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Kittitas County commissioners voted Tuesday, Sept. 15, to extend the county’s six-month-old ban on new data center applications for another six months, pushing the moratorium’s expiration to Feb. 12, 2027. The vote was 2-0, taken at the close of a public hearing at the courthouse in Ellensburg, and it means anyone hoping to file paperwork for a large server farm anywhere in unincorporated Kittitas County will keep waiting at least through next winter.
The case for the extension came from one man: Chad Bala, director of the county’s Community Development Services department, the office that would have to process any data center application that came in the door. Bala told commissioners the county’s existing land-use code “does not adequately define and classify data centers,” which is another way of saying the rulebook was written before anyone here imagined a building full of servers asking for tens of megawatts off the local grid. He said the county has already fielded “concerns and inquiries about data center projects,” and that the buildings carry “high electrical demand” with “potential impacts to public infrastructure” — water, transportation, the electric lines that run out to the wind-farm country east of town and back.
What Bala is asking for, in practice, is time. The work plan commissioners approved alongside the extension runs through September 2027 and lays out a sequence: research into what other counties have done, a round of stakeholder and public engagement that includes an open house, draft amendments to the comprehensive plan, work sessions in front of the planning commission, and — pointedly — a site visit to Quincy. Bala put it plainly: the county is “looking to improve our code to make sure that we’re ready.” Quincy, over in Grant County, is the cautionary tale and the roadmap in the same breath: it became one of the state’s biggest data-center hosts on the strength of cheap hydropower, and it has spent years afterward wrestling with what that growth did to its electric rates, its water demands and its sense of itself as a farm town. If Kittitas County commissioners are sending staff there before writing new rules, they are telling you which outcome they are trying to avoid.
Only one resident spoke at Tuesday’s hearing. Milton Johnston told commissioners he didn’t “really have a position one way or another” on data centers themselves, but he raised the “adverse publicity” data center fights have generated nationally — the fights over water use, noise, and property values that have played out from Virginia to eastern Oregon — and urged commissioners to “have an open mind” toward whatever opportunity might be on the table, citing Quincy’s experience as something to learn from rather than simply avoid. Johnston’s was the only voice in the room. No developer, landowner or utility representative spoke for the record, and none of the county’s larger civic or business groups weighed in publicly at the hearing — a quiet turnout for a decision that will shape what kind of industry can locate here for the next year.
Commissioner Laura Osiadacz, representing District 2, cast her vote in the same register Bala used to justify the extension: caution over commitment. She called the review “part of the county’s due diligence” and said she was “not really for or against” data centers as a category — a position that leaves the county’s actual appetite for this kind of development an open question, one commissioners have now bought themselves another six months to answer without saying which way they lean. Commissioner Brett Wachsmith joined Osiadacz in the 2-0 vote; the board’s third seat, held by Jeff Leichleiter, was not recorded as opposing.
The moratorium began as an emergency measure earlier this year, adopted without public discussion, and this extension keeps that same character: a stopgap renewed rather than a policy debated on its merits in public. County code required Tuesday’s hearing within 60 days of the original emergency action, which is why the matter came up now rather than on its own timeline. The extension does not settle whether Kittitas County wants data centers, and it does not answer the harder question underneath it — what a facility with Quincy-scale power demand would mean for a county whose electric infrastructure, water rights and comprehensive plan were built for cattle ranches, timothy hay fields and a university town, not server halls. That question now has a deadline of its own: county staff are expected to bring draft regulations back to the planning commission over the coming months, with the work plan’s public open house still to be scheduled.
Nothing filed with the county this week proposes an actual data center project in Kittitas County. The moratorium exists because commissioners want rules in place before one arrives, not because one has.
Sources: Daily Record News, SAVRN Data Center Moratorium Tracker, Kittitas County Board of Commissioners
