With data centers and energy projects drawing workers from Portland and beyond, some longtime Boardman residents feel like their quiet agricultural community is becoming unrecognizable, while newcomers say fresh ideas and investment are exactly what the town needs. Who has the better argument?
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Add your commentBorn and raised here. My family has farmed along the Columbia since my grandfather's time. I'm not against progress, I really am not, but when I walk into Rays and don't recognize a single face anymore, that stings in a way that's hard to explain to someone who didn't grow up knowing every person at the feed store by name. These aren't bad people moving in. But Boardman wasn't broken. We didn't need fixing.
Can I just challenge the longtime residents in this thread real quick: what specific policy or action do you actually WANT? Because "keep it like it was" is not a platform. If you want local hire requirements written into development agreements, advocate for that. If you want agricultural land protections, there are mechanisms for that. Nostalgia doesn't stop a data center. Organize and show up to city council. That's how you protect a community.
Okay I'll be the contrarian: Boardman was always going to change. The question was never IF but HOW. At least tech money builds roads and funds schools. You want the alternative? Look at some of the other small Oregon towns that got nothing — hollowed out, young people fled, main street empty. I'll take growing pains over a slow death any day.
Nope. Hard disagree with the whole premise that newcomers bring "fresh ideas." Fresh ideas for WHOM. For a town that runs on agriculture and has for over a century, the fresh ideas I need are about water rights and crop prices. Not kombucha and coworking spaces.
Moved here from Portland two years ago for a job at one of the data centers and honestly? Best decision I ever made. My kids can actually play outside unsupervised. We go to the river on weekends. People wave at you in the parking lot. I'm not here to bulldoze anything — I genuinely love this town and I'm trying to be a good neighbor. Not every transplant is some culture-destroying villain.
Honestly as a woman who grew up here and left for college in Eugene and came back — the old Boardman had a certain smallness to it that wasn't always charming. There was gossip, insularity, not a lot of room for anyone who was different. Some outside energy has loosened that up a little. My mom's book club now has members from four different states and she loves it. Change isn't automatically loss.
That claim about "largest concentration west of the Mississippi" is not accurate at all. The Dalles and the broader Columbia River Gorge corridor has massive facilities but so does Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Silicon Valley — Boardman is significant but please don't spread misinformation. The actual draw here is cheap hydro power and the Columbia River cooling capacity. Get the facts right if you're going to make the pro-development argument.
the property taxes argument cuts both ways folks. yes new development brings revenue but it also drives up assessed values on land that farming families have held for decades. my cousin nearly had to sell because her tax bill jumped after the data center boom. nobody talks about THAT part
I used to live in Boardman from 2015 to 2020 before relocating to Boise. Visited last summer and I gotta say the vibe shift is real. Not entirely bad — the new park improvements near the marina are genuinely nice — but the housing situation for working families looked rough. Rentals that were $650 when I left were being listed at nearly double. Someone needs to ask who exactly is benefiting here because it doesn't look like it's the folks who were already there.
These data centers actually use almost no local workers, FYI. Most of the jobs go to people they transfer in. So the argument that it's an economic boon for Boardman residents specifically is just not accurate. The servers hum, the profits leave, and we get the traffic.
I actually read somewhere that Boardman's data centers are the largest concentration of server infrastructure west of the Mississippi. Not sure if that's still true but the point is this town is already WAY more important to the global internet than most people realize. Your cat videos might literally be stored here lol. Little bit of pride isn't unwarranted.
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