The Dalles v. The Oregonian: The Case That Made Google's Water Use Public

The Dalles sits on the Columbia River east of Portland, and it was one of Google's earliest data center homes. As the company planned expansion in a dry region, Oregonian reporter Mike Rogoway asked a basic accountability question: how much of the city's water was Google using? He filed a public records request with the city for the numbers.

The question was not academic. Data centers cool themselves with water, the city was being asked to support Google's growth with public water supply, and residents had no way to weigh that trade without the consumption figures. Every community facing a data center proposal since has confronted the same blind spot: officials negotiate water commitments with the operator, and the public is asked to trust the math it is not allowed to see.

Instead of releasing the records or simply denying the request, the city took the extraordinary step of suing the journalist and his newspaper in 2021 in Wasco County Circuit Court, asking a judge to declare Google's water figures exempt from disclosure as trade secrets. The posture was remarkable: a public utility's customer consumption data, held by a public body, treated as a corporate secret worth litigating over, with the city carrying the banner. Google's fingerprints were on the arrangement from the start, and the eventual settlement confirmed it, with Google reimbursing the city's payment of the paper's fees.

The case never reached a trial ruling on the trade secret question. On December 14, 2022, the parties settled, and the terms amounted to a near-total win for disclosure:

• Ten years of water records were released. They showed Google's campus consumed roughly 29 percent of The Dalles' water supply, a number the public had never seen.
• The city paid $53,173 of the newspaper's legal fees. Google reimbursed the city, an acknowledgment of whose interests the suit had served.
• Google changed its national posture. After the settlement, the company stopped claiming site-level water use as a trade secret nationwide, releasing figures for its data centers across the country.

That last term is why a case from a city of about 16,000 people echoes everywhere. One records fight, pushed to litigation and won in settlement, changed what the world's largest data center operators concede the public is entitled to know.

Transparency did not shrink Google's thirst; it just made the numbers public while they grew. By 2026, reporting showed The Dalles working to secure additional water for the future, looking to sources connected to Mount Hood National Forest as Google's demand continued to climb. The disclosure fight settled who gets to see the ledger. The supply fight, how much water a region commits to computing in a warming West, is still being negotiated in plain view, which is exactly where a decision like that belongs.

The Dalles records also gave every other community a benchmark. When residents in Georgia's Newton County worried about a Meta campus drawing roughly half a million gallons a day, or when Arizona and Georgia water fights made national headlines, journalists and neighbors could compare against real disclosed figures instead of estimates, because this case pried the first real ones loose.

Most disputes on this site are nuisance, zoning, or environmental cases. This one is different: nobody sued over harm. The litigation was about information, and it shows a truth that runs through every other case we track: the fight is usually won or lost on what the public can prove, and what the public can prove depends on what it can see.

Records requests are cheap, fast, and available to anyone. They do not require standing, a lawyer, or a filing fee. And as The Dalles shows, when a government or operator resists, the resistance itself becomes the story, and fee-shifting provisions in public records laws mean a wrongful denial can end with the government paying the requester's lawyers. Neighbors used exactly this insight in the Bessemer, Alabama fight, where litigation pressed the city on what councilors reviewed, and in open meetings cases like Festus, Missouri, where the paper trail is the case.

If you live near an existing or proposed data center and water is your worry, The Dalles gives you a working playbook before you ever think about suing:

• File a records request with the water utility. Ask for the facility's consumption history, projections, and any supply or rate agreements. Cite the operator's own nationwide disclosures if a trade secret objection comes back.
• Get the numbers before the approval vote. Consumption commitments made in development agreements are public documents, and they are easiest to change before they are signed.
• Pair the data with your own evidence. If your well or water service has already changed, disclosed usage figures plus your documentation are the foundation of a potential claim.

If a data center's water use has affected your property, or officials are stonewalling the records that would show it, a free intake form lets you tell us what is happening; where a participating attorney who handles these matters is available, we may share your information with them with your consent, but we cannot promise that anyone will contact you. For the harm side of the equation, see our guide to water contamination claims and the evidence worth documenting.