Rob Kerr / The BulletinChuck Goolsbee, right, Facebook Prineville data center manager, explains the function of computer servers during a tour for the recipients of the company's Prineville Local Grants Program.

Facebook and Apple have done more than construct the biggest buildings Crook County has ever seen.

Their data center projects overlooking Prineville have generated $1 million or more for the county through fees on the tech giants’ building permits.

An examination of Crook County permits shows Apple has paid more than $93.5 million to build the first of its two planned, 338,000-square-foot data centers just west of Prineville. Nearby, Facebook has paid nearly $64 million to build two data center facilities.

The county receives a small percentage of the value of each permit.

But as the projects have drawn closer to completion, the money from new building permits has dwindled.

Last year, Crook County’s community development department tapped into permit fees to increase a half-time building inspector to full time. But that position was eliminated entirely this year, with no new, high-value permits coming in for more than six months, county building official Lou Haehnlen said Friday.

And while Facebook employees can be seen eating at restaurants and shopping downtown, Crook County officials said there are few Apple employees to be seen in Prineville, nearly a year after the company’s first data center became partly operational.

“A lot of people that have been working there are in security,” Crook County Commissioner Ken Fahlgren said Friday. “They’ve probably got 30 people there and 25 are in security.”

Apple has long been tight-lipped about its data center plans in Prineville. The company built a large wall around the facility to block its view from the public during construction.

Apple officials didn’t return several requests for comment this week. The terms of a 15-year tax break the company signed with Crook County depend on the company hiring at least 35 people.

The companies’ data centers are designed to store the massive amount of data each companies’ users interact with each day. Each data center stores billions of megabytes of information, like Facebook photos and music downloads through Apple’s iTunes store.

Both companies received large property tax breaks to set up in Prineville, and the data centers need fewer than 100 employees to operate them, so the job impact isn’t as big as a large manufacturing company might be.

But Fahlgren said the data center projects have offered Crook County a private-sector partner for major public projects in the pipeline, like a new hospital and elementary school.

Those are expected to be up and running late next year.

“We’ve been working so hard for so long to get these projects people together,” he said. “Just by adding the school and the hospital, we think we can get a much more affluent level of people to come to Prineville.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7820, eglucklich@bendbulletin.com