Rezoning near Prineville Airport advances

PRINEVILLE — A Chicago-based firm’s request to annex 160 acres into the industrial zone near the Prineville Airport moved closer to final approval Wednesday at a combined meeting of the City Council and Crook County Court.

Members of the council and court agreed to expand the city urban growth boundary and change the zoning from county agricultural to city light industrial. The County Court, the three-member elected administrative body, also agreed to make an exception to state land use law to allow a possible road to the site across surrounding property.

Finally, the City Council agreed unanimously to annex the 160 acres. The council must approve the boundary expansion and annexation a second and final time, which it plans to do when it meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday.

Annexing the 160 acres will increase city industrial land near the airport. The property is also within an enterprise zone, where Facebook and Apple have built data centers. Those firms enjoy tax abatements on equipment and capital improvements that are tied to job creation at their facilities.

Representatives of the property owner, Legacy Ranches LLC, declined comment on plans to develop the property, although a local land-use consultant, Craig Kilpatrick, and a Lake Oswego attorney, Wendie Kellington, at past meetings of the county planning commission alluded to plans to build a data center on the site just west of the airport.

Both declined to comment Wednesday. Kilpatrick said he was “contractually obligated” to say nothing about the site other than that plans will not be filed soon. Chad Feigel, a Legacy Ranches representative in Chicago, also declined comment Wednesday. Feigel is also affiliated with CMT Trading LLC, a brokerage firm that shares an address with Legacy Ranches and xCelor LLC, which specializes in high-speed data processing for financial traders.

Kilpatrick also declined comment on the future of Remington Ranch, the 2,000-acre resort project near Powell Butte that Legacy Ranches purchased for $2.5 million in December. Columbia Bank foreclosed on the property after its former owners went bankrupt.

The 160-acre site is inside a larger, 1,424-acre Legacy Ranches property and lacks access to any nearby road. The Oregon Department of Transportation expressed concern that an existing access directly to state Highway 126 would not be sufficient for increased traffic at an industrial facility. Legacy Ranch traffic engineers provided two likely options that satisfied the County Court.

One option is to pave a road across a section of the surrounding property still designated for agricultural use. Another option is to extend the road that leads into the Prineville Airport. That decision won’t be made until Legacy Ranches makes a formal application to develop the property.

Prineville Mayor Betty Roppe said, as other city and county officials have said, that she doesn’t know what Legacy Ranches has in mind for the property. That’s not unusual in the history of data center projects in the surrounding area, she said. Not until the day Facebook broke ground on its data center east of the airport did she know what company was building there, Roppe said. Apple still refers to its data center across Highway 126 as Project Pillar.

“I hear rumors like everybody else,” Roppe said. “I’m assuming that somewhere along the line we’ll get to hear the name.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com