re: If you are questioning data centers in your community you want to be poor and backwards

That’s fine the discussion about data centers should be had. I don’t care if we build them but we shouldn’t be giving them incentives and people should stop pushing false negatives that they are going to create these massive permanent jobs. The fact is they don’t and they aren’t massive tax wins for a locality. If the equipment has a sales tax exemption which a lot do, you aren’t getting sales tax from them, if you have property under a massive abatement you aren’t collecting property tax on that until year 10 or later and by then that property is going to be obsolete and retired. So not much new property tax revenue. The massive ones create maybe 20 jobs so very little withholding and very little economic impact.

This isn’t like a manufacturing company getting incentives. The equipment there is going to outlast any abatement. Manufacturing actually creates jobs unlike data centers.

Should we ban data centers no, we probably do need them but we can have the discussion without making false statements like they are bringing massive tax benefits. They aren’t doing that and it only makes credits and incentives look worse when these things are getting deals based on bullshite data.