How Oregon’s Data Center Boom is Supercharging a Water Crisis

By Sean Patrick Cooper  |  Nov. 24, 2025  |  Rolling Stone

Amazon has come to Oregon’s eastern farmland, worsening a water pollution problem that’s been linked to cancer and miscarriages.

In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for his four ranch dogs. Healthy adults that these people knew were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly. “It was kinda grim,” Doherty says.

Sixty years old, broad-chested, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Doherty had been running a cattle ranch business with his wife for 25 years when he entered public service in 2016, winning a seat on Morrow County’s three-person board of commissioners.

What stood out about those conversations was the way people connected them to a problem with water in the area. Doherty knew what they meant: The county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked.

The aquifer underneath Morrow County, known as the Lower Umatilla Basin, is the only source of water for as many as 45,000 residents in and around the county, the majority of whom rely on private wells that draw on the basin. Since 1991, regulators at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) have been collecting samples from the aquifer that show a slow and steady increase of chemical toxins in the water.

Water hadn’t really been a political priority for Doherty — he’s a Republican, and he focused mostly on economic development and transportation projects — until a couple of years into his second term, when the uptick of stories he heard about young women enduring miscarriages and middle-aged men with organ failure started making him uneasy. Scientists believe that excess consumption of even a small amount of nitrates can do significant harm to the human body; they can cause debilitating conditions in newborns and have been linked to increased risks of cancer. Doherty wasn’t familiar with the research at the time, but he wondered if there was a connection between the contamination in the water and those conversations he kept having.

In June 2022, he decided to do something about it. He went out and collected tap water samples from six homes he chose at random and sent them to a nearby laboratory. The lab called a few days later and explained that it was their policy to notify anyone with a sample that tested above the federal limit for the presence of nitrates in drinking water — 10 parts per million.

Doherty asked which family was going to receive the bad news about their water. But the lab tech corrected him. It wasn’t one of the homes he visited that had a toxic well. It was all six. Doherty says he picked up 70 more test kits and went back out a week later, this time knocking on doors across a wider swath of the county. The results were equally bleak. Of the 70 wells he tested, 68 violated the safety threshold, with an average concentration of nitrates close to four times the federal limit.

When Doherty collected the water samples, accompanied by an official with the county health office, they’d taken an informal survey. Talking mostly to farmhands and factory workers who were reliant on well water, they asked if anyone in their household had one or more of the known medical conditions linked to nitrate exposure. According to Doherty, within the first 30 homes they visited, they heard of at least 25 miscarriages and a half dozen people living with one kidney. “One man about 60 years old had his voice box taken out because of a cancer that only smokers get,” Doherty says, “but that guy hadn’t smoked a day of his life.”

It never occurred to Doherty that his effort to fix the water problem would provoke the ire of a group of local officials who resented scrutiny of their role in the pollution. That it would end his political career, tank his cattle sales, and cause him so much stress he’d lose 50 pounds. He couldn’t have foreseen the multibillion-dollar political scandal submerged in that fouled water, the class action lawsuit that would rise from it, the intervention by the Oregon governor and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a civil suit from the Oregon attorney general, or sanctions from the state’s ethics commission and Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). He never thought parents in the area would be terrified that their children might sneak a glass of poisonous water from the kitchen sink. And he never imagined that one of the world’s largest tech companies — Amazon — could play a part in the crisis.

“The historical precedent here is Flint, Michigan,” says Kristin Ostrom, executive director of Oregon Rural Action (ORA), a water rights advocacy group. “In part because of how slow the response to the crisis has been, and in part because of who’s affected. These are people who have no political or economic power, and very little knowledge of the risk.”

Amazon opened Morrow County’s first “hyperscale” data center in 2011 — nearly 10,000 square feet of warehouse space filled with rows of computer servers. The facility services the company’s most profitable division, its cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon’s presence lent Big Tech cachet to the county’s industrial district and diversified its investment portfolio away from a reliance on agriculture. Amazon has generated commercial taxes for the county worth more than $100 million over the course of a decade.

Eager to compete with other rural communities looking to host data center campuses, local officials had offered Amazon a 15-year tax abatement for each hyperscale data center it built, which would be worth billions to the company. Amazon has since constructed seven such facilities in the area, with agreements for five more underway.

