In the quiet, pastoral folds of Molalla, Oregon, where the views of the Cascade foothills are more likely to inspire a sense of peace than a sense of urgency, a different kind of storm has been brewing—not in the skies, but in the comment sections of local Facebook groups and the whispers at the grocery store. A rumor has taken hold, spreading like wildfire, that the city government is secretly conspiring to bring a massive data center to the outskirts of town, paving over farmland and threatening the rural character that defines the community. The narrative is compelling in its dread: images of sterile, windowless warehouses humming with the noise of a thousand servers replacing the quiet fields of hay and cattle. It has become the perfect boogeyman for those already anxious about the future of their little citychelle, stoking fears of rising water bills, strained power grids, and a total loss of local identity. In response to this social media frenzy, Assistant City Manager Mac Corthell has stepped out from behind the bureaucratic veil to issue a definitive, transparent, and good-humored clarification: the city has not courted a data center, is not courting one now, and the entire rumor appears to be based on a single, failed, and deeply unappealing inquiry from over a year ago.
To understand why the city’s response is so confident, one must first understand a fundamental truth about how municipalities actually function: they are not land developers. As Corthell patiently explained, the City of Molalla does not own any large parcels of industrial land just waiting for a corporation to snap them up. In fact, the city’s property portfolio is remarkably simple, consisting almost entirely of parks, municipal buildings, and the streets themselves. The business of buying and selling industrial land is entirely in the hands of private property owners. For a data center to even theoretically appear on the horizon, a private landowner would have to voluntarily put their land on the market, and a speculative developer would have to express a concrete interest in buying it. The city simply does not hold the keys to this kingdom. They are not in the land-brokering business; their role is strictly regulatory—they exist to ensure that whatever development occurs meets the building codes, safety standards, and zoning laws that have been democratically established, not to conjure development out of thin air.
The rumor’s origin appears to stem from a misplaced anxiety over the state-mandated Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) review process, a bureaucratic necessity that requires the city to plan for the next twenty years of housing and employment needs. During this process, the city has honestly acknowledged that it would be beneficial to add a few large-format industrial lots to its available inventory, a move intended to attract what they call “living-wage manufacturing” jobs—the kind of timber-fabrication plants or distribution centers that might keep young people from having to move to Portland or Salem for work. However, the presence of this planning goal has been twisted to fit the data center narrative. A diligent public records search was conducted to address the speculation head-on, and it ultimately revealed just one tantalizing lead: approximately eighteen months ago, an unidentified company sent a boilerplate prospecting inquiry to the city asking about utility capacity and available land for a potential data center. This was a standard canvassing email, sent to hundreds of municipalities across the country. When the city responded with the reality of its infrastructure, the interested party vanished overnight, never to be heard from again.
The reason that inquiring developer abandoned Molalla so quickly lies in the cold, unromantic, and very tangible physics of municipal utilities. A data center is not just a big office building; it is an energy-sucking leviathan that requires the kind of electrical capacity and water resources typically associated with small cities or heavy industry. Molalla’s water treatment plant, which is more than adequate for residential and light commercial needs, currently has no excess capacity for the millions of gallons of water a day required to cool a large server farm. Likewise, the local electrical grid—built to serve a rural community of roughly 10,000 people—simply does not have the high-voltage transmission lines or substation infrastructure required to power the equivalent of a miniature city. The city’s leadership has been transparent about this: they do not have the supply capacity in water, sewer, or power to sustain such a development, and short of a speculative, multi-million-dollar infrastructure investment by an outside company (which has not been offered), that remains the hard truth. It is a simple math problem: the resources needed are not there, and no developer is willing to pay to build them out without massive incentives that Molalla is not offering.
This reality does not mean that a data center could never, in a theoretical sense, exist within the city limits, but the practical hurdles make it an exercise in fantasy. For a data center to be built, there would need to be a willing landowner with industrial-zoned property, a private developer who finds the location attractive, and a partnership with utility providers to significantly upgrade the power and water infrastructure—which would require hundreds of millions of dollars in upfront capital and years of permitting. When compared to existing data center hubs just a few hours away in places like The Dalles or Hillsboro—which sit directly alongside cheap hydroelectric dams and major fiber-optic backbone lines—Molalla offers none of these economic advantages. The city does not even own the land that might one day be zoned for this use; any development would require a private landowner to voluntarily sell to a speculative developer clinging to a fantastical business plan. And to date, no landowner has approached the city inquiring about such a sale related to data storage, and no developer has shown a glimmer of interest beyond that single email from a year and a half ago that died on the vine.
So why does the myth continue to propagate? Because in an age of rampant misinformation, a scary story is far easier to spread than a boring, factual explanation of zoning laws, water rights, and electrical load limits. The term “data center” has become a modern bogeyman, shorthand for corporate interest that offers few local jobs while consuming resources and generating little community benefit beyond tax revenue. Critics of the UGB expansion, who may genuinely fear rural sprawl or a loss of small-town character, have seized upon this spectral image of a data center as an emotional weapon. By conflating the city’s modest request to plan for future manufacturing space with an alleged secret scheme to invite in Silicon Valley giants, they are creating panic where none is justified. The city’s response has been to meet this fear with a radical commitment to transparency—publishing the records of every application, sharing the results of their public records search, and imploring citizens to come to the planning commission meetings to review the facts with their own eyes.
Ultimately, the story of Molalla’s data center rumor is a classic case study in how a genuine need for economic development can be hijacked by speculative fear. The city is not, and never has been, in the business of recruiting tech behemoths to bulldoze its heritage. Its UGB process is about creating room for diverse, sustainable employment for its own residents—not for courting an industry that would employ perhaps a dozen people while consuming the city’s entire vital resources. Residents who wish to separate fact from fiction are strongly encouraged to attend the public meetings or visit the dedicated UGB information page on the city’s official website, where the planning documents, utility capacity studies, and meeting minutes are available for anyone to review. Engaging with the process directly is the antidote to the rumor mill. So, the next time you see a dire social media post about data centers descending upon Molalla, remember the facts: no landowner is selling to such a developer, no utility capacity exists, and no company has filed an application. The city’s only goal is to secure a better future for its residents—a future built on honest, achievable manufacturing jobs and managed growth, not on the speculative whispers of an internet ghost. Step away from the Facebook thread, attend a city council meeting, and look at the actual planning documents—you’ll find the only thing truly humming in Molalla is the hum of a community working together to define its own future.