The first line from the Mick Herron novel “Real Tigers” hit home for me last week. “Like most forms of corruption, it began with men in suits.”
The book has nothing to do with hyperscale-class data centers like the one proposed for Hermantown. Still, after seeing video of citizens (just some real people) filling city council chambers Monday, October 26, and disrupting the planned votes to let Google move forward with its really huge project, Herron’s quote seemed apropos.
Of course, since the project inception was hidden from the public under cover of a large, Twin Cities-based commercial builder, not the project’s end user, and papered over with enough non-disclosure agreements to support a small legal practice for a year, we don’t know if any of the players were in suits.
The non-violent, though loud, disruption of council meetings is a positive, healthy sign of folks exercising a fundamental right of citizenship. But for too many people in the city government and the media, such action is portrayed as an anti-social negative.
The poobahs sitting at the council’s partial roundtable, stunned by the opposition they faced, recessed their meeting and announced it would resume the next day. But the next morning, city officials canceled the Tuesday night meeting, citing safety concerns and early voting operations taking place in the building. Later that day, the City of Hermantown issued a press release, rescheduling the meeting to Friday, October 30, at 6:30 p.m. They limited the number of citizens who could speak to council, set up barriers to keep people in place that may have created unsafe conditions, and had law enforcement on hand to “keep order”.
Under the enforced quiet, the city council on the 30th basically said FU to its citizens and voted to move Google’s desires forward.
The Google data center, if built, is just a handful of miles from our little retirement house on the border of Proctor and Duluth. We don’t really have a dog in the Hermantown fight, but the idea of people wanting to preserve their community’s culture and environment sparks a bit of optimism in this old man. I am inspired to see the people I might cross paths with at one of the big-box retailers in Hermantown’s commercial area near the Miller Hill Mall standing against the cozy relationship between local officials, big business, and big government.
I’m pretty sure that Hermantown personnel and the electeds see the data center as economic development, the great myth that all economic development is unalloyed good. I wonder if any of them remember the Foxconn scam about investing millions and creating thousands of jobs in Wisconsin during the first Trump term. Maybe they should have checked with the city of Appleton, where the Prairie Correctional Facility that promised economic prosperity has sat vacant for 16 years. DHS just bought it at an outrageous amount, money that will never see city coffers or local businesses, but will pass from the federal checkbook to a large private prison company.
Even bad publicity might be good publicity, but bad economic development is just bad. The consultants, builders, and public officials whose promises get these projects started are never around when reality sets in.
In addition to the projected noise generated by these mega data centers along with their excessive consumption of electricity and water, there is the issue of what happens to the building site when the expected obsolescence happens as little as a few years down the line. Google has apparently offered a plan to address that in Hermantown, but will it be financially viable, or even around, in the end?
On Thursday, October 28, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had its worst one-day drop in market value in its history after releasing its earnings report for quarter three. Reinforcing the doomsday predictions I’ve heard, Alphabet erased about $500 billion in market value in a single trading session. Shares fell 12.6%.
I hear rumbling warnings from knowledgeable sources, similar to what I heard at the epicenter of the housing crisis 20 years ago. The financial chicanery feeding the stock market boom and the building of data centers these days is floating on a bubble, and that bubble could burst at any time.