There was good reason for Amazon to set itself up in a place like Morrow County. With $107 billion in cloud computing sales in 2024, Amazon Web Services has the dominant position with 30 percent of the market. But the company faces stiff competition from Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and Google. In the third quarter of 2024, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft increased their investment in data centers 81 percent compared to the previous year, per the telecom market researcher Dell’Oro Group, and have already spent $360 billion on capital expenditures over the past 12 months. S&P predicts that demand for new construction is expected to double by 2030, most of it in rural counties like Morrow that are otherwise reliant on agriculture. Around the country, and the world, there is a land race among the big tech companies for sites for their data centers. The stakes of the game are high: a recent Goldman Sachs analysis found AI technology could unlock as much as $5 trillion to $19 trillion for the American economy.

But data centers pose a variety of climate and environmental problems, including their impact on the water supply. The volume of water needed to cool the servers in data centers — most of which need to be kept at 70 to 80 degrees to run effectively — has become a nationwide water resource issue particularly in areas facing water scarcity across the West. This year, a Bloomberg News analysis found that roughly “two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress.” Droughts have plagued Morrow County, occurring annually since 2020. But even areas with ample water reserves are vulnerable to the outsized demand from data centers. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency reported that data centers could consume 1,200 billion liters by 2030 worldwide, nearly double the 560 billion liters of water they use currently.

The volume of water isn’t the most pressing problem in Morrow County, however. The issue is pollution, which Amazon’s data centers have exacerbated since their arrival.

In response to a request for comment, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski replied that “the apparent narrative” of this story “is misleading and inaccurate.” Levandowski went on to say: “The truth is that this region has long-documented groundwater quality challenges that significantly predate AWS’ presence, and federal, state, and local agencies have spent years working to address nitrates from agricultural fertilizer, manure, septic systems, and wastewater from food processing plants. Our data centers draw water from the same supply as other community members; nitrates are not an additive we use in any of our processes, and the volume of water our facilities use and return represents only a very small fraction of the overall water system — not enough to have any meaningful impact on water quality.”

“One man about 60 years old had his voice box taken out because of a cancer only smokers get, but that guy hadn’t smoked a day of his life.” — Jim Doherty, former Morrow County commissioner

Morrow County is an unlikely location for an agricultural juggernaut. Essentially desert country, its porous, sandy soil is inhospitable to all but a few types of shallow-root crops. Yet over the past few decades, it was transformed by a group of entrepreneurial local officials and farm operators who leveraged chemical fertilizers to make the desert bloom.

To compensate for the dry conditions and create more capacity for large agricultural operations, vast irrigation systems were built in the 1990s by officials at the Port of Morrow, the county’s transportation and food-processing hub along the bank of the Columbia River. Increased water flow meant large agricultural companies could use fertilizers in fields year-round. That drew some of the Pacific Northwest’s largest dairy concerns and producers of onions and potatoes to Morrow County. Lamb Weston, which supplies virtually all of the potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, set up shop. So did Threemile Canyon Farms, one of the largest dairy operators in the nation.

The massive inputs of fertilizer to grow crops and feed for the animals came at a price: the contamination of the Lower Umatilla Basin. In 1992, DEQ measured an average nitrate concentration of 9.2 ppm across a cluster of wells pulling from the basin. By 2015, that average had risen 46 percent, to 15.3 ppm. For some wells, DEQ found nitrate levels nearly as high as 73 ppm, more than 10 times the state limit of 7 ppm.

Every day, the megafarms and food processing plants in Morrow County send millions of gallons of wastewater to the Port of Morrow. The Port in turn pumps it to one of several lagoons that hold tens or hundreds of millions of gallons of tainted water. Vast pools of this wastewater are covered in football field-sized tarps, which trap the solids that rise to the surface. Microbes metabolize some of the solids, expelling methane gas which then burns out of thin chimney pipes sticking up from the tarps, the flames flickering atop like birthday candles. Once the solid waste has burned off, the water under the tarp is laden with residual nitrogen chemicals — the remains of the fertilizers, animal manure, and plant material. At no cost to farm operators, the Port then pumps that nitrogen-dense water back out onto the farms, where nitrogen turns into nitrates when it interacts with the soil. It is a novel recycling process that alleviates the Port’s wastewater burden and offers farms a steady flow of highly concentrated fertilized water to expand their industrial-ag footprints.

When the Port sprays that water back over the farms, some of the nitrates are absorbed by the crops, but there’s a limit to how much the sandy soil and shallow-root plants can hold before it leaks all the way through the dirt, polluting the aquifer below. “The aquifer is basically one giant sandbox, and the water flows through there very quickly,” says Chad Gubala, a hydrologist who managed Oregon DEQ’s oversight of the Port of Morrow’s wastewater permit from 2018 to 2022. Once the crops have absorbed what they can, the rest of the nitrates “get flushed right through [to the basin].”

