Buying Land in Crook County, Oregon

How Prineville became a national data-center hub

Prineville's emergence as a major data-center location traces back to Oregon's Long-Term Rural Enterprise Zone program, created by the state legislature in 1985 to spur large-scale business investment in rural areas. Under this program, a qualifying company locating in a designated rural enterprise zone can have new improvements -- the buildings and infrastructure itself, not the underlying land -- exempted from property tax for up to 15 years, roughly three to five times longer than a standard Oregon enterprise zone exemption, in exchange for a negotiated community service agreement with the local government.

Meta (originally Facebook), Apple, and Amazon have all built major data-center campuses in Prineville under this framework. Apple and Facebook pay property tax on the underlying land they've purchased, but the buildings and equipment themselves are exempt from taxation for the duration of the enterprise-zone agreement. The result has been a genuinely transformative local economic story: hundreds of long-term, stable jobs in a county whose economy was previously heavily dependent on a struggling timber industry.

The fiscal tension: tens of millions in lost school revenue

The same tax exemptions that attracted these data centers have a real, well-documented cost for local government, and especially for Crook County's schools. In 2019, Crook County Schools reported giving up roughly $10 million in local revenue to corporate property-tax exemptions. As additional data centers came online in subsequent years, that figure grew substantially -- reaching an estimated $29 million by 2024, according to local reporting. That's a genuine and ongoing point of local political debate: the jobs and general economic stabilization the data centers bring have to be weighed against a school district that's foregoing tens of millions of dollars a year in property-tax revenue it would otherwise collect.

This tension reached the state level in 2026: the Oregon Legislature removed data centers from a bill that would have otherwise expanded the state's broader tax-break programs, effectively pausing further expansion of this exemption structure for new data-center projects for one year. Separately, Prineville officials have signaled they intend to negotiate harder for community benefits in any future data-center agreements, rather than simply replicating past terms. If a data-center or comparable large-scale industrial project is part of what's drawing you to land in Crook County, confirm the current status of the enterprise-zone program and any pending state legislative changes directly with Crook County or the City of Prineville before assuming past exemption terms still apply.

Outside Prineville: high-desert EFU ranchland and public land

Away from the data-center campuses, Crook County looks like classic central-Oregon high desert: Exclusive Farm Use zoning covering cattle ranching operations and irrigated hay and alfalfa production concentrated near the Crooked River and Prineville Reservoir, with the Ochoco Mountains to the east and substantial BLM and U.S. Forest Service land across much of the county's remaining acreage. As with EFU zoning statewide, a non-farm dwelling on this land requires conditional-use approval and specific county findings -- confirm dwelling eligibility for a specific parcel with Crook County Community Development, and confirm any BLM grazing allotments tied to a ranch property, since those permits don't automatically transfer with a land sale.