re: Some Louisiana lawmakers backing out of NDAs as questions arise over data centers & deals

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the info not being disclosed is usually jobs, investment and the location they are targeting to buy. The reason being competitive advantage of rivals not knowing. All of those things are of course revealed at the meetings where any actual incentives will be approved.

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Correct.. As an example, an economic development client I was working with wanted to attract a bitcoin mining server center. The big draw was the power sale the EDC wanted to secure, but they weren’t a valid bidder without a significant fiber build (>$1M).

Fiber builds aren’t cheap (about $60 k /mi) and typically require 2-3 years lead time to provision, longer if rail RoWs are involved.

In our case I would not approve such CapEx without the privacy afforded by NDAs, and I approved dozens of such projects every year in rural Georgia and north Florida .

Just good business with ethical governments

And where is your proof of corruption? Because you think it’s corrupt?

A NDA sounds nefarious to someone that has never worked in the private sector and dealt with 10 million plus dollar projects.

The selling land as a private citizen but while in an official does lend its self to a little bit of the insider trading area. I would argue though that if I own land and someone is approaching me to buy it, I’d get up to speed on what’s going on before selling that land. The real scandal would be if he sold for way under value to help energy acquire more land knowing who it was.

I would expect if energy wanted to buy land I owned they would have me sign a NDA just as a standard practice.

The real nefarious actions aren’t NDAs it’s passing things to give data centers, or flock under coded titles or such. The public doesn’t pay near enough attention to these local meetings. I’d also say the more nefarious act is these boards delaying votes on controversial topics with the goal to have the public forget.

Democrats want to block economic progress.

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They aren’t secret for long once there is a meeting. All it really is keeping who is buying and investing until a deal is in place. So if tax payers pay attention there would be a parish council meeting where they approve these things. Almost no incentive can be given without a public meeting.

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This isn't even remotely true. The data center projects are getting hundreds of millions of dollars, in the case of Meta likely tens of billions, in Tax exemptions without any public notice. Only their ITEP exemptions would require any local input, and those would be a relatively small part of the incentives these projects receive. The bulk is sales and use tax exemptions which are finalized before the projects are even public.