Experts say Amazon’s arrival supercharged this process. The data centers suck up tens of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer each year to cool their computer equipment, which then gets funneled to the Port’s wastewater system. All of the data center water gets mixed into the dirty lagoon wastewater, which only increases how much water the Port must then discard over the fields. As Greg Pettit, who served at the DEQ for 38 years and led the development of Oregon’s Groundwater Quality, explains, “the more water you put on, the faster you’re going to drive the nitrogen through the soil and down into the aquifer.”

Gubula is likewise critical of how the Port historically has dealt with the overwhelming volume of wastewater, which included spraying the fields during the cold winter months, even when no crops were planted. “This idea of winter irrigation was the goofiest thing on God’s green earth,” he says. “The farmers and the Port facility folks argued that maintaining irrigation during a non-growing season was a reasonable thing to keep the soil ‘in appropriate condition’ they called it, so it’d be ready for spring seed sowing and early growth. Well, it was functionally a load of shit, a way to maintain year-round discharge of wastewater from their facilities.” (In an Oct. 30 press release, the Port pledged to end the practice this winter. The Port’s executive director, Lisa Mittelsdorf, told Rolling Stone in a statement, “The Port and DEQ have worked together to ban non-growing season land application of industrial wastewater.”)

The nonstop spraying during the winter months helped the Port and Amazon manage the incredible volume of wastewater coming out of the farms and data centers, but it raised alarm bells for DEQ rank-and-file analysts. The winter irrigation practice “provides a significant risk to … to groundwater,” Larry Brown, a DEQ environmental health specialist, wrote in an email in 2023, summarizing concerns he had shared with DEQ administrators a year earlier. “[It] must be phased out as soon as reasonably possible.” The warning signs were ignored.

As the underground aquifer became tainted with more nitrates, even the ostensibly clean water that the Port pulled from the aquifer’s deepest wells — which it used to service its large industrial customers like Amazon — became polluted. Soon, Amazon was using water to cool its data warehouses with nitrates as high as 13 ppm — above the federal and state limits.

When that tainted water moves through the data centers to absorb heat from the server systems, some of the water is evaporated, but the nitrates remain, increasing the concentration. That means that when the polluted water has moved through the data centers and back into the wastewater system, it’s even more contaminated, sometimes averaging as high as 56 ppm, eight times Oregon’s safety limit.

On June 9, 2022, Jim Doherty called a public hearing for the county commission to vote on a state of emergency for the county’s drinking water. As word spread about the meeting, some residents were angry — and not necessarily about the health threat. Many feared an emergency declaration would expose the county to intervention by the Oregon DEQ or the federal Environmental Protection Agency, whose regulators might shut down businesses to halt the contamination.

“The historical precedent here is Flint, Michigan, in part because of who’s affected. These are people with no political or economic power and little knowledge of the risk.” — Kristin Ostrom, executive director of the advocacy group Oregon Rural Action

Local residents and farm managers packed the hearing at the county courthouse in the town of Heppner, with dozens more watching the livestream. “Our legacy will be what we are doing now,” Doherty said of the emergency decree. The county, he argued, needed to unlock emergency funds to buy bottled water for anyone living with tainted wells and provide test kits to the thousands of residents who didn’t yet know if they were drinking polluted water.

Melissa Lindsay was one of Doherty’s fellow county commissioners, elected the same year as him. She said she had reservations about the state of emergency, because it would mean giving broad authority to the governor over resource allocation, emergency services, and communication about the crisis to the public. Doherty disagreed. He had received a phone call from then-Gov. Kate Brown a few days earlier, and she’d offered emergency assistance without strings attached. “She did not say they would come run our county,” Doherty said.

That was enough for Lindsay, but not everyone at the meeting was swayed. The agricultural operators who accounted for the $2 billion local economy remained wary. Doherty says one farm manager spent 15 minutes at a second meeting telling him “what a godawful person I was for trying to shut down farming and the local ag industry.”

The tensions laid bare the economic realities of Morrow County, a place where the gap between rich and poor is extreme. Roughly 30 percent of the county lives in mobile homes — the vast majority of which rely on well water — and 40 percent live below the poverty line. Meanwhile, the top five percent earn an average income of $374,000, more than 20 times the bottom 20 percent. These farm managers and factory executives tend to live in McMansions scattered around the countryside or in manicured developments in Boardman. In sharp contrast to the potholed gravel roads and slanted bungalows where the workers live, the new developments have freshly paved streets and sidewalks, and they drink and cook with water from city water pipes that go deep into the aquifer, where the water is less concentrated with nitrates — although the contamination levels for even the deepest wells are starting to rise.

