentioned “an unnamed industrial user” that would need about 1 million gallons of water a day.

Google is “currently the City’s largest water customer,” retired public works director Anderson said. But it is not the “unnamed industrial user” in the master plan, he wrote in his letter to OPB.

Anderson said OPB’s article seemed “to intend to lead the reader to believe” that the future industrial water user is Google.

The article did not speculate who the future user may be.

Google used 383.9 million gallons of water in 2023, and 434.4 million gallons in 2024, according to data provided by the city to OPB in response to a public records request. That amounts to 1.05 million gallons a day in 2023 and 1.19 million gallons a day in 2024.

Here is the chart showing that data, as provided by The Dalles.

The 2024 water master plan includes projections for the next 50 years, and includes projection summaries for the years 2024, 2029, 2034, 2039, 2044 and 2074. The table accounts for “the addition of a large industrial user with approximately 1 MGD average use.”

Here is the relevant section of the 2024 water master plan.

The Dalles aquifer is in a critical groundwater area

In addition to getting water from the Hood Basin, The Dalles gets water from wells that pull groundwater from a deep aquifer. Aquifers have a limited amount of water and must be replenished by rain or snow melt, so Oregon law limits how much people can draw by allocating water rights.

Oregon water regulators designated The Dalles a “critical groundwater area” in 1959 due to a rapidly declining water table.

In a 1959 report, Oregon regulators said there was a massive drop in water levels in The Dalles groundwater area between 1951 and 1958. It dropped to its lowest level in the summer of 1958. A state engineer attributed the drop to overallocation of water rights.

The year before, Harvey Machine Co. opened a smelter in the area — the same year that water levels dropped to their lowest. The engineer’s report included calculations from Harvey Machine Co.’s water use.

Here are those calculations from the 1959 report available on the Oregon Water Resources Department’s website.

Last March, Oregon District 3 Watermaster Robert Wood presented a report to the Wasco County Board of Commissioners that showed a decline of water levels starting in 1965. Those levels picked up again after the smelter closed in 2000. Wood partly attributed the water levels stabilizing to the smelter’s closure.

“So the aluminum plant scaling back and then eventually closing — the aluminum plant used a lot of water, and that was part of the reason I think why things have kind of stabilized over the years,” Wood told commissioners at the meeting. “So the aluminum plant wells, currently, they have been abandoned within the last few years, and those water rights that are on that property have been transferred over to the city.”

The Dalles’ 2024 water master plan also says the smelter’s closure helped increase groundwater availability. It says since 2010 and the closure of the smelter, “the annual volume of groundwater pumped from the [groundwater area] has decreased significantly.”

In 2016, Google purchased the former aluminum smelter property so it could build data center buildings. That land came with the right to pump water from an underground aquifer. Google transferred those rights to the city.

In his letter, Anderson notes that The Dalles acquired only part of the smelter property’s water rights.

The article states that the city has the right to pump the same amount of water as the prior aluminum smelter, potentially straining groundwater resources again. The assertion is incorrect. First, only a portion of the smelter’s prior groundwater rights were transferred to the city, not all of them.

OPB was not aware that Google transferred only a portion of the property’s water rights to the city. OPB has clarified the original article to reflect this information.

Google and The Dalles signed agreements that provided the company with tax breaks and the city with new water infrastructure.

Anderson also took issue with a section of OPB’s story that says Google invested $28.5 million into The Dalles’ water infrastructure “in exchange” for deep tax breaks.

Anderson is technically correct that only the infrastructure agreement between the city and Google details the $28.5 million payment for water infrastructure improvements. There is a bigger picture here though.

That agreement was authorized by the city on Nov. 8, 2021, in its council meeting. The next day, Google signed something called a Strategic Investment Program agreement that provided massive tax breaks to Google. The SIP agreement had been waiting on Google’s execution for over a week. The city and the county signed it in October.

The same day that Google signed the SIP agreement, the company issued a press release heralding the two agreements it had signed, according to Columbia Community Connection, a local news website.

Google said the Strategic Investment Program and infrastructure agreements were “part of its ongoing commitment to Oregon.”

When asked if the deals were linked, Mays said the agreements “were closely related,” according to council minutes from November 2021.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/23/the-dalles-mayor-data-center-google/