Elected Leaders or Corporate Puppets? The Data Center Debacle
Local elected officials have recently taken great strides to highlight the fact that they don’t work for us. Instead, they seem mostly lockstep in making sure that we know they are beholden to the corporate agenda of hyperscale data center developers. Whether it is the mayor denying a role in a recent decision to reconsider and approve amendments to data center rules, despite reportedly having instructed her Chief of Staff to contact the city staffer in charge of the meeting, or the city’s refusal to reveal any details about a newly proposed north city data center, it is clear that local officials don’t care about what voters want. They care about the agenda that corporate leaders, and their donations, are interested in advancing.
For close to a year, city residents have been forced to watch a soap opera of cowardice that stars the city’s aldermen, mayor, and senior city staffers. At first, city leadership indicated that they would join other regional governments in imposing a moratorium on large data center construction. This would have been to allow the city to come up with regulations for these new industrial sites. This was publicly proposed by planning department head Don Roe, the same man who would later follow the mayor’s directive to ask commissioners to change their votes to support amendments to the city’s rushed and flawed data center rules. Instead, the city quickly changed course. Rather than wait for a regulatory review process to proceed in an orderly fashion, the mayor decided to issue an executive order allowing data centers under the “conditional use” process. This created a situation giving developers a total upper hand. This move put all of the pressure on local elected officials, with the constant threat that a lack of action would lead to hyperscale data centers being built with virtually no regulation. In the months that followed city voters have been forced to watch a sham process unfold.
Instead of a thoughtful process that could’ve led to guidelines supported by the community, local officials decided to go along with the mayor’s plan to shove through hastily written rules that lack much of any enforcement provisions and are filled with loopholes. This is not to say that the mayor has been alone in supporting this strategy. It has faced little pushback from the Board of Aldermen. While officials in St. Charles County pumped the brakes on data center development, city officials are putting the pedal to the metal to get the proposed Armory data center deal approved. Recent weeks have also brought mention of plans to approve another data center in north city. President of the Board of Aldermen Megan Green has joined board members in pushing to finish the new “regulations”, citing the potential for a second hyperscale data center being located in the city. Instead of pushing back against this rushed and flawed process, elected officials have continued to bend over backwards to appease corporate interests, leaving voters wonder who is representing them in city government.
Then there’s the fact that Clayco, a company founded by Mayor Spencer’s most public and vocal billionaire supporter Bob Clark, is profiting off the boom by making modular electrical and mechanical rooms for data centers. That seems worth mentioning.
What connects this entire series of events is the way in which city leaders have done everything in their power to facilitate data center approvals, while voters seem overwhelmingly opposed to the slapdash “process” that officials have pursued. In this way, the data center debacle is instructive, as it makes clear elected officials don’t see voters as their most important constituency. From the ridiculous “process” to local officials actively playing their roles in concealing the identities of the end users behind the proposals, voters are right to be mad. Local officials clearly see themselves as working for the corporations that will use the data centers, not city residents. Sure, some have echoed voter displeasure, but they seem unable to call this out as what it is: clearly corrupt. By failing to call this out, they have decided to put their relationships with fellow elected officials and corporate donors above their constituents and the city itself.
People are mad, rightfully. We deserve elected officials who work for us, not corporations.
