Independent economic studies for the governments, developers, and businesses of Crook County, built on the county's own federal data and designed to hold up when a lender, a school board, or a funder reviews them.
| Largest sectors by employment | Jobs | Concentration |
|---|---|---|
| Accommodation & food services | 795 | 1.16x |
| Construction | 794 | 2.01x |
| Health care & social assistance | 776 | 0.69x |
| Manufacturing | 746 | 1.19x |
| Retail trade | 647 | 0.85x |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2023 annual averages, Crook County. Concentration is a location quotient (county sector share of employment divided by the national share), computed by Project Red Team. Covered jobs exclude the self-employed and some agricultural workers.
Crook County runs on roughly 7,435 covered jobs across 892 establishments, at an average annual wage of $75,535, a wage that beats the state and national average by a wide margin for a county this rural. Job growth was flat over the year, up 0.0 percent, so whatever comes next has to add jobs rather than just replace them. Accommodation and food services (795 jobs) and construction (794 jobs) are the largest employers by headcount, followed closely by health care and social assistance (776), manufacturing (746), and retail trade (647). The real story sits in concentration: construction runs at more than twice the national rate (LQ 2.01), and agriculture, forestry, and fishing runs at more than five times the national rate (5.36x), the highest specialization in the county. Information also runs at 3.59 times the national rate, an unusual concentration for a county this size, and it traces directly to Prineville's data center campuses, which show up in the wage figure above as much as in the concentration number.
Crook County's economy sits on two very different bases. The older one is ranching and hay, along with the wood products mills that have processed timber off the surrounding forests for generations, the ordinary working economy of a high-desert county in central Oregon. The newer one is data centers: Facebook, now Meta, broke ground on its first Prineville campus in 2010 and has since built out more than a dozen buildings and roughly $2 billion in investment, and Apple built its own campus inside the same enterprise zone. Together they turned Prineville into one of the largest data center hubs in the Pacific Northwest, helped pull the county's average wage up to $75,535, and helped cut unemployment from roughly 20 percent in the depths of the 2008 recession to around 6 percent today.
That growth came with a bargain most residents never see the terms of. Both companies built inside Prineville's Long-Term Rural Enterprise Zone, which exempts new buildings and equipment from property tax for up to 15 years in exchange for a minimum $12.5 million investment and a jobs commitment. The exemption has been renewed and extended as each new building goes up, and Crook County's own school district has told reporters it gave up close to $29 million in local revenue to these exemptions in a single year. A new ranching operation, a wood products expansion, or the next data center deal all face the same test here: what it actually delivers in jobs, payroll, and local spending, set plainly against what the county and its schools give up to get it.
The county's next data center tax abatement deal is the live question worth putting through the engine. Facebook's original Prineville tax exemption is nearing expiration, and Prineville and Crook County are already negotiating terms for the campuses that follow, weighing another long-term enterprise zone exemption against a minimum investment figure, a jobs count, and a set of community fees. That is exactly the kind of decision a fiscal impact analysis is built for: model the direct jobs and payroll a new campus adds, the construction spending, and the local purchases, against the property tax the county, the schools, and the fire district give up for 15 years, and show the county what the trade actually nets out to in real dollars rather than the headline investment figure the press release leads with.
Public-data path: BLS QCEW for the local job and wage base, Oregon Department of Revenue enterprise zone and Strategic Investment Program filings for the abatement terms, Crook County Assessor records for exempted value, USDA NASS for the ranching and hay economy, and the city's own franchise fee and utility revenue reporting for what the existing deals return each year.
We produce the study first: economic impact (what a project brings to Crook County, in jobs, output, and tax revenue, with local leakage handled honestly), feasibility and viability (whether it should move forward, measured with the finance a lender runs), and fiscal impact for public budgets and grant applications. Every engagement returns a full report, a one-page brief, a reviewer pack, and a decision package.
And if a study is already in hand, we review it: we inventory its quotable claims, attach the evidence, and tell you plainly what survives review before you quote it or fund against it. More on reading a study before you rely on it.
National firms fly in, bill the travel, and price a county like Crook out of the analysis it needs, even as the company across the table negotiating its next abatement can afford a specialist of its own. We work across the interior West, we can be on-site in Prineville, and we build every study on the county's measured federal and state record, the same BLS and enterprise zone data behind the numbers above, so the result traces to a public source and survives scrutiny from either side of the table.
Have a project in Crook County? Tell us what you are weighing and where. We will lay out what it takes to answer it, and what it costs.
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