Oregon Public Broadcasting

A follow-up now to a three-part series we brought you back in December on Washington and Oregon state data centers.

These are high-tech facilities that house computer servers for state agencies.

The Washington state lawmaker who waged a one-man battle to stop construction of a new data center in Olympia now says that fight is over. Austin Jenkins has this update.

In a lengthy blog post, Representative Reuven Carlyle of Seattle says he is formally ending his vigorous opposition to the $300M data center project near the State Capitol.

Carlyle says because of the way the project is financed - through bonds that were sold by a non-profit, not the state -- the legislature's hands are tied to alter the project.

Carlyle, a Democrat and high-tech entrepreneur, says he still thinks the state is locking itself into a 20th century approach to data management.

Reuven Carlyle: "At the same time, there is an opportunity from this crisis. And I think that we can make lemonade from this mistake and the way to do that is to have a statewide enterprise-wide strategy around technology."

What Carlyle means is individual state agencies have their own technology fiefdoms. He says that will have to end.

Washington state spends more than a billion dollars on technology every year. Carlyle says chipping away at that spending will be his next battle.