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Walla Walla County’s three commissioners have decided the Amazon data center proposed for Wallula will go through the county’s ordinary permitting process, not a special timeout. At their Sept. 14 meeting, Commissioners Todd Kimball, Gunner Fulmer and Bertha Clayton declined to take up a one-year, countywide moratorium on new data center development — the central demand of a citizen group that has been organizing against the project for months.
The vote, reported by the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, keeps the Amazon Web Services campus on the same procedural track as any other large industrial project in the county: staff review, public comment, and a decision from the Community Development Department rather than a board-imposed pause. Five days later, the Tri-City Herald confirmed the same outcome, reporting flatly that commissioners “won’t consider a data center moratorium.”
What Amazon filed, and when
The project sits on 554 acres at the Wallula Gap Business Park, land the Port of Walla Walla sold to Amazon in February. An earlier site development permit application, filed in late May, sat incomplete for months because it lacked a required traffic impact analysis. Amazon refiled a complete application on Sept. 12, and that filing is what triggered the clock now running: the county’s first public comment period on the project is open through 5 p.m. on Oct. 12.
County officials have laid out what happens after that deadline. Comments collected in this first window go to Amazon, the Community Development Department then issues its own determination on the application, and only after that does a second public comment period open before any final decision is made. It is a multi-step process, not a single up-or-down vote — which is part of why the county has resisted freezing it with a moratorium while it’s underway.
The water question
Water is the detail residents keep returning to. Amazon’s own filings say the Wallula campus would use roughly 14 million gallons of water a year, drawn initially from the Port of Walla Walla’s Wallula-Dodd potable water system. That arrangement is set to run only until January 2029, after which the company plans to shift to Columbia River water for cooling. Amazon says the site will rely on air cooling about 93% of the year, with water-based cooling for the remaining 7%, and has compared its annual draw to that of a single large irrigated farm circle — a comparison meant to reassure a county where water rights and irrigated agriculture are not abstractions but the basis of the wine and onion economies.
Not everyone finds the comparison reassuring. Earthjustice filed formal comments with the county in July raising questions about water use, environmental review and long-term transparency once the project shifts to river water. The Walla Walla Anti-Data Center League, the group behind the moratorium push, has framed its concerns more broadly — pointing to generator emissions, wildlife and ecological impacts, and whether Amazon will in fact be held to environmental commitments made now once construction is underway. At a company open house earlier this year, league-aligned residents turned out to press the point directly to Amazon representatives; one resident told reporters at the time that “this is happening way too fast with little insight and input from the locals.”
Jobs, incentives, and who’s missing from the room
Amazon’s pitch to the county has leaned on jobs and tax revenue, arguments that carry real weight in a county where the Port of Walla Walla has spent years courting industrial tenants for the Wallula Gap park specifically because rail and river access make it attractive to exactly this kind of large-scale development. What’s been quieter in the public record is any detailed county accounting of the incentive package’s net cost — tax breaks weighed against the services, roads and utilities the project will draw on — the kind of ledger commissioners will eventually have to defend to voters regardless of which way the permit goes.
The commissioners’ refusal to entertain a moratorium is not the same as approval. It is a decision to let the Community Development Department’s technical review run its normal course rather than substitute a board vote for that process — a distinction worth keeping straight as both sides claim momentum. For a project this size in a county this size, the permitting file itself, not any commissioner’s public remarks, is where the real fight over water rights, emissions limits and enforceable conditions will be won or lost.
What happens next
The immediate deadline is Oct. 12 at 5 p.m., when the first public comment window closes. Residents can submit written comments to the county’s Community Development Department before then. After that, expect the department’s determination, a second comment period, and — eventually — a permitting decision that will do more to shape the Wallula Gap area’s next decade than anything said at a commissioners’ meeting this month.
Sources: Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, Apple Valley News Now, Walla Walla Union-Bulletin
