THE OREGONIAN

North Plains’ plan to double in size thrusts tiny community into Oregon’s eternal land debate

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

Nestled at the western edge of Portland’s urban frontier, the tiny city of North Plains sits at the point dividing the region’s farms and forestland from subdivisions and semiconductor factories.

North Plains has straddled that divide since a railroad set up the town a century ago, seeking to connect Washington County farms to markets in the city 18 miles east.

Urbanization in neighboring cities along the Sunset Highway has steadily pulled North Plains away from its agrarian roots, gradually turning the city into a bedroom community of 3,400 residents with little industrial or commercial base of its own.

So city leaders say it’s time to take North Plains’ future into their own hands by doubling the city’s 700-acre footprint and tapping into the region’s thirst for industrial land and housing.

They have approved an 855-acre expansion to North Plains urban growth boundary, making way for more subdivisions, data centers and – they hope – light manufacturing, food processors and breweries.

“There is an incredible amount of opportunity here to complement what else is going on in the region,” said Mayor Teri Lenahan. She said urban expansion will diversify North Plains’ tax base, add residents and give them somewhere to work in their own communities.

Some living in and near the city look at what’s happened elsewhere in the region, though, as a cautionary tale rather than an inspiration.

They see Hillsboro’s data centers and Amazon warehouse as blights on former agricultural land. And they say upscale subdivisions do little to ease the region’s housing crisis.

A petition has forced North Plains’ growth plans onto next May’s ballot, the only time in memory any Oregon city’s proposed boundary expansion has been referred to voters. Opponents say North Plains’ plan squanders precious farmland without a clear idea of what kind of industry and housing would replace it.

Aaron Nichols co-owns Stoneboat Farm, about a mile from North Plains. His land isn't in the proposed urban growth boundary but he said the city's expansion could disrupt farming nonetheless. "We could make it less damaging to the important, productive farmland around here."

“It’s just a very useless waste of land,” said Aaron Nichols, who runs Stoneboat Farm, about a mile from North Plains’ city limits. Nichols said he’s frequently in North Plains to take his kids to parks and the city’s library, and that he supports measured growth.

But he said the city’s current proposal is too large and favors data centers and low-density housing over alternatives that could use less land and do more for the community.

“We could make it less damaging to the important, productive farmland around here,” Nichols said.

More than a speed trap

Land use is a perennially contentious issue in Oregon. Longstanding state policy seeks to preserve the rural character of areas around its cities by limiting displacement of farms and forests.

At the same, time, though, Oregon land-use law encourages communities to plan for future growth, converting rural land to for more urban uses by adding roads, water service and other infrastructure to make way for homes and businesses.

The interface between the rural and urban has been especially contentious over the past year as state lawmakers sought to overcome a shortage of industrial land, which has inhibited growth of Oregon’s chip industry.

A semiconductor industry task force convened last year identified North Plains as a potential destination for new chip facilities. Both supporters and opponents of North Plains’ proposed expansion agree the city is an unlikely candidate for a major factory. City officials, though, hope an expanded growth boundary might attract chip industry suppliers whose smaller facilities play an essential role in Oregon’s tech ecosystem.

North Plains sits on the edge of Oregon’s Silicon Forest, along the north side of U.S. 26. The city abuts rolling hills of farms growing grass seed, clover, fir trees and many other crops. But it’s not far from some of the region’s largest employers: Intel’s main manufacturing campus is just 15 minutes away in Hillsboro.

Such proximity has attracted an affluent population with a median household income just north of $100,000, nearly 50% above the statewide median. The close-in convenience has also attracted housing developers who have built brand-new neighborhoods and filled them with townhomes and houses built from the matching sets of architectural plans.

As North Plains moves beyond its agricultural heritage, though, the city itself hasn’t built a new economic identity.

It has no large employers. Downtown has a florist, a wine bar, a public library and a handful of restaurants, but there’s no grocery store, downtown coffee shop or other basic amenities common in other small towns. North Plains Hardware closed 11 years ago and nothing has replaced it.

City leaders say just 1.5% of the population both works and lives in North Plains. Nearly everyone else commutes. Officials say it’s financially unsustainable for the city to remain a bedroom community forever.

“The city hasn’t had an economic base grow along with all the housing,” said Bill Reid, North Plains’ finance director.

Fifteen years ago, the biggest source of funding for city services was speeding tickets.

North Plains was notorious for operating a speed trap along the 1.5 miles of U.S. 26 inside city limits. Traffic citations produced more than a fifth of the city’s revenue – many times what other jurisdictions collected and more than what the city collected in property taxes.

The traffic tickets irked people passing through and eventually became unpopular among the city’s own leaders.

“I was just appalled. It seemed really high for a police budget,” said Lenahan, who joined the City Council in 2008, eight years before becoming mayor.

“The council had conversations about it and basically said, this has got to stop. We need a community policing focus and not a tollbooth focus,” Lenahan said. “The council wanted a police department that was policing the streets of North Plains, being present in neighborhoods and at events and things like that.”

