alt Hacker NewsProperty Tax revenue, and they are not a drain on services like schools, roads, fire department, police department etc.
I'm watching this debate in a town that i am from and where I live. Our choices are pretty much be swallowed up by growth from neighboring cities and become a bed room community or solar farms and data centers.
The downside with becoming a bedroom community is you risk creating a negative tax base. where the cost of providing services is more than the properties bring with property taxes. I don't know what the right answer is.
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Data centers have the potential for fire and so local fire departments must spend resources being prepared for such a thing.
Edit: water (and sometimes electricity) are local services also and data centers use quite a bit of these.
Property tax revenue seem highly unlikely when the DC operators have been given enormous tax cuts.
Yeah if you look at it purely from a municipal profit and loss point of view, datacenters are clearly great in that they ideally would pay higher taxes and have less drain than something like a shopping mall.
But in this case you also need to consider other points of view to decide what the right answer is, such as the extreme resource extraction datacenters have, pollution issues, and the opportunity cost of using limited land for other purposes.
If you're looking purely from a short-term profit and loss analysis and ignore all other factors, datacenters is the right answer by default but you arrive it at it using the wrong method.
Opposition to data centers is like 90% hatred of Silicon Valley and its obstinate elites. One they amplified by trying to build these things sneakily.
Nobody invests a billion dollars in a facility without first lobbying to get an exemption from property taxes. Most states in the US have passed incentives that include sales and property tax exemptions.
They're all drain.