Planning officials in Oregon’s Morrow County recently approved a proposal from Amazon to build a data center campus with buildings encompassing 816,000 square feet just east of the Boardman Airport. 

The county’s planning commission approved Amazon’s land use application for the project, which is called PDX 154, during its March 31 regular meeting. Planning commissioners put conditions on the approval, including requiring Amazon to mitigate impacts from its stormwater and wastewater systems and not have the facility’s lighting negatively impact the airport’s runway. 

Per Amazon’s application, plans include construction of four buildings to house the data center itself, with each ranging from 190,000 to 218,000 square feet. The campus would also have a 7,260-square-foot industrial water building, an 8-acre stormwater evaporation pond, two wastewater evaporation ponds covering 2 acres each and a 1.4-acre septic drain field. 

The approval came despite opposition and questions from residents and rural community advocates. Along with concerns about water and air pollution, some asserted the facility could harm airport operations by attracting birds to its ponds, despite netting to prevent them from landing there. 

“Netting would prevent birds from landing on the lagoons but would not prevent the birds from being attracted to them,” wrote Kaleb Lay of La Grande, Oregon-based Oregon Rural Action, in a letter to the commission. “Common sense would suggest that waterfowl being drawn to a water body, but not being able to land on it once it reaches it, may actually create a higher risk to local aircraft.” 

Amazon’s representatives are working with the Federal Aviation Administration and state officials to ensure any impacts to the airport, which is operated by the Port of Morrow, are addressed, according to documents. 

“Port of Morrow has not indicated that the use, including the proposed water impoundments, creates a potential for attracting birds that could limit the Boardman airport’s ability to operate. The ponds are not within the airport approach corridor,” Amazon’s representatives said in a response letter to the planning commission. 

Amazon already has a large data center presence in Morrow and neighboring Umatilla counties.  

The tech giant was also recently revealed as the company working to buy 500 acres at the Port of Walla Walla’s Wallula Gap Business Park for a $5 billion data center project. 

Those developments have been welcomed by municipal and economic development officials. But they’ve also led to concerns about how the resource-hungry facilities will consume energy and water for cooling. Amazon also recently agreed to pay $20.5 million to settle a lawsuit that claimed its existing data center operations at the Port of Morrow contributed to nitrate pollution in local groundwater.