In 2004, a young guy named Chris Saka turned up in the Dahls, Oregon.

The city had long been sustained by the aluminum industry, but its 16,000 residents were wondering what was next after the local smelters furnaces had gone cold.

Would they become yet another community across the United States to lose its primary industry and the tax revenue that accompanied it?

Or would they find something else

to replace it? Luckily for them, Saka came with a possible answer. By that time, the internet

had been commercialized and privatized for nearly a decade. The boom and bust of the dot-com bubble

was over, and the companies that survived the crash were solidifying their gains and gearing up

for another wave of growth.

Saka claimed to represent a company called Design LLC that was proposing to spend hundreds

of millions of dollars to establish a presence in the dolls, build its own facility, and

create hundreds of permanent jobs. The facility it was proposing to build was a data center,

but there was a catch. It wasn't a

coincidence that this mysterious company was eyeing Oregon for its data center project. Sure, it was

close to the internet company hubs, the Bay Area, and Seattle, but it also had particular financial

advantages. This is how the Oregonian business journalist Mike Rogaway put it when speaking to the

Berkeley Technology Law Journal podcast.

Back in the 1980s, Oregon, like a lot of other states, created what they called an

enterprise zone program, a set of property tax incentives for the idea with small

manufacturers.

And you put them in distressed communities, rural, small towns, and try to attract manufacturers

by giving them a temporary exemption on their property taxes.

But lawmakers didn't put any cap on the size of those tax breaks.

...