Oregon wants to charge Amazon, Google and Microsoft for running fiber-optic cables across the state's ocean floor, and the fees would flow to a fund that supports every public school district in the state, including Beaverton.

The Oregon Department of State Lands proposed a fee of $3 per foot of cable. That could generate more than $1 million per new cable, according to Dana Hicks, a planning and policy manager at the department.

The compensation fees would go directly to Oregon's Common School Fund, a constitutional fund that distributes earnings to K-12 districts based on student enrollment.

The fund is set to distribute roughly $161.6 million statewide during the 2025-2027 biennium, according to a Legislative Policy and Research Office report. BSD's share of any new revenue would be proportional to its enrollment relative to all Oregon districts.

A local tie to undersea infrastructure

The proposal has a direct geographic connection to the Beaverton area. Hillsboro is one of only two places on the West Coast where landing stations bring undersea cables further inland, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle's reporting on the proposal. The other is Los Angeles.

That infrastructure has made the region a hub. Sixteen active cables now run off Oregon's coast, and the pace of new permits has accelerated: the state approved three new cable easements in the 1990s, 13 more in the following two decades, and two more in just the last few years, Hicks said. Amazon, Google and Microsoft all hold ownership stakes in cables off the Oregon coast, and representatives from Google and Amazon served on the state advisory committee that shaped the proposed rules.

A data center boom in Oregon, driven by the state's lack of sales tax and enterprise zone incentives that have saved those companies hundreds of millions in property taxes, is among the reasons for the increase.

What's changing

Since 1989, when Oregon's first trans-Pacific cable was laid from Pacific City to Alaska to Japan, the state has charged only a $5,000 application fee, frozen at that level since 2001. The new proposal would:

• Triple new application fees to $15,000
• Raise renewal fees to $7,500 while extending the renewal period from 20 to 25 years
• Add the new $3-per-foot compensation fee that flows to schools

Application fees would cover the agency's administrative costs. Only the per-foot compensation fees would reach the Common School Fund.

California, by comparison, charges companies annual rent of about $5 per foot for their cables.

The rule changes were triggered partly by a 2020 incident in which a Facebook subsidiary abandoned 1,100 feet of pipe and 6,500 gallons of drill fluid in the ocean off Tierra Del Mar after breaking drilling equipment.

State regulators didn't learn of the incident until county officials alerted them two months later. The company later paid $250,000 for the breaches and about $135,700 for permission to leave the broken equipment on the seafloor for 50 years.

How to weigh in

The public comment window closes Monday, August 3. Comments can be submitted online or at in-person meetings in Newport and Seaside, or at a virtual meeting. The State Land Board, made up of Gov. Tina Kotek, Secretary of State Tobias Read and State Treasurer Elizabeth Steiner, will vote on the rules at a monthly meeting before the end of 2026.