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GOLDENDALE — The Klickitat County Planning Commission will hold a special public hearing at 6 p.m. on Sept. 28 to take testimony on shrinking the county’s Energy Overlay Zone, the map that for years has told solar developers where on the plateau they may build. The meeting is set for Room 200 at 115 Court St. in Goldendale, with a virtual option for anyone who cannot make the drive, according to a county notice reported by Columbia Gorge News and mirrored on the county’s own public-notice feed.
The overlay zone matters because it is the difference between a proposal a developer can bring forward and one the county’s planning staff will not even take up. Drawn wide during an earlier renewable-energy push, the zone currently opens a large share of the plateau’s rural and agricultural land to solar and battery storage siting. The Sept. 28 hearing is the county’s first formal step toward pulling that map back in — the Planning Commission will hear from residents before deciding whether to recommend a smaller zone to the Board of County Commissioners.
The hearing does not arrive in a vacuum. It follows a summer in which the county’s three elected commissioners have argued openly, in public meetings, about how fast to act on a wave of solar, battery and data-center proposals reaching for plateau farmland. At the board’s Sept. 8 meeting, Commissioner Todd Andrews moved for a six-month moratorium on new data center applications while the county caught up on rules. The motion died for lack of a second. Board Chair Ron Ihrig told the meeting the county had “plenty of time” to write an ordinance instead of imposing a pause, and Commissioner Lori Zoller said a moratorium would need its own legal review, adding cost and delay rather than saving it. Both said they expected a county data-center ordinance could be finished within roughly 90 days without a formal freeze.
That vote left the county’s Planning Department to do the drafting under deadline pressure. Staff have told commissioners they intend to bring a draft data-center ordinance forward by Oct. 1 — a timeline that puts the Sept. 28 overlay hearing squarely in the middle of the county’s broader attempt to write land-use rules for an industry that arrived faster than the code could keep up with it.
The overlay zone reduction under consideration Sept. 28 is narrower in scope than a data-center ordinance, but it draws from the same well of frustration. Farmers and rural landowners on the plateau have pushed back for months on proposals that would put solar arrays and battery storage on land some have worked for generations, arguing the county’s overlay was drawn too broadly and without enough attention to which parcels are still in active agricultural use. Reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting in early August described the tension building across the plateau as solar, battery and data-center developers compete for the same open ground that has historically supported wheat, cattle and orchard operations — the same friction now playing out over the overlay map itself.
What is not yet public is how much acreage the Planning Commission’s staff proposal would remove from the overlay, or which specific areas of the county would come out of eligibility. The county’s own hearing notice, and the Columbia Gorge News brief reporting it, describe the hearing’s subject only as “proposed reductions” without publishing a map or acreage figure in advance — meaning the first real look most plateau landowners will get at where the lines are proposed to move is likely to come at the hearing itself, or in the staff report the Planning Department is expected to release beforehand.
For a county that has spent much of 2026 navigating the Goldendale pumped-storage project’s federal licensing fight, wind and solar siting battles, and now a fast-moving data-center boom, the overlay hearing is a reminder that the plateau’s energy future is still being drawn one zoning line at a time, in a room in downtown Goldendale, with the people who farm that ground doing most of the talking. The Planning Commission does not have final say — any recommendation still goes to the Board of County Commissioners, the same three-member board that could not agree on a moratorium three weeks ago — but Sept. 28 is where the county’s newest attempt to rein in the overlay zone will get its first public airing.
Residents who want to weigh in can attend in person at the Goldendale courthouse annex or watch and testify remotely; details on the virtual link are available through the Klickitat County Planning Department’s public notice page.
Sources: Columbia Gorge News, EIN Presswire (Klickitat County notice), Gorge News Center, Oregon Public Broadcasting
