Winlock's Data Center Pause Is Really a Question About Water
October 8, 2026
October 8, 2026
"They would drain us dry of connections."
That was Winlock Community Development Director Robert Webster at the Sept. 14, 2026 council meeting. He was explaining why the city turned down a developer's proposal for a 2,000,000-square-foot data center in Winlock some time ago. He said the decision came down to water, because he wasn't sure the city could guarantee an adequate supply. Nine days later, on Sept. 23, the Winlock City Council voted unanimously for a six-month moratorium on data center development.
Most coverage of moratoriums like this one focuses on the technology. For anyone who owns land in or near Winlock, or is thinking about buying some, the more useful part of the story is the city's water system. Water explains why the pause happened. It will shape the rules that replace it, and it limits what any industrial parcel here can realistically become.
The draft of Ordinance No. 1202 in the Sept. 23 council packet goes further than a pause on construction. It puts a citywide moratorium on the "filing, acceptance, processing, review, and approval" of applications to establish or expand data centers. That covers changes of use and projects where a data center is only one piece.
The recitals say why the timing mattered. Winlock's municipal code has no definition of a data center. The council had also learned that "the region is being considered for location of data centers, including facilities within city limits." The draft says immediate action was needed "to prevent or mitigate the threat of vesting of applications under the current municipal development code." Put plainly, the city wanted to keep anyone from locking in a project under rules that never contemplated one.
This is where it matters for a sale. If you are marketing land inside city limits with a data center buyer in mind, no such application can be filed right now. The buyer's real timeline depends on code that does not exist yet.
The draft also limits what counts. An ordinary server room or network room that serves another lawful business on the same site is excluded, and so are wireless facilities regulated under city code.
The calendar as of Oct. 3, 2026:
The city had not posted the adopted ordinance text or the Sept. 23 minutes when this was written. The adoption date comes from The Chronicle's Sept. 25 report, and the hearing date and terms come from the draft.
The pause makes more sense next to what city staff were saying in August 2025. At that time, Water and Sewer Superintendent Rodney Cecil told the council the city produces about 110,000 gallons a day of reclaimed "purple water." The council approved a feasibility study for a supply line to Winlock's industrial park.
The first plan was to sell that water to Cardinal FG for cooling. Cardinal uses about 125,000 gallons a day, but it was also looking at other cooling methods. Cecil said that if Cardinal didn't buy the purple water, the city could use it to save drinking water or sell it to tech businesses that might build a data center in the industrial park. Then-Mayor Brandon Svenson called it "another revenue stream for water and sewer." Cecil mentioned that Kubota could use it for membrane cleaning.
The city that was pitching cooling water to data centers in 2025 is the same city that paused data center applications in 2026, and both moves fit together. Reclaimed water can serve industrial cooling. Drinking water is the scarce part. The 2026 moratorium gives the city time to write rules that keep a large cooling user on the first kind of water.
Mayor Victoria Marincin described the goal as getting "some guard rails up" for "all sorts of heavy-industrial or light-industrial ventures that may come to Winlock." She said the codes would allow data center construction without putting the water supply at risk. Councilor David Anderson put it more directly: "It could be a good fit. It could be not a good fit," and said the city needs "good policy, good ordinances, to protect what we all want, which is water, infrastructure and other things."
Winlock's drinking water comes from five groundwater wells. The city's 2025 water quality report, published in April 2026, lists no spring source. The city's water-use filing for calendar year 2024 breaks down production by well:
| Well | Gallons produced in 2024 | Share of total |
|---|---|---|
| Well 603 | 67,087,600 | about 46% |
| Eureka 1 | 42,108,109 | about 29% |
| 505 Well | 23,070,122 | about 16% |
| Baichtel 2 | 11,653,772 | about 8% |
| Eureka 3 | 3,304,027 | about 2% |
| Total | 147,223,630 |
The same filing reports about 114.7 million gallons of authorized consumption in 2024 and about 32.5 million gallons of distribution loss, a leakage rate of 22.1%. Every connection was metered. Supply limits are not new here. The last Department of Health-approved Water System Plan found in this research is dated March 2020, and it named source capacity as the limiting factor.
Those numbers explain Webster's reaction. When he said a draw of 1,000,000 gallons a month would be "way too much," he offered it as a hypothetical. Even so, that figure equals about 8% of what all five wells produced in an average 2024 month. The Chronicle has reported that a data center can use hundreds of thousands of gallons a day for cooling, depending on its size. At 300,000 gallons a day, one facility would use about 109.5 million gallons a year. That is nearly the city's entire authorized consumption for 2024.
The city's plan for more supply depends on its largest industrial neighbor. As of August 2025, Cecil was working with the Washington Department of Ecology and Cardinal FG, on Avery Road, on a new water right. "They owe us 157 acre-feet," he said, and Cardinal had already returned 78.9 acre-feet.
Another nearby owner was offering about 34 acre-feet of irrigation rights. Those rights are seasonal, so they are not year-round municipal water. Cecil described having Cardinal buy them and leave them unused. That would let the city tell Ecology that 34 acre-feet were going back into the aquifer, which would strengthen the new-right application. City staff were also looking at buying land near Cardinal to drill another well.
These details are a year old, and the outcome of the Ecology filing was not in the records reviewed for this post. The process is the point. New municipal water in Winlock comes from filings, agency meetings and land purchases, and it arrives slowly. Data center rules written over the next six months will be written against whatever supply the city can show by then.
Many of the acreage owners around Winlock live in unincorporated Lewis County, and the county settled this question in September 2025. Its updated development regulations allow data centers only on land mapped as major industrial development (MID) or regional area industrial (RAI). They are not allowed on agricultural resource land, forest resource land, rural development districts or open space.
The county has two MID areas. One is the TransAlta/Industrial Park site in Centralia. The other is the Cardinal Glass Plant site in Winlock, which the county describes as fully developed. The 12 RAI areas include Curtis Rail Yard, Baer, Williams Industrial, Ed Carlson Airfield, PSE Natural Gas Storage, Taylor Drilling, Klein Bicycle, PLS Log Yard and Morton Log Yard. The full designations are on the county's official zoning map. Commissioner Sean Swope said the limits were meant to "protect our farms, forests and rural way of life" while giving industry certainty.
For a timber tract or a farm parcel near Winlock, that settles it. If the parcel is not on the MID or RAI map, a data center is not a permitted use, however much interest the region draws. Pricing that land as if one were possible means pricing it for a buyer the county code doesn't allow. Even on eligible industrial land, the county said in June 2026 that standards for water use and energy demand were still under discussion.
Process still matters on eligible sites. At the Sept. 23 meeting, Lewis County Planning Commission member Jeff Skutley urged the council to use planning commission review, a public hearing and the SEPA process. He said electrical demand, water use and noise all need review, and that "just the runoff from a 500-acre building is huge."
Does the moratorium affect new homes or ordinary water hookups? As drafted and as reported, it covers applications for data centers only. It is not a general moratorium on connections. Accessory server rooms that serve another business on the same site are excluded from the definition.
Was it aimed at one developer? In September, Councilor Alishia Hornburg said a citywide moratorium was needed to avoid looking prejudicial toward an individual developer after a proposal had been submitted. No developer, site or acreage has been named publicly.
Where can I comment? At the Planning Commission on Oct. 5, which is also on Zoom, and at the council's public hearing, which the draft sets for Nov. 9.
If you own a parcel near Winlock and want to know where it falls on the county's industrial map, or how the city's water picture affects what it can become, June Jones and the Woodland Real Estate team can go through the zoning, the dates and the public records with you before you price it or make an offer. Let's Connect.
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