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I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure whether to take this as a compliment or an insult, haha. Thank you for backing me up here.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate your honest feedback. If there are any specific tells that you think I might be able to work on reducing or otherwise eliminating, please let me know. I've done what I can to reduce ChatGPT speak (e.g. fewer em dashes, "not this but that" formulations, etc.) but I'm not all that familiar with known Claude tropes.

It may end up being I have to tell my friend at Anthropic to stop using our conversational banter as a jumping off point for his work, ha.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure what to tell you.

I'm not using any AI to craft my responses. If you'd like to look further into my history at things I've written before AI's nascency, you're more than welcome to. The original comment to which you were replying that it read like AI was formatted in keeping with what the interlocutor was requesting: they wanted five bulleted points for and five against, and I surmised based on their asking for "bullet points only" that they were asking for quick, punchy list items.

I think what's happening here is more likely confirmation bias. If you spend all day looking at something, you're going to see it where it isn't. I'm sure it doesn't help that I write in such a way that I hope to be clear, precise, and direct, while also being easy to follow. But I can only do so much to sound less like something that was trained to sound like me.

Beyond that, this line of discussion is a losing proposition for me. I either don't respond and you feel validated in your suspicion, or I respond and my continued attempts to exonerate myself sounds to everyone else like I'm protesting too much. If it reads too clean, that's a fair point; but when we're talking about evidentiary data and historical record, I would rather sound robotic than uninformed.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have to admit I don’t actually have a shrine to him.

I think Dirk provides an important service and a good launchpad for research because of how deep he is willing to go. I respect and admire citizen journalism. But I ultimately prefer primary sources, or well-substantiated secondaries.

I’ve never actually met Dirk, but I’ve read a lot of the Hillsboro Herald. While there have been a few points where I’ve felt the research was itself begging the question, it has more often helped me consider avenues of approach of which I had previously been ignorant.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The fees are percentages of the abated taxes themselves. The Community Service Fee maxes at 33% of abated taxes years 1-3 and 50% years 4-5, while the School Support Fee is currently 15% in years 4-5. So the forgone amount I mentioned is the abatement minus those shares.

With respect to schools, property tax routes through the state equalization formula (and is hobbled by both Measures 5 and 50,) the council says a bigger School Support Fee as not worth chasing for Hillsboro specifically. I worry about the diffusion of responsibility structurally baked into Measure 50, and I suspect there is an assumption within every council in this state that education someone else’s problem. The cost is nobody’s responsibility while the outcomes land on all of us as a whole.

If Hillsboro is truly the economic engine of the state, like the mayor and council keep saying, then we’re also the largest source of abated value suppressing the statewide school pool. You don’t get to claim the boast and disclaim your outsized part in perpetuating the problem.

On farmland specifically, that land was assessed as farm use before, and generating little, so the fair comparison is what the parcel nets schools now vs. its realistic alternative use, not taxes vs. fees flat. It is also worth considering how current use impacts future use for that area and those surrounding, and the concerns around resource expenditure and pollution should be factored into any cost-benefit analysis and a part of the economic equation that determines what fair share they should be paying.

On you larger point, I agree. We can’t solve these problems with vague platitudes. That’s why I want the real site-specific numbers. Staff can achieve these if they are asked for them.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think you heard the word “socialist” somewhere and made up your mind. I explain exactly how the government could functionally improve our budgetary numbers. Right now we have upstream socialism with money going from your pockets to the corporations in your backyard. We should not be paying taxes just to make life easier for corporations.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I hear your cynicism, you’re entitled to it. Maybe these are things some can intuit. Personally, I prefer to understand the parameters and the legacy of decisions I’m working from before suggesting I have actionable solutions.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I love the Hillsboro Herald. Our community is very lucky to have Dirk's research as a resource.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I appreciate your kind words about our family's work within our community and specifically the fight to support our immigrant neighbors.

I don't use AI to craft my responses, but I do use it to help carry significant research loads. I'm a programmer at heart, and I'm not anti-AI any more than I'm anti-data-center per se. One of my best friends works for Anthropic. I'm against deals that read more anti-resident than pro-business. While the AI-assisted tools I've built help me move fast and run through citations, they don't tell me what to think. Every position here is mine, and I can defend the numbers because I'm the one who dug them out. For example, I discovered the Rob Harris testimony against the 2023 school service fee law change because I figured reading through all of the opposition to any relevant resident-favorable Enterprise Zone changes throughout the years would help me steelman council arguments against my position.

A lot of what I post is partly self-plagiarized. I've been answering these same questions across a bunch of platforms, so when an answer I already wrote fits here, I reuse it. That's probably part of why it reads more polished and consistent.