At the end of the June 9 meeting, commissioner Lindsay endorsed the declaration — a move that would free up county funds for bottled water and prompt the state to open up its own emergency response coffers. “The safe drinking water of our constituents is  number one,” Lindsay said. Her vote, along with Doherty’s, was enough. The third commissioner, Don Russell, who had worked at the Port before winning a seat on the county board, did not show up to the emergency hearing.

With the initial $250,000 in emergency funds, the county hired water trucks for well users to fill large jugs. Health officials began distributing bilingual flyers that warned wells could be tainted, advising that “residents who have a high level of nitrate in their well water should not boil their water. Boiling does not get rid of nitrate.” By the end of the summer, the county had spent $500,000 addressing the water problem, including additional deliveries of bottled water to residents’ homes. Despite the concern about the state’s involvement, the county received little help from state agencies and lawmakers.

Doherty was particularly upset that Gov. Brown didn’t release a statement supporting the county. He pressured her office about the $4 million in emergency funds he’d requested, but the county only received $881,000 from the state for testing and home water-filtration kits. Doherty suspected that the lobbyists representing Morrow County business interests were working behind the scenes to thwart an aggressive state-level intervention. “That was the mafia mentality at work,” he says. “‘We’re going to take care of it, don’t you worry about it. Just keep it in the family.'” (Former Gov. Brown declined to directly address these allegations, instead suggesting Rolling Stone file a public records request.)

Other state agencies seemed to fall in line with farm operators’ assertion that this wasn’t much of an emergency, and if it was, the burden of solving the problem lay with the agriculture industry and not the state. “[To] move the needle on reducing contamination to healthy levels … it’s going to take work and creative solutions from farmers, ranchers, homeowners, really anyone who uses water or land in this area,” a DEQ spokesperson said that June.

By September 2022, 248 additional homes had been found to have nitrate levels above the state’s safety limit. At another packed town hall meeting, “county leaders and people with contaminated wells expressed growing frustration at the lack of direct intervention from the state in public testimony,” one local newspaper wrote in its coverage. Despite several invitations, Gov. Brown did not attend, nor did any representatives from DEQ or Oregon Health Authority.

Speaking to the crowd, Doherty emphasized the significance of raising awareness among the worker enclaves. Some immigrants in the area, many of whom are undocumented, were reluctant to seek help. According to several sources with direct knowledge of the incidents, managers at several of the food processing plants and farm operations were telling employees that the emergency declaration was a bad-faith campaign that would endanger their jobs. Gathering at town halls or speaking about the pollution to reporters was tantamount to inviting the shutdown of your place of employment. Doherty tried to counter the disinformation: “We need you. We need you to walk across the street and talk to your neighbor,” he told the crowd. “You need to talk to your friend or, better yet, make a new damn friend, tell them to test their water.”

But as word continued to spread across the county that residents had potentially been drinking contaminated water for years, if not decades, Doherty was besieged with emails, texts, and Facebook messages from concerned residents who encouraged him to fight the pollution. “Out of the kitchen sink is the way we all get our life,” one local wrote to Doherty. “Make it right. You’re the man to do it.”

Another person contacted him who had just moved away. “My husband had kidney cancer in his early 40s. His doctor thought it was due to exposure to herbicides and pesticides. He lost a kidney but he lived,” she wrote. “We had acceptable levels of [toxins in our] drinking water when we first moved there. After my husband’s cancer we realized they went up and up through the years. It’s very sad.”

Some of the larger agriculture operators in the area, including Tillamook Creamery and Lamb Weston, offered financial support to people who needed water. But they stopped short of acknowledging that they might have played a part in the water crisis. Tillamook did not reply to multiple requests for comment on this story from Rolling Stone. Lamb Weston replied in a statement that “while only a very small percent of nitrates, as confirmed by the Oregon DEQ, are attributable to the land application of food processing water, we are committed to doing our part to protect safe drinking water in the region. Among other actions, we are improving water treatment to reduce the nitrogen content in our process water and taking steps to reduce water use, including the amount of process water ultimately land-applied as irrigation.”

