Facebook Dons Cowboy Boots, Rides Into Desert For Economic Rescue

Prineville, Oregon: A far cry from Silicon Valley, but a good match for Facebook

Facebook’s Ken Patchett showed up in Prineville, Oregon to run the company’s new-age data center, and Steve Forrester recognized him right away.
Forrester, Prineville’s city manager, is a fourth-generation Oregonian and about as far removed from a Silicon Valley insider as you can get. But he remembered the Facebook man from a meeting years earlier, when Patchett sold him a wood chipper while working for an outfit that manufactured forest equipment. “It blew my mind,” Forrester says. “We actually have a lot in common.”
Ken Patchett spent a year and a half running Google’s Asian data centers, and he played a similar role at Microsoft. But in 2010, when he arrived in Prineville, a tiny town on the high desert of central Oregon, he fit right in, with his boots and his matching belt buckle and what can only be described as a wonderfully gregarious attitude. “Ken has a little bit of the cowboy in him,” says Eric Klann, Prineville’s city engineer. “And this is a cowboy community.”
As Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other internet giants reach more and more people with more and more web services, they’re also expanding their network of massive computing facilities that run these services. In many cases, they’re building in rural areas like Prineville, where local governments are willing to provide tax breaks in the hope that these big names will boost a struggling local economy. Prineville actually expanded its borders to accommodate Facebook’s facility.
Some have questioned whether these “cloud computing” facilities can really improve a local economy. In a recent story from The Washington Post, residents of Maiden, North Carolina, express their dismay with a brand-new $1 billion Apple data center, saying it has very little impact on the surrounding community. But according to many Prineville residents — though not all — Facebook has slotted into central Oregon quite nicely, bringing not only a boost to the economy but also some pride and good will.

With his bit-of-cowboy, Patchett is a visible part of the community — at least according to Forrester and Klann and a few others — making him a nice metaphor for Facebook’s Oregonian adventure. “Ken’s got a lot of data center experience,” says Jason Carr of Economic Development for Central Oregon, a not-for-profit dedicated to improving the local economy, “but he also understands the economics and the culture of a small town.”
According to Carr, Facebook has made a conscious effort to integrate with Prineville, and the effort has paid off. “This is a rural community, and it’s economically distressed, so no one business is going to turn everything around,” Carr says, “but the overall impact of Facebook has been more far-reaching than most people realize.”
‘Keeping the Town Alive’
Facebook employs 55 people in its data center — only five more than Apple employs at its facility in Maiden, North Carolina. But according to Ken Patchett, about 70 percent of those jobs are staffed by locals, and this is only one way the facility feeds the local economy. Construction brings in additional jobs, and as Cart points out, new jobs aren’t the only benefit a business can bring to a community.
Facebook pays local businesses to cater its daily lunches, for instance, rotating from restaurant to restaurant, and a nearby commercial laundry, Northwest Laundry Services, cleans the data center’s door mats each week. “The data center has been great for the community,” says Mike Uriz, the owner of Northwest Laundry. “It has kept this town alive.”
Ken Patchett and his top lieutenants are from outside the community, but most now live in the area full time, and Facebook has made of point of hiring locals to work under these top managers. “When a company like Facebook comes to a rural, depressed area like this, it’s important to realize you can be a beacon of light,” Patchett says, showing off the lobby of Facebook’s data center, decorated with Prineville photographs dating back to the turn of the last century. “You have to be aware of who you are and how you’re being perceived.”
Facebook created about 1,400 temporary jobs when building the data center, and according to Patchett, more than half of those were staffed by locals. Two local metal fabrication businesses, Fabtech and Proline Fabrication, did work for the facility. “When [Facebook] first came, there was a bad taste in the mouths of some. [Facebook was] excavating before anyone knew what was going on and some local people who felt they should have gotten some work out of it but didn’t,” says Dean Pettyjohn, the owner of Proline. “But overall, I think it’s been a very good thing.”
As with the completed data center, the construction work creates more than just jobs. “You have people patronizing the local restaurants and gas stations and hotels and shops. All of that impact has been greatly felt,” says Carr. “They would not have seen that extra business is Facebook hadn’t been here.”
The existing data center is actually only half of Facebook’s eventual footprint in the town. The company is building a second facility of the same size — about 330,000 square feet — right next door to the first. “The level of construction activity that we saw through most of 2010 and into 2011 will pretty much continue through the next few years,” says Carr. This second site will also add 10 to 15 more permanent jobs.
‘I Ain’t Seen It’

Ken Patchett, general manager of Facebook's Prineville data center

Some still question whether Facebook is really having the impact it promised before coming to Oregon. “They said it was going to create thousands of jobs for local businesses,” says 21-year-old Josh Willard, who owns a landscaping business that has not received work from Facebook. “I ain’t seen it.” And other locals say much the same.
But many others are quite pleased the arrival of the world’s largest social network. And Carr says any blanket criticism of Facebook is unfounded. “My opinion is that those are uninformed opinions,” he tells Wired. “They don’t understand what the data center has brought.”
When we walk into the gym on Prineville’s Main Street — Norm’s XTreme Fitness Center — Bobby Blanchard is at a desktop computer, checking his Facebook news feed. “I know that here in the gym they get talked about a lot — and the things they do around town. And I see their name in everything — everything from one end of Prineville to the other,” says Blanchard, who works in the gym. “So, yeah, I’d say they’ve been a blessing for our community in every aspect.”
As Carr explains, a data center doesn’t feed the Prineville economy the way the logging industry once did, but it’s still a welcome addition to a community that has fallen on tough times. “Data centers are more capital intensive as opposed to labor intensive, so a lot of misconceptions comes from that. This community is used to logging and saw mills and wood manufacturing plants that have hundreds of employees in them. Facebook is not going to make as many jobs as those kinds of things. But there are other benefits,” he says.
“Data centers provide some diversification. It adds something different. Besides the jobs, the city of Prineville will likely receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in new revenue in power franchise fees. That effects the health of the city, which can in turn affect taxpayers.”
According to Eric Klann, Prineville’s city engineer, the day that Facebook arrived to discuss a possible data center in the town, he received an e-mail with the latest unemployment rate for the county surrounding the town. It was 21.8 percent. “When you consider that, it’s been great for our community to have the extra jobs, but it has also really put us on the map. People now know where Prineville is,” he says.
Is there any drawback to having Facebook in Prineville?
“In this economy?” Klann says. “There sure isn’t.”