Where We Stand

Public comment at council meetings is a one-way format. Three minutes of testimony, no response, no follow-up. Residents cannot tell whether the council heard them, and the rules do not allow councilors to answer during the meeting. A town hall works the opposite way: residents raise a concern, get a real answer, and push back on it in the same room. Karim will hold one every week, with virtual office hours for people who cannot attend in person.

Karim will push to make council meetings more accessible: meeting times and formats working people can attend, interpretation so Spanish-speaking neighbors can participate, plain-language summaries of what the council is deciding and why, and outreach that brings more of Hillsboro’s communities into the process before votes happen.

The city took on 17 applications from just eight companies in three months, all the way until the statewide moratorium (HB 4084). It even included a rolling series of 3- to 5-year exemptions that keep at least one campus tax-free until 2051.

For years, data centers paid about 8¢ per kilowatt hour while households paid more than double, near 20¢, according to the Citizens’ Utility Board. While the council doesn’t set the rate, the franchise fees it collects from data centers’ increased load results in more money coming out of residents’ pockets.

The deals carry two fees the council controls. The Community Service Fee is a city invention, capped at 33% of abated taxes in years one through three and 50% in years four and five, and it charges more the fewer jobs a company creates; the council can raise that ceiling with a vote. The School Support Fee is state law, set by the council and school board together anywhere from 15% to 30%; Hillsboro sits at the floor. The 33 agreements already signed are contracts, but the council can put higher rates on every new one, verify job and wage commitments and claw back when they are not met, and decide what terms the next expansion gets. Seventeen applications are on the desk right now.

An enterprise zone abatement is supposed to run three to five years. In March and April of 2026 the city signed twelve agreements that stretch it, the furthest a chain of six back-to-back contracts keeping NTT’s campus off the tax rolls from 2036 through 2051. Each contract covers newly installed equipment, so the exemption can keep going as long as the company keeps installing new hardware. The city’s own page says the zone’s designation runs out in 2028. On June 22, 2026, 1000 Friends of Oregon, the Oregon Education Association, Councilor Kipperlyn Sinclair, and others sued the city and Washington County over all 17 approvals. The council can stop defending the 2036 to 2051 chain, audit the spring agreements against the state’s 21-day public-posting rule, and require every future application to come before the full council in open session.

There is one franchise lever the council does control. It sets PGE's electric franchise fee by city ordinance, currently 3.5% of gross revenue, below the 5% statutory ceiling (Hillsboro Herald), leaving headroom the city has never used. Karim will push the city to study a data-center electricity classification that charges the load it zoned in its own franchise rate, instead of spreading the cost across every household's bill. Whether the city can legally set a load-differentiated franchise rate is an open legal question its attorney would have to answer, but it is a tool Hillsboro has never tried.

Under its Intel SIP deals, the city has collected about $256.72 million in fees and built its entire General Fund capital strategy around them. The city's own budget states that General Fund capital needs will "rely solely on SIP Funds into the foreseeable future." That is what two decades of dependency looks like.

Data center jobs: eleven major data center operators in Washington County employ about 26 people each on average while receiving an average of $7.6 million apiece in annual property tax breaks, roughly $294,000 in forgone taxes per job (The Oregonian). One TikTok-linked facility gets $5.5 million in breaks for 11 employees, according to Washington County figures. No local hire requirements exist. No community benefit agreements were required as a condition of any of the applications processed before the moratorium took effect. The city's economic development argument rests on construction jobs and tax revenue projections that have not been independently verified.

The governor's own Data Center Advisory Committee is now asking whether these abatements are still necessary, given what Oregon already offers: no sales tax, a mild climate, fiber, and land. No sales tax also means Oregon collects less from day one. Once fully running, a model data center pays about $17.1 million a year in state and local taxes in Hillsboro, versus $26.3 million in Santa Clara, California, where equipment purchases are taxed (Tax Foundation). The moratorium is the time to run the numbers: what Hillsboro and its schools would collect without the abatements, before the council decides whether to renew the zone in 2028.

Oregon's Enterprise Zone program allows cities to waive property taxes for qualifying businesses in exchange for job creation, but the state does not mandate minimum wage levels, benefits, or local hire requirements. Hillsboro negotiates these deals individually, and has not consistently required community benefit agreements as a condition of approval.

What community benefit agreements can include: minimum wage floors indexed to local cost of living, requirements that a set percentage of employees be hired from within the city or county, health coverage requirements, and affordable housing contributions proportional to the development's impact. Hillsboro has the authority to require them. It has chosen not to.

The city's adopted budget for 2025–27 contains no mandatory notice requirement before rent increases, no right to counsel in eviction proceedings, and no anti-displacement fund. Willow Creek Crossing's first phase, 120 units, is built. A second Willow Creek project in early development is expected to add another 118 units by 2028. The city's own April 2026 update counts about 280 affordable units created in the last five years against more than 5,000 needed over the next 20.

The connection to corporate tax policy is direct: when industrial assessed value sits off the property tax rolls under the Intel SIP deal, and tens of millions more is waived every year through data center exemptions, every overlapping taxing district, including the housing programs funded by property taxes, is underfunded. The city can't build its way out of a housing crisis while giving away the tax base that would fund the solution.