“Local officials knew from the get-go how big Amazon would become in Morrow County. They planned for it and watched it all happen.” — Melissa Lindsay, former Morrow County commissioner

The Port, which is overseen by the county, issued its own anodyne statement at the time, never conceding any role in the problem. “The Port of Morrow welcomes the County’s emergency declaration on groundwater,” the statement read. “This has been a community issue for decades and it is past time to address the issue on a regional basis. The Port is eager to play its role in finding workable solutions.” Lisa Mittelsdorf, executive director of the Port, said in an email to Rolling Stone that the “DEQ has consistently acknowledged Port operations have had minimal effect on nitrate levels in the basin’s groundwater.” Since 2011 Oregon DEQ has issued more than a thousand violations and more than $3 million in fines against the Port for excessive spraying of nitrate-laden water over farmland.

Amazon pitched in money as well, “to help neighbors, families, and workers impacted by the water emergency,” as the company put it in a press release. Behind closed doors, however, members of Amazon’s legal, communications, and AWS teams debated the cost of being associated with the industrial agriculture operators who, in the public imagination at least, were the cause of the pollution.

“Is there any risk in having our name in this, or any reason why we wouldn’t do this?” one staffer wrote, according to a review of hundreds of internal emails obtained through a public records request.

“There is always potential for some risk of affiliation with the causation,” Amazon director of public policy Roger Wehner wrote, though he underscored how the company’s donation would “also offer an opportunity to position AWS [as] an engaged corporate citizen doing good for the community.”

Being seen as an “engaged corporate citizen” would be helpful to Amazon as it negotiated for the next round of multibillion-dollar tax abatements from Morrow County’s business development committee for building out five new data centers. “This is a rare, highly impactful opportunity (could critically help influence $2b incentives) in our second largest region globally … We simply cannot miss the window given high risk/impact to the business,” AWS economic development principal Hillary Lambert wrote in the email thread.

“Our absence … will be noted not only by the public but also very important stakeholders who 1) hold the keys to $2B of tax abatements currently in negotiation for the business 2) gate keep for key land acquisitions to meet supply needs, and 3) facilitate our permitting and water/fiber infrastructure approvals,” wrote one AWS team member. “All of which are very critical for our continued success.”

Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski characterized the use of these quotes from the emails as “misleading,” adding, “We have been investing and creating jobs in eastern Oregon since before the launch of our data centers there. Any suggestion that our support during this emergency was connected to tax negotiations or regulatory approvals misrepresents the facts — our response was driven by our commitment to the community’s well-being.”

Doherty wasn’t surprised by the corporate messaging and philanthropic support by Amazon and the other major industrial players in Morrow County. It was in their interest to curry favor with the public, particularly if it meant they could avoid any commitment to altering the wastewater management practices that continued to exacerbate the crisis.

But it wasn’t just the C-suite executives who were keeping a close eye on Doherty’s emergency declaration. Behind the scenes, powerful local officials were coordinating their own response.

Morrow County’s transformation from a rural backwater into an agricultural powerhouse is, in many ways, the work of a single man. Gary Neal was elected general manager of the Port of Morrow in 1989, when the waterfront terminal was still a modest operation. Built in the 1960s as a rail and shipping hub to distribute the county’s crops and dairy products, it had one dock and only a few food processors.

That’s where Neal came in. Over the course of more than 30 years, utilizing grants and revenue bonds to finance infrastructure investments, Neal built miles of rail track at the Port to ship exports out to the Union Pacific line. Hundreds of acres of land owned by the Port were rezoned for industrial use, hooked up to new water and waste pipes, and powered by substations installed near the Port after Neal lobbied the local utilities. Creating plug-and-play spaces for new industrial tenants allowed Neal to court increasingly larger businesses to sites that had “all the services” they could need, he said during one board meeting. (Neal did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)

Neal also built roads and irrigation systems, constructed fiber optic internet connections for business offices, and expanded a network of pumps and pipes that collected the wastewater from the food and dairy operators. By 2017, the Port was doing $2.8 billion in annual business. In 2019, state lawmakers passed a resolution honoring Neal, noting that when he had taken over the Port “the local economy was in rough shape with high unemployment” and that through his “vision and leadership,” it was now “one of the most productive areas in the state of Oregon.”

Neal’s pumps and pipes were an essential part of the vision. It was Neal who built the massive lagoons that effectively recycled the fertilizer used by the farm and food operators. This created another incentive for industrial expansion, as the wastewater was free in exchange for taking it off the Port’s hands, and it significantly reduced how much farm operators had to spend on fertilizers. “[We] beneficially reuse approximately 3.6 billion gallons per year of industrial wastewater generated by the food processing and other industrial facilities,” the Port wrote in a 2022 statement touting their wastewater program. The chemical-laced water “provides the local farmers with a valuable service,” delivering “nutrient rich wastewater … in this water-deficient region.”

