Economic studies for Douglas County, built on the county's own numbers

What the numbers show

Douglas County runs on roughly 12,300 covered jobs across about 1,100 establishments, at an average annual wage near $49,900, and job counts held roughly flat over the year, up about 0.1 percent. Retail is the largest employer at about 1,900 jobs, concentrated in East Wenatchee across the river from the larger Wenatchee market, followed by hospitality, construction, health care, and manufacturing. The concentration is unusual: utilities employ people here at more than four times the national rate, the mark of the Douglas County Public Utility District and its Columbia River hydropower, and retail and construction both run well above national shares. That cheap, abundant power is the county's defining economic asset, and it explains the direction its biggest projects are taking.

The Douglas County economy

Douglas County stretches from East Wenatchee up onto the Waterville Plateau, one of the state's major dryland wheat regions, with tree-fruit orchards along the Columbia and wind turbines on the high ground. East Wenatchee holds most of the population and retail, functioning as the east-bank partner to Wenatchee, while Waterville, the county seat, anchors the farm economy on the plateau. The Douglas County Public Utility District runs Wells Dam on the Columbia and delivers some of the lowest electricity rates in the nation, an advantage that has reshaped what the county competes for.

A data-center campus drawing on PUD hydropower, a wind project on the plateau, a wheat or tree-fruit operation, or a retail and housing build-out in East Wenatchee all turn on the same two questions: what the project genuinely adds to the county, and whether it pencils against local wages, land, and the power and water it will draw.

A project we could put through the engine here

The defining subject a study here now faces is the data-center buildout along the Columbia, where Microsoft and others are drawing on Douglas County Public Utility District hydropower and rates under five cents a kilowatt-hour. Microsoft's East Wenatchee campus is projected to add hundreds of full-time and service jobs across its Central Washington sites and to rank among the county's largest taxpayers once fully built. An honest study would weigh the property-tax base and construction spending against the modest permanent headcount these facilities carry, the power and water they consume, and how much of the benefit stays in the county rather than flowing to distant owners.

Public-data path: regional input-output multipliers, free-data regionalized or drawn from a purchased BEA RIMS II order where a project supplies one, BLS QCEW and Census LODES for the local labor base, USDA NASS for the wheat and tree-fruit core, public utility-district load and rate filings for power-intensive projects, and county assessor records for the property-tax questions data centers raise.

What we do for Douglas County

We produce the study first: economic impact (what a project brings to Douglas 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.

Local, and grounded in the record

National firms fly in, bill the travel, and price a county like Douglas out of the analysis it needs. We work across the interior West, we can be on-site, and we build every study on the county's measured federal record, the same BLS and Census data behind the numbers above, so the result traces to a public source and survives scrutiny.

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