The Hillsboro Recovery Center, which opened June 2, 2025, provides mental health services, addiction recovery, and Spanish-language outpatient care. It was funded by Washington County. The city did not lead on this. Mobile crisis response routes mental health and substance use calls to trained counselors rather than law enforcement. Programs like CAHOOTS in Eugene have operated this model for decades; the question for Hillsboro is whether the city is willing to fund it adequately.

Meanwhile, the city is building a $95 million police headquarters, its borrowing raised from an original $70 million, justified in the city's own budget document in two sentences: it will consolidate the east and west precincts. The mobile crisis team budget is a fraction of that. A serious community safety strategy funds both, and it is honest about which kinds of calls need which kind of response.

While the Supremacy Clause means the city cannot order federal agents out of Hillsboro, the Due Process Clause binds those agents everywhere they operate. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee due process to every person on US soil, and ORS 181A.820 bars local police from spending a dollar or an officer on immigration enforcement. Agents who mask their faces, misidentify themselves, and seize residents without judicial warrants are acting outside the bounds of the federal law they claim to enforce.

Inside those limits the council has more room than it has used. Most ICE arrests happen on an administrative warrant signed by an ICE supervisor, not a judge. An administrative warrant does not open a door, a city building, or a city database. A judicial warrant does. The council can write "judicial warrant only" into every policy it controls. It can end automated license plate surveillance and stop sharing what is already recorded. It can keep every non-public room in every city building closed to agents without a judge’s signature. It can fund legal representation, because a person with a lawyer at a bond hearing goes home at a rate a person without one never sees. Each of those slows an operation down, and slowed down often means it does not happen.

The council declared a local emergency on November 18, 2025, passed Ordinance 6513 on March 3, 2026 to put sanctuary rules into city code, and put about $730,000 into legal aid, rent help, student support, and small business grants. Then it stalled. It tabled a Human Rights Office in January 2026 and has not come back to it. The legal aid money will run out and will need to be replenished so long as the demand remains.

The U visa gives immigrant crime victims who help police a path to legal status, and it starts with a certification from local law enforcement. In 2025, Hillsboro police received 28 certification requests and denied 22 of them. Statewide, agencies approved about three out of four. The council can demand a public accounting of certification policy and set the expectation that Hillsboro stops being an outlier.

City council members have limited but real tools for protecting immigrant residents: a formal policy limiting city resources used for federal civil immigration enforcement, a legal defense fund for residents facing deportation proceedings, and a guarantee that all city services, from housing assistance to public safety response, are accessible regardless of immigration status.

Washington County has a significant and growing immigrant and refugee population. Many of these residents are employed in the agricultural and industrial sectors that Hillsboro's economic development strategy is built around. They are the workforce the city courts corporations to employ. They deserve a city government that takes their security as seriously as it takes the tax base they help generate.

Property tax exemptions don't just affect the city's General Fund. They affect every overlapping taxing district that draws from the same assessed value base, including the Hillsboro School District. Because Oregon equalizes school funding statewide, the loss is spread across every district, not just this one. The city negotiates the deals. Schools across the state share the cost.

Karim will push for school funding contributions as a required element of any future enterprise zone deal, not charity but a proportional return on the public investment being made. He will also advocate at the state level for education funding reform that breaks the link between local property tax base and school quality.

One tool already exists. Oregon's HB 2009, passed in 2023, lets the city charge a school support fee on enterprise-zone abatements, set anywhere from 15% to 30% and applied in the fourth and fifth years of each deal. Hillsboro charges the 15% floor. Raising it toward the 30% ceiling on future data-center agreements would route money the city is already forgoing back to the schools its workforce comes from, without touching deals already signed. The council sets that number. It chose the minimum.

Oregon DEQ cited Intel for failing to monitor unsafe emissions at its Hillsboro facility, a failure that went on for nine weeks before it was caught. The city's financial relationship with Intel, built over two decades of SIP deal dependency, gives it no structural incentive to push back. The city's budget response to industrial pollution is a Sustainability Revolving Fund and fleet electrification goals for city vehicles. Neither touches industrial emitters. There is no environmental compliance condition in any SIP or Enterprise Zone agreement.

On transit: the comparison between individual accountability (vehicle emissions testing, where working people pay hundreds of dollars to fix their cars or lose their registration) and industrial accountability (a state agency citation for the largest industrial emitter in the region) makes the disparity plain. Karim will push for environmental compliance as a condition of all future subsidy agreements, and for real capital investment in Hillsboro's transit infrastructure.

Karim will require health coverage as a condition of every subsidy and enterprise-zone deal, cover every city employee in full, and use the city's purchasing power to require that contractors carry their workers on qualifying health plans. Today the city attaches none of these conditions to the public money it gives away.

The connection to Hillsboro's tax policy: when the city's corporate tax deals come with no health coverage requirements for workers, the cost of uninsured or underinsured employees shifts to county emergency rooms, OHP, and the public generally. Requiring health coverage in enterprise zone deals is not a mandate on business. It is a condition on receiving public subsidy.