In 1989, Neal took a seat on the Columbia River Enterprise Zone (CREZ), a committee that decides which areas are designated for business development incentives. Handing out tax breaks on the committee made him popular with businesspeople. Major additions to the Port during his tenure included Lamb Weston (the largest frozen potato producer in North America, with a more than $9 billion market cap) and Tillamook Creamery (a $1.2 billion operation that produces 180 million pounds of cheese annually). By the beginning of the 2010s, the Port employed around 8,450 full-time workers, a 36 percent increase from 2006. 

“He took sand and sagebrush and turned it into the second-largest port in the state,” wrote Oregon Rep. Greg Smith, a co-sponsor of the resolution honoring Neal. Smith had worked with Neal at the Port before his election to the statehouse in 2001. “I don’t think many people would have the foresight like Gary,” said J.R. Cook, an agriculture industry consultant, when he spoke to the county commission about how Neal utilized his zoning authority. “Looking back on it now, it was a stroke of genius.”

Neal developed a reputation as an adept bureaucratic salesman, but one with a sometimes combative style. “It became widely known that you didn’t speak out against Gary or anyone on his committees,” says Jim Doherty. “Folks out here started to call them the mafia. He wanted to build up the Port and do his deals, and by and large he did them. If he needed approval from the state to build pipes under the highway, or whatever it was, he’d rather do the crime and pay the fine before he wasted the time and effort to go through the proper channels. That was his mindset.”

Those tactics became apparent in the deals to expand Amazon’s data centers. Amazon initially came to the county in 2008, three years before it opened its first data center. The company agreed to pay $1.6 million for 80 acres along the Port’s waterfront on the condition that no one involved in the deal could publicly acknowledge Amazon’s involvement, according to Don Russell, who was on the county commission at the time. (Amazon spokesperson Levandowski called the company’s use of nondisclosure agreements “an industry-wide common practice.” Russell did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Using strict nondisclosure agreements, Amazon required Neal, who effectively led negotiations with the tech giant, and his colleagues, to refer publicly to the Silicon Valley giant as VAData, a holding company. Jerry Healy, a Port commissioner involved in the deal, would later tell an investigator at the Oregon Ethics Commission that no one was “permitted to use the word Amazon.” (Healy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) But it wasn’t long before news of Morrow County landing business with one of the world’s largest companies leaked out. “Everyone knew who they were,” Healy said.

“How can you live with yourself knowing that the water you put in people’s houses is causing miscarriages or cancer? And they’re still making money on deals for new data centers.” — Resident Kathy Mendoza, who like her illness to nitrates in the water

By the time the first data center opened in 2011, Neal and his team were already lobbying state legislators for better tax incentive packages that would benefit Amazon. In 2015, those efforts bore fruit: The state passed Senate Bill 611, which exempted data centers from central assessment taxation. Amazon state public policy adviser Eileen Sullivan testified before the Oregon Senate Committee on Finance and Revenue that the bill made it possible for the company to build at least 11 new data centers. “It goes back to jobs and stability,” Neal told reporters. “This helps us round out our economy.”

In 2017, with these new tax breaks in his pocket, Neal began negotiating with Amazon in secret CREZ executive sessions to bring in five more data centers that were each worth $1.9 billion, with footprints twice or triple the size of the first. The tax abatement rules would allow the county, the Port of Morrow, and the city of Boardman to trade tax abatements worth between $1 and $2 billion to the tech giant over the next 15 years.

The question was what the county would get in exchange for that trade. As the negotiations got underway, Melissa Lindsay joined Jim Doherty as a freshman board member on the County Commission. A fourth-generation farmer with 12,000 acres of rolling hills about 25 miles south of the Port, Lindsay was aware of Neal’s success on the waterfront. “The economy that he essentially created here brought him a lot of power and respect,” she tells me.

She’d been eager to work with Neal on the CREZ committee that was in talks with Amazon. Her goal was to win commitments from the company to provide funds for the school district and emergency services in exchange for the tax breaks. But in CREZ meetings — which along with the three county commissioners included the elected leaders of the city of Boardman, plus Neal and his deputies, who’d been appointed to their roles by the elected Port commissioners — she was struck by how deferential everyone was toward Neal, and seemingly supportive of every one of his ideas and decisions. “He came across as this steward of the county,” Lindsay says.