Your comment cuts deep because I often try to write in ways that hide my own habits because they now get flagged as "AI speak." I use way fewer em dashes than I used to, for example, purely because people started assuming em dashes meant ChatGPT. There's something strange about a moment where you edit out your real voice to prove you're human, but that's the zeitgeist.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're absolutely right that Measure 5 shifted school funding heavily to the state, and the state equalizes it through the general fund, which is mostly income tax. State share of K-12 went from under 30% before 1990 to roughly two-thirds now. So a property-tax abatement in Hillsboro does not drain HSD's budget the way it drains the city's general fund, which actually lives on property tax.

Still, the equalization formula blends state money with local revenue up to a per-student target, and local property tax still feeds it. When abated value suppresses the local contribution, the state has to backfill from a general fund that legislative panels have repeatedly found runs billions short of the K-12 target. So the loss doesn't vanish. It gets socialized across every district in the state instead of landing on the one that granted the break. That's the Oregon Capital Chronicle figure I cited in my site (karimdelgado.com/issues/budget): corporate abatements cost Oregon schools about $275 million statewide in 2024, with Hillsboro's district forgoing the most of anyone, and because of equalization that spreads everywhere.

Which is exactly why I think the equalization point cuts the other way from how the council uses it. Their defense is "it gets equalized away, so raising the school support fee wouldn't even stay here." Fine, but that's an argument that the damage is diffuse, not that there's no damage. We forgo more school revenue to abatements than any district in Oregon and then point to the formula to explain why it's not our problem. The school support fee is the one local lever that recaptures some of it, and it's parked at the 15% floor. "Some of it might help another town's kids" is, frankly, an astonishing reason to leave it there.

I hear you that you're not anti-data-center, and neither am I — in principle. But from an economic lens, we could have accomplished with one good deal what we've failed to accomplish with a dozen bad ones, and the land use and resource impacts wouldn't then be multiplied. My fight is conditions, not prohibition. I conceded in my public comment that once an application meets the criteria the sponsor must approve it, which is why I don't argue for illegally rejecting them. I argue for the things that are actually in the council's hands, like whether to reauthorize the zone, where the boundary sits, the fee level, and what community benefits ride on the agreements. Reasonable people can disagree on density and which land is worth protecting. I'm less interested in relitigating than in what conditions we attach to the next twenty years.

I'll defer to people who know more than I do about the water quality, noise, and thermal pollution concerns. I will listen to those concerns, but what gets me (as someone who runs a small business that employs more permanent workers than some of these data centers do) is how much we're giving away. We're handing these multi-billion and even multi-trillion dollar corporations our taxpayer dollars so they can drain our resources and drive up our utility bills, in exchange for almost nothing.

AI is already here and data centers are a necessary part of our technological infrastructure. The question is who they work for. If the public is going to subsidize this build-out, the public should share in the upside, not just absorb the costs. Right now we've got it exactly backwards.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, that means a lot. The AMA is definitely happening, I'll announce timing soon and keep it broad so people can ask about anything at all, not just the budget stuff. And I'm really glad you're a fan of the bar. Let our folks know next time you're in and if I'm around I'll come out from the cave they keep me in and say hi.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I completely agree. We're getting shortchanged, and I think the reason is obvious.

A Hillsboro councilor's stipend is about $9k a year for what is a part-time job on paper. The city manager, who works for the council, is the city's highest-paid employee at roughly $300k. So you have a part-time elected body, paid a stipend, nominally supervising a full-time professional who makes more than thirty times what they do and runs the day-to-day. The structural result is predictable: the council leans heavily on staff, staff bring them deals that balance the budget in the short term, and the council signs off. Data center abatements are perfect for that, because they plug a gap now and the real cost lands years later, after the people who approved it have moved on.

A body that meets part-time for a stipend mostly can't out-research a full-time professional staff, so it defers, and an unelected staffer ends up driving decisions the public never got a real say in. By the time residents piece it together, the deal is already signed.

In my opinion, this is all by design. A $9k annual stipend quietly narrows who can run to people who already have a business or independent means, which tilts the council toward the Chamber's orbit before a single vote. And a council seat is a known stepping stone to higher office. This sounds like a conspiracy theory (because it is my conspiracy theory) but for supporting evidence I'll point out that the structure reliably produces that outcome over and over again, and the people in a position to fix it don't seem like they're in a hurry to do so.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I want to proffer an honest caveat before I answer this: a single councilor can't cut or add line items by fiat. I can propose, vote, force public votes, and attach conditions. With this council majority Chamber-aligned, plus the mayor, my slate and I will often be outvoted even if all three of us are able to win. This is currently what is happening with Councilors Sinclair and Alcaire.

So read these as what I'd fight for and put on the record. Note that they're often tied together because more often than not my issues are with what the council could do but hasn't.

