For some strange reason, they apparently believe the dislike is rooted primarily in the size and energy usage of ultra-large data centers—the ones that take up a hundred acres or more and consume as much electricity as a major city.
While it’s true that people dislike them for those aspects, it’s not only those things. It’s not only any one thing or any two things.
It’s the combination of bad things associated with data centers that has drawn the ire of good, decent people all over the state. These are not people easily swayed by the cause of the day or some liberal talking points. Many of them are not all that politically engaged, and they usually vote for the conservative candidate they know.
But they’ve been spurred into action—showing up at county commission meetings and city council meetings and, God help them, political rallies—by a laundry list of grievances that mostly add up to one thing: Their elected leaders have failed them.
They have failed them purposefully. They have failed them on a grand scale. They have failed them in a manner that has infuriated them.
And now, it seems, even their chosen leadership at the state level—the Republicans they’ve put their trust in—are also failing them because they keep telling them that everything’s going to be fine, that these insignificant changes will be enough or that their very real concerns are bullcrap based on Chinese propaganda.
Except that 2 million-square-foot monstrosity that’s sucking up water and electricity and emitting a steady hum that you can feel in your bones from two miles away is in what used to be their neighbor’s soybean field, disrupting their lives, killing their water pressure and jacking up their power bills. There are lights on all the time, and they’ve heard horror stories about the pollution being generated just a few hundred yards from land many of them have had in their families for generations.
These folks aren’t much on hyperbole. They don’t like to cause a scene. And they don’t want anything other than the peace and quiet they believe they’re entitled to on their own property.
So, they’re pissed. And they have every right to be.
Because also baked into this data center problem is a government problem—a government that has sold them out, repeatedly and grossly.
In town after town in Alabama, local governments have basically cut ironclad deals with companies to develop large data centers without a single word being uttered publicly and with apparently zero thought given to protecting the citizens of those towns.
Some of the deals are so insanely sketchy that the details sound like outright lies when you first hear them.
Like in Bessemer, where city officials signed a nondisclosure agreement that states that city officials will destroy records, including notes taken by city lawmakers, whenever the developer demands it. It also kept hidden all sorts of details about the project, and Bessemer officials refused to release any of that information—including the NDA itself—until environmental groups threatened them with a lawsuit.
Whenever you go to that much trouble to hide something from the public, the public is going to automatically know it’s shady as hell.
And Bessemer isn’t alone.
In Columbiana, the outgoing mayor committed the town to a data center deal that apparently no other city official ever voted on. But the deal the mayor signed prevented the new mayor from easily exiting it.
Down in Brookwood, a secretive deal is bringing a massive, 2 million-square-foot data center that’s going to be built across from the town’s middle school. The deal was so far along before anyone in the public learned about it that the Alabama Department of Environmental Management had approved the plans for the build-out. (ADEM also apparently approved the plans without knowing the center’s water usage plan because … why not just throw one more government failure on top of it all?)
Then there’s another massive data center planned for Lowndes County—it’s going up a short distance from the historic Civil Rights Trail, where marchers in 1965 traveled from Selma to Montgomery. It, too, was kept secret until the project was all but finalized. Probably because the developers and county officials didn’t think the steady hum from the data center would be a great tourist attraction.
These things aren’t happening by chance, and these secretive tactics aren’t being used because these things are great deals for the communities. They’re being used because the people behind the projects know what we all know now—that as soon as the general public learns the details, they’re outraged.
And please, stop it with this nonsensical argument about these things being huge moneymakers for the communities. They’re not. Because in basically every deal I’ve mentioned, any basic tax revenue that could be recouped through property taxes and pushed back into the local towns is offset by huge—YUUUUGEEE—tax abatements and givebacks.
Most of these places will create relatively few permanent jobs—often only dozens—once they’re up and running. The only money they’re going to be generating long term is for the out-of-state companies that own the data centers.
Look, we all know what’s driving this. The companies building these data centers, and the developers and real estate professionals they employ on their advance teams, are spreading money around to local leaders. (I’m not saying anything illegal is happening, just to be clear.) Land deals are happening left and right. Huge amounts are being paid to secure land and access roads.
And the working folks of these towns have noticed that all of the perks and all of the benefits seem to go to just a handful of people in government, while they’re left with nothing but the pollution, the noise and the higher energy bills.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways to ensure that data centers are not leeches on the local community. There are ways to ensure that your local citizens—the folks who voted you into those positions—are considered and that their peace and quiet and property rights are protected. There’s a way to ensure that data centers don’t jack up power bills, overuse water, chase away wildlife or pollute the entire area around them.
But to do so, laws have to be passed, regulations put in place and oversight established. You have to stop this cloak-and-dagger absurdity and stop selling out your people for a few quick bucks.
To do it, you need a plan and a little time—a moratorium, perhaps—and you need elected leaders who are putting you and the local community above personal enrichment. There’s a way to do all of that, but you’re probably going to have to stop caring so much about party affiliation.
