SHIP has an open house
By Griffin Beach on Tuesday, June 24th, 2025 in Columbia Basin News More Top Stories
HERMISTON – Hermiston Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan made a presentation to members of the Hermiston community and several community partners on Monday, discussing what’s new and upcoming at the South Hermiston Industrial Park (SHIP). The open house took place at the intersection of two newly paved and extended roadways, one of the new things Morgan said.
“Thirteen years ago, we would’ve been standing in the middle of a cornfield,” he said over the roar of equipment at the numerous construction sites on the SHIP property.
Morgan first spoke about the aquifer storage and recovery project currently taking place, as the rig drilling the well was in view just behind him. The project will pump water from the Columbia River during low-demand months, and store it in an underground aquifer for use in high-demand months. Amazon Web Services is covering the construction costs. He said that only about 30 percent of water used for cooling by the data centers is lost to evaporation while showing a pipeline map which illustrated how the roughly 70 percent water that does not evaporate is pumped into a nearby irrigation canal for use in the surrounding agriculture industry.
The city has also been working for the last 18 months to expand its urban area growth boundary (UGB), which currently ends at Feedville Road. The proposed expansion would be approximately 1,000 acres south of Feedville Road and encompass much of the land between it and the railroad.
“We’re going to be scheduling hearings on that UGB expansion here in about the next month or so, so we hope to have that process wrapped up here mid-fall,” said Morgan.
He did point out that expansion is specifically predicated on the data center industry.
“There are no reasons why we couldn’t go through different UGB processes, but some of the requirements that we’re going through in order to make it more simple in terms of a lot of the utility planning, we had to pick kind of a specific industry,” he said.
Morgan is enthusiastic about not only what these new developments could bring, but what has already been accomplished by the city.
“When I showed up in Hermiston in 2012 total employment in Umatilla County was around 28,000 total jobs,” he said, adding that the number was at 28,300 in 2018. “By November of 2024 total employment in Umatilla County is now 31,000, so suddenly we’ve added 3,000 jobs just over that time period,” he concluded.