Today, the speed traps are gone. Traffic citations are now a nominal portion of the city budget, accounting for just about $44,000 a year. However, the police reforms left North Plains with a budget hole the city has never filled.

North Plains has some of the lowest property taxes in the region, less than half the rates in Hillsboro and Forest Grove.

The city’s residents have given no indication they’re willing to pay more. They’ve consistently turned down tax levies over many years. Last May, for example, voters overwhelmingly rejected a public safety levy last May that would have increased taxes to pay for faster police response.

Portland State University’s Population Research Center forecasts North Plains’ population will double by 2040. The city wants more land for those people to live and work, and a tax base to pay for parks, police, firefighters and roads. And that takes more land.

“It’s meant to, in 20 years’ time, put the city in a balanced fiscal situation so it can provide the services it already does and begin to add the services that residents are interested in having,” Reid said.

A high-tech future?

So North Plains drew up a proposal to add 855 acres to the city’s urban growth boundary, heeding the state’s direction to prepare for the future.

Oregon cities have rarely, if ever, planned to grow this much.

“That, as a matter of scale, is certainly beyond any that I’ve had experience with,” said Mary Kyle McCurdy, deputy director of the land conservation group 1000 Friends of Oregon. Other urban growth boundary expansions have added more acreage, but she said she’s not aware of any other city that sought to more than double in size this way.

1000 Friends opposed North Plains’ proposed expansion because, McCurdy said, the city hadn’t justified a need for growth on that scale. But she said the organization won’t participate in the campaigning before next May’s vote.

“It’s really for people in and around North Plains to determine,” McCurdy said.

Other groups have been more active, mobilizing people outside the city limits to collect signatures from North Plains voters to put the boundary expansion on the ballot.

Only people who live in North Plains will be able to vote on the issue next May, but officials are incensed nonetheless at the role people outside their city played in marshalling opposition to their plans.

“There’s a fair amount of consternation around the fact that we have an outside interest coming into our community, which is our living room, and basically trying to control policy,” City Council member Russ Sheldon told a council meeting this past week.

Nichols, with Stoneboat Farm, has been active in other land-use fights and gathered signatures to put North Plains’ expansion on the ballot. But he said he doesn’t feel like an outsider since he lives and works just beyond the city limits.

The boundary expansion affects everyone in the area, Nichols said, because it would take agricultural land off the map forever. When there are fewer farms, there are fewer supplies and other resources available for those that remain, he said.

And Nichols is skeptical that North Plains’ new land would be filled with the kinds of low-impact, job-creating businesses the city describes, like breweries, chip industry suppliers and food processors. Far more likely, he said, is what happened in neighboring Hillsboro, where huge data centers occupy hundreds of acres of industrial land, each producing just a handful of jobs.

“Most people think it’s going to be either data centers or warehouses, something like that,” Nichols said.

Indeed, the city’s planning documents specify data centers as a prime candidate for land in the expanded urban growth boundary. They envision two large data centers and cite the enormous QTS Data Centers facility that occupies 100 acres on the other side of U.S. 26, in Hillsboro, as the kind of project the city seeks.

North Plains' economic plans call for two large data centers, like the 100-acre QTS development in neighboring Hillsboro. City officials hope to add housing, too, and light industry.

Other Oregon communities have used the state’s enterprise zone program to attract data centers with generous tax breaks that save the industry more than $180 million a year. Affluent North Plains probably wouldn’t qualify for the enterprise zone program, which was intended for economically distressed areas.

But the city’s low tax rates might make it attractive to data centers anyway, potentially saving them millions of dollars and remaking the area’s landscape.

North Plains officials maintain that very little of the farmland in the proposed urban growth boundary is growing food. It’s nearly all grass seed and clover, they say. But they acknowledge the city needs to do a better job explaining to residents why they would benefit from a larger city.

“We’ve got a way to go to get people to understand that vision, but it’s really about trying to balance that tax base,” said Andy Varner, North Plains’ city manager. A process kicks off next month to gather feedback on what residents want in the expanded city.

“North Plains will have the ability to say in what goes there,” Varner said.

Washington County planning commissioner Sushmita Poddar wishes the city had done that listening before drawing up its growth plans.

“We keep extracting from community, but we don’t give them something first. How about we give them a more clear, concise vision first?” Poddar said last month at a planning commission meeting on North Plains’ proposal.

Growth is coming, Poddar said in a subsequent interview, and North Plains is smart to plan for it. Many new residents come from South Asian families working at Intel, though, and Poddar said recent immigrants don’t have any experience with wonky concepts like the urban growth boundary. Poddar said people she’s spoken with in North Plains weren’t even aware of the planned expansion.

Before planning a huge, 855-acre expansion, Poddar said North Plains ought to have identified how the city would meet the needs of residents at a variety of income levels, from many different backgrounds, to better plan for the community North Plains is becoming.

“I understand urban growth is going to happen,” Poddar said. “This is our one opportunity to demand that when it happens it happens keeping in mind our diverse communities and diverse needs.”

Correction: This article originally misspelled the name of North Plains finance director Bill Reid.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com