With everyone following Neal’s lead, Lindsay realized that other than her and Doherty, no one was interested in wringing much out of Amazon. The deal, it seemed to Lindsay, was already done, and Amazon would give up little to secure the tax abatements.

Lindsay raised her concerns with Marv Padberg, a commissioner working under Neal at the Port. According to Lindsay, Padberg urged her to avoid meddling and let Neal and his team work with Amazon behind closed doors. “Melissa, you just need to figure out the easy button,” she says Padberg told her. (Padberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Lindsay says she also spoke to Sandy Toms, the mayor of Boardman, who represented the city on the enterprise committee and who frequently made the first or second motion for Neal’s proposals. Toms, Lindsay says, brushed off her concerns. (Toms died in 2024.)

“I kept pointing out that we’re negotiating billions of dollars,” Lindsay says. “But I was just laughed at, or accused of being jealous, or described as being hard to work with.”

She noted that her attempts to bring in outside financial advisers or attorneys to negotiate on behalf of the committee were dismissed as unnecessary. Eventually, she was no longer included in talks about the deal with Amazon. That year, Amazon broke ground on the first of the five data centers, a 200,000-square-foot facility with the energy demand equivalent of 30,000 homes and a 15-year tax abatement worth nearly $200 million.

In 2018, after 29 years as the Port director, Gary Neal stepped down. His son, Ryan, was chosen by the elected members of the Port commission as his successor — a selection process that included Gary’s input on potential candidates, according to sources familiar with the appointment. Gary stayed on with the Port as an informal adviser, frequently traveling with his son to meetings with representatives of Amazon and other industrial clients. (Ryan Neal died of Covid complications in 2022 and was succeeded by Lisa Mittelsdorf.)

“There are so many bad actors all at once. Each bears direct responsibility for the pollution that they’re putting out there.” — Kaleb Lay of the advocacy group Oregon Rural Action

Melissa Lindsay, for her part, could never understand why Neal was so willing to give in to Amazon’s demands. “It was brutal to watch how we got nothing for it,” she says of the deals. “But you couldn’t stop it. No matter what idea you brought up for a better deal, you were met with extreme pushback.”

In 2008, Pat Lauritsen moved from Heppner from Tri-Cities, Washington, to join a struggling fiber optic company called Windwave. An experienced telecom salesperson, Lauritsen would eventually take over Windwave’s operation as CEO to “try to make money with the company instead of just losing it all the time,” she says.

Some of those losses were born of Windwave’s unusual corporate structure. Windwave was a for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit called Inland Development Corporation. Inland’s mission was to provide much-needed fiber optic internet to remote rural hospitals and schools, which didn’t pay well; Windwave was a commercial pursuit, hooking up internet to industrial clients and private businesses in Eastern Oregon. But for years after Windwave was founded in 2004, the profits didn’t materialize.

Lauritsen answered to two distinct boards of directors that shared several members and largely functioned as one oversight body. The board members — who included Gary Neal, Don Russell, Jerry Healy, and Marv Padberg — always seemed skeptical that Windwave would survive. “Gary Neal at every board meeting told me that it’d be a zillion years before we’d become a viable company,” Lauritsen says. “They didn’t expect we would ever make it.”

None of the board members had experience in commercial telecom. Instead, they’d been selected by Lauritsen’s predecessor for their influence in the region’s agriculture-dominated industry. “I don’t know a thing about putting fiber in the ground,” Healy, who had served on the Port commission since 1994, later told an investigator from the Oregon Ethics Commission. He said that Neal and the other board members focused instead on “financial performance, income statements, balance sheets, cash flows, [and] to set policy.” Often, at board meetings, the public officials would evaluate the real estate tied to fiber optic projects for potential disposal of the Port’s wastewater. “Right from the beginning I thought, ‘Oh, this doesn’t look good,'” Lauritsen says.

In 2010, Amazon signed a nearly million-dollar deal with Windwave to install and service miles of underground fiber optic lines for its first data center. Suddenly, Lauritsen noticed, the board members viewed Windwave in a new light. “When we turned the corner and were making a real profit, Don Russell said to the board, ‘Oh man, we need to look at this, there might actually be some money in the company.'”

