City looks ahead to housing infrastructure for semiconductor workforce

At a committee meeting Sept. 4, Councilor Greg Evans noted that new jobs are coming to Eugene.

Councilor Greg Evans: Stratacache just nailed that $19 million from the state to move forward with retrofit and everything else out here with the Hynix site. They finally cleared up their little difficulties. (Their tax issues.)

[00:00:21] Yeah, exactly. And they got, they got the $19 million, plus they got some other money from the feds, just like HP got $60 million up in Corvallis.

[00:00:36] Councilor Randy Groves: Stratacache will be bringing jobs.

[00:00:38] Councilor Greg Evans: Three or 400.

[00:00:40] Councilor Randy Groves: To start with (To start with), up to probably 1,000.

[00:00:43] John Q: We spoke with the Stratacache CEO as his company was settling its dispute with Lane County. We asked what that was all about.

[00:00:52] Chris Riegel (Stratacache, CEO): The Lane County Assessor has a much higher value on it than we feel it’s worth, so we’re working through that appeal process with the county. It’s been in front of the magistrate. That will then set the value one way or the other, and then we move forward from there.

[00:01:10] John Q: The parties reached an agreement, and the county website shows taxes paid in May.

[00:01:18] Chris Riegel (Stratacache, CEO): We’ve owned the site since 2020. We bought it in the first quarter of 2020. We then spent a lot of time and resource to get the site basically what we call ‘fab-ready’ or ‘production-ready.’ We started ordering tools in 2022. And most of the key tools that we need for the facility are 18, 24, 30 months availability.

[00:01:43] So we anticipate starting to take major tools in 2024 and into 2025, just because of production delays on the tool set side, and then start to scale out from there.

[00:01:56] John Q: The phone interview took place on a trip to Europe.

[00:01:59] Chris Riegel (Stratacache, CEO): I’m bouncing between London, Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the major semiconductor centers here.

[00:02:07] John Q: As the city councilors discussed this week, jobs are coming to Eugene.

[00:02:14] Chris Riegel (Stratacache, CEO): We’ve done a lot of community outreach to all sorts of different community groups on basically being able to hold job fairs when appropriate once we know tool timelines and finalize there, but we’ll try to hire as much local as possible.

[00:02:29] And there’s also a good base in both Corvallis and in Portland of semiconductor engineers and smart folks in the sector.

[00:02:37] John Q: All the new employees will need a place to live. But before housing can be built, Eugene needs to provide city sewer, stormwater, and more. On Sept. 4:

[00:02:50] Ethan Nelson (Intergovernmental Relations manager): There’s a whole lot of things that are being discussed on housing production.

[00:02:55] When you talk about housing production land readiness, it has to be water, wastewater, transportation, stormwater.

[00:03:02] Our number one is going to be infrastructure dollars. (City Manager) Sarah (Medary)’s going to be signing the contracts with the state of Oregon for the $6 million for the Crow Road infrastructure.

[00:03:12] (City Engineer) Jennifer Willer sent an email that there’s a number of adjacent landowners who want to annex into the city because of those infrastructure improvements, which is a good thing. So we’re seeing that when we make those infrastructure improvements, there’s a lot of interest from adjoining landowners.

[00:03:31] We’re going to continue to seek dollars for infrastructure, and if the state is allocating money programmatically, or if it’s discretionary, we’re going to go after it. That’s a priority.

[00:03:42] The more money we can bring on into the community for housing production and for us, our role is infrastructure.

[00:03:49] Additionally, if it’s capital-A Affordable housing, we have a list of projects that need money and so if the legislature says, yes, we want to allocate direct money to projects on a district-by-district basis, we’re prepared.

[00:04:05] John Q: Stratacache gets $19 million as part of Senate Bill 4, and the city prepares for future housing needs.

Image courtesy Business Oregon.