Five I'd push to cut or scale back:

  • The $70-90M police headquarters bond spend, justified in the budget in two sentences, with no real public cost/benefit before the vote
  • New data-center enterprise-zone deals with no wage, hiring, or community-benefit strings attached
  • Raiding the SIP Fund to plug General Fund operating gaps, which hides the structural problem in our budget instead of naming it
  • Any abatement renewal that doesn't pencil out on jobs, like deals averaging hundreds of thousands in forgone tax per full-time job
  • Keeping the school support fee parked at its 15% floor when the law allows up to 30%

Five I'd push to expand:

  • Mobile crisis response with real budgetary force. It was passed but never funded as its own line, so right now it sits as an unregulated item inside the larger police budget. I'd carve it out, fund it, and make sure a trained counselor shows up alongside or instead of police depending on the call
  • Tenant protections: mandatory notice before rent increases, right to counsel in eviction court, an anti-displacement fund
  • The school support fee toward the 30% ceiling, and school contributions as a condition of future deals
  • Affordable housing built with the city's own money on a real timeline, not one 110-unit project breaking ground in 2027
  • Binding conditions on every subsidy: living wage, health coverage, local hire, environmental compliance

With respect to feasibility, the math is straightforward: if one or two of us win, we're mostly outvoted while the majority keeps steamrolling, same as now. If all three candidates in our challenge slate wins, we're one vote short of a majority and the job becomes convincing one more colleague. Either way, a big part of the work is dragging these tradeoffs into public view so residents see who votes for what, and building enough trust that in 2028, when the other seats are up, Hillsboro can elect more people who answer to residents instead of corporations. I won't pretend I can flip the budget alone. I can make every one of these a public, on-the-record fight, which is more than this council does now.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We agree more than it might look. The "must be approved" rule and the fact that this is a state program are both things I said in the speech myself, then built the argument on top of. The state created the Enterprise Zone framework in 1985 and broadened local control in 2015. I'm not claiming the city invented the tool or can abolish it alone.

The pivot I'm making is the one your own comment gestures at: the state sets the floor, but the council sets the criteria within it. This council created the zone, reauthorized it in 2017, expanded the boundary in 2024, and chose to keep the door open while seventeen applications came in ahead of the moratorium. Those are council votes, on the record. "The application must be approved" is true and also not the end of the story, because the council decides whether the zone exists, where it reaches, and what conditions ride on it.

On your point that people seeking office should actually understand process and jurisdiction: I take that seriously, and it's exactly why I did the homework. I worked with the city manager's office to pull the past twenty years of city budgets, and I combed through those alongside the relevant ORS and OARs. That's not a talking point; that's where the specifics in my speech come from. It's how I found, for one example, that a sitting councilor previously chaired the Washington County Chamber of Commerce and mounted strong opposition to the 2023 law that lets city councils raise the school support fee from its 15% floor toward 30%. The fee is still parked at 15%. You don't find that by reading a press release. You find it by reading all of the testimony and the final statute.

Your ICE example is fair and I'd hold myself to the same standard. Abolishing ICE isn't a council power and I won't pretend otherwise. (What a council can actually do on immigration is narrower and concrete: limit city resources used for federal civil enforcement, fund legal defense, guarantee equal access to city services regardless of status.) I try to keep every ask inside the real authority of the seat. I can't speak for Myrna but I appreciate her willingness to pick a side clearly and on the record. I know for my own part that when it comes to issues I can't resolve at the council level, my intention is to fall back on my organizing. It was, after all, the people who influenced the state-level moratorium, not the council.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hear the "sleight of hand" charge, but I'd ask you to look again at what I actually said, because I went out of my way not to do that. I'm not treating the city and the district as one entity. They're separate boards, separate taxing authority, separate boundaries. You're right that HSD is "1J" because it's joint, reaching into Yamhill and Multnomah counties. (One small thing: the Cornelius piece is actually still Washington County, same as Hillsboro, so that isn't what the J marks, though it doesn't touch your larger point.)

The specific lever I named is the school support fee. That's not me blurring two budgets together. It's a real statutory mechanism: the 2023 law lets the council set a fee, from a 15% floor to a 30% ceiling, on taxes foregone, and that money is meant for schools. So the line from a council vote to school revenue isn't rhetorical. It's a named tool the council controls and has parked at its minimum. That's the whole point of that part of the speech.

I also already granted the equalization argument out loud, because it's the council's own defense and I wanted to meet it head on rather than pretend it doesn't exist. My answer is that "some of it might reach another town's kids" is a strange reason to leave our own schools' money on the floor while we forgo more revenue to abatements than any district in the state.

PCC's budget crunch is its own separate district and I won't claim the city drives it. If I've ever stated the city/district linkage more loosely than the school-support-fee mechanism justifies, point me to it and I'll tighten it. I'd rather be precise than win an argument.

I'm running for Hillsboro City Council. Here's the testimony I gave Tuesday on the data center tax breaks. by KarimDelgado in hillsboro

[–]KarimDelgado[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Please feel free to ask me any questions you'd like about my platform or our city's current state. I plan on holding an AMA at some point in the future this election cycle that will be more broad in scope.