For Amazon, there was terrific efficiency to doing business in Morrow County. Gary Neal and his fellow public officials negotiated lucrative tax breaks for new data centers from their positions on the CREZ board, while at the same time Neal and the others oversaw Windwave’s board of directors, hammering out what would become dozens of contracts as Amazon’s primary fiber optic service provider. Likewise, in his role as the general manager of the Port, Neal ensured that Amazon had no problem dispensing with tens of millions of gallons of its nitrate-laced wastewater. Morrow County, it seemed, had become a one-stop shop for Amazon’s data centers. (Amazon spokesperson Levandowski told Rolling Stone, “We work with local officials in their official capacities as representatives of their communities and jurisdictions. Economic development discussions, utility planning, and infrastructure services are handled through standard procurement and regulatory processes with appropriate oversight and transparency.”)

Lauritsen says she wasn’t aware that members of the Windwave board were negotiating tax breaks with Amazon or managing the data center wastewater as they were making deals for Windwave fiber optic. She was too busy working 60-hour weeks trying to install enough underground concrete vaults and wire conduits to keep up with the demand from the Amazon campuses. Indeed, according to Lindsay, much of Amazon’s dealings with Morrow County officials were kept secret, with those officials often citing NDAs with Amazon as a pretext to move public discussions into private executive sessions.

In 2016, Gary Neal and his associates embarked on a campaign that would transform Windwave and line their own pockets: an effort to spin off Windwave from Inland and set it up as a stand-alone company — with Neal and the other officials as owners and equal partners. Lauritsen assumed the idea was Neal’s: “No decision was ever made that Gary didn’t say what he thought first and then the other ones would follow suit,” she says.

Lauritsen says she was the only member of the Windwave board who objected to slicing up the company into equal portions shared by Neal, Healy, Padberg, Russell, and Blake Lawrence, another board member who’d helped Lauritsen manage construction. (Lawrence did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) She suggested instead that it should be an employee-owned operation as a reward for the loyal crew that had spent years building the fiber optic network that became the backbone of Amazon’s data center enterprise. “I thought they deserved to have that money go to their 401(k)s and not to the board members who didn’t even believe in the company,” she says. “I asked Gary why did he think that they deserved to have the company and the money it would make, and his comment back to me was, ‘They got their wages, didn’t they?'”

The tension between Lauritsen and the other board members sharpened as she declined an offer to join them as a part owner. “The Inland papers of incorporation write it out fairly clear at the top: No board member is allowed to make or do anything with the company for personal profit,” she says. The hostilities weren’t always subtle, with Padberg at one point warning her to “be careful,” she recalls, which she took as a threat. (Padberg did not respond to requests for comment.) Lauritsen resigned from Windwave in 2017; Lawrence replaced her as CEO, and the five men completed the buyout of the company in May 2018.

News of their financial maneuvering did eventually come to light. An explosive investigation published by The Oregonian in September 2022 accused Amazon of “benefiting mightily from the deals it cut with local officials.” The article quoted Lindsay and Doherty. “Incentives were given,” Lindsay said. “It wasn’t always clear what other benefits people at the table might be receiving.” Doherty alleged that Neal and the others had been “working these deals behind the scenes … [setting] themselves up for a windfall.” (An attorney for Neal submitted a letter to the Oregon Ethics Commission claiming Neal recused himself from two discussions of Amazon business and that “all the objective information … demonstrates that no offense or violation occurred during the period at issue.” Russell told The Oregonian that his investment in Windwave was his “private business” and defended his approval of tax breaks for Amazon based on the company’s economic contributions to the region.)

There was no accountability for anyone involved until this past July, when Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield sued the men (and three “disinterested directors” recruited by the owners to approve the sale from the Inland board) in circuit court, alleging that these “established community leaders” had “abused their authority and breached the public trust for their personal financial gain.” In a press release announcing the lawsuit, Rayfield said “this nonprofit was created to connect eastern Oregon communities — not to quietly enrich a handful of officials behind closed doors.”

In the lawsuit, Rayfield describes in detail how Neal and the others went about taking Windwave. Their first step was to arrange for a sale price that was well under the actual value of the company. To do that, “the Insiders” — which is how Rayfield described Neal, Healy, Padberg, and Russell — had to get around the Cogence Group, a financial forensics and business valuation firm, which was brought in to conduct a valuation of Windwave.

“The people responsible for the pollution are huge mega-corporations with a lot of power. And they’ve been getting away with this for decades now.” — Attorney Steve Berman, who has filed a class action suit related to the water crisis

According to Rayfield, the men did this by withholding important financial information about Windwave, namely the lucrative deals they were negotiating with Amazon Web Services. Without that information, Cogence put Windwave’s fair market value at $1.8 million. But Windwave’s new owners knew the company’s value was about to soar, thanks to the Amazon contracts in the pipeline.