Shameless Frontier Mayor and Booster@jamesdecker2006
Let me speak about the data center discourse, because most of the conversation is maddening and this wholesale framing of opposition frustrates me.
I am the mayor of a rural community who has a Google data center being constructed about 15 miles outside of town. I have actual personal experience on the matter, rather than just posting about it.
Our community has mixed feelings. We are cautiously hopeful about growth opportunities in a place that has been starved of such for decades. Our local sales tax revenues are up 30 to 40%, thanks to the influx of construction workers. Multiple new homes are under construction at the same time for the first time in 40 years. New retail businesses are inquiring.
Our city has contracted to sell water to Google for non-cooling purposes. It will result in about a 20% increase in city revenues. It also doesn’t jeopardize our citizens’ supply, because we’ll sell them less water than we sold to some large wholesale/industrial accounts that we held for 50 years until losing them in the early 2000s. They’re also paying for all the infrastructure.
Our people want to see progress, but we want to retain the character of our community that made our place special to begin with.
We are also not naïve. We realize we had very little say in this project. The project came here. We did not attract it. We did not give local tax incentives, nor will we. Some were given on the county level, but we didn’t have a say in that.
It’s jarring to our people to go (practically overnight) from a growth-starved rural place, struggling on the whims of the global ag economy, to an epicenter of the tech universe. We’re trying to use what power we have to make sure that our people benefit from this project as much as possible, rather than it becoming yet another case of economic colonialism, mining a rural community’s resources to benefit other people and places.
When people do have questions and concerns about the sudden data center rush, many of them are well intentioned. Why so many? Why so fast? Why everywhere all at once? Is this prudent? Have we thought through all the consequences? Can we afford it? Do we have the resources for it?
None of those are unfair questions, but many of the answers are vague and nebulous at best. Much of the justification is “uhh, reasons I guess. And China.” People would feel better if we had some sort of actual policy discourse about a moment that’s being billed as the most important since the Industrial Revolution. But instead, many of our elected officials are fighting about the stupid and meaningless topic of the moment, because that requires less brainpower and it gets you on tv. People with fair questions get lumped in with the weirdos and billed as a “loon” with “fringe beliefs.”
Data centers may well be the next great moment in American innovation and they may revolutionize many things in many good ways. But the conversation is not meeting the moment.
