So. I closed out today’s legislative wrap-up with a reference to Tim ‘Solid Waste’ Sheldon. Tim might want to have someone read this article to him:
FESTUS, Missouri — Voters in a small Missouri town, unhappy with the city council’s approval of a $6 billion data center, struck back at the polls last week, ousting all four incumbent council members running for reelection.
Tuesday’s election in Festus, Missouri — a city of 12,000 people along the Mississippi River a half-hour south of St. Louis — is the latest example of growing public backlash against cities agreeing to host hyperscale data centers over the objections of residents concerned about their local impacts.
On the same day as the Festus election, voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb, where tech giants Oracle and OpenAI are building a $15 billion data center campus, also registered their disapproval by overwhelmingly passing a first-of-a-kind referendum to restrict future projects. At least three other cities across the country will vote on similar measures this year.
The remaining unanswered question, which came first, Festus, MO, or THIS GUY?:
BTW, here’s what happens when you offer incentives to attract data centers to your state:
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year out of state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
Despite these generous subsidies, data center owners are legally allowed to shield many of their financial details from state oversight. They aren’t required to prove their ongoing eligibility for the tax exemptions unless they are audited by the state Department of Revenue. Lawmakers enacted sales and use tax breaks for data centers in 2010 and expanded them in 2015.
“At that time, no one could have predicted the explosive growth of data centers and how much energy they consumed,” Gov. Josh Stein told his Energy Policy Task Force, which met this week. “And because data centers at that point were a brand-new industry, they benefited from financial incentives to induce capital to invest. Those days are long gone.”
Consumers pay sales and use taxes on food, clothing, furniture, utility payments, general merchandise, and other goods.
In North Carolina, data centers don’t pay sales tax on certain equipment—heating and air conditioning, computer hardware and software, and electrical infrastructure—so long as they meet county wage standards, provide health insurance to full-time employees and invest $75 million in private funds in a project within five years.
Nor do qualifying data centers pay taxes on electricity use. Under that exemption, a large project that consumes 100 megawatts of energy avoids paying as much as $2.2 million a year, state Commerce Department figures show. (Because utility Duke Energy might negotiate project-specific terms with very large customers, this number could vary.)
Data center operators don’t have to report the amount of exemptions they’ve claimed. Nor must they provide information that would allow an independent evaluation of the financial impact of their projects. In some cases, data centers contractually require local governments to keep electricity and water usage secret. “State agencies have a limited view of the sector’s energy use and economic activity,” the Commerce Department wrote in a report to the energy policy task force.
There’s something so…Delaware-y about all this. Unlike Delaware, though, it looks like North Carolina may crack down on all this corporate secrecy:
Sen. Julie Mayfield, a Buncombe County Democrat who sits on the energy policy task force, said the legislature should reconsider tax breaks for data centers, consistent with its repeal of several clean energy incentives. “If the original purpose was to incentivize data centers to come here, you could argue that the objective has been met,” she said.
Widener Law School To Relocate To Downtown Wilmington. I like this development:
A project bringing three higher education institutions to downtown Wilmington is moving forward.
The Bridge Project expands the Community Education Building’s existing educational ecosystem as it transforms downtown office space.
“One, it’s the revitalization of 3/4 of a million square feet of vacant office space into educational use, and associated residential needs,” said Thère du Pont is the Chairman of the Community Education Building Board. “Equally it is a nationally unique birth cradle to career pipeline, literally starting with students at birth and our Youth Development Center in the early learning seats. All the way through a series of K-12 schools.”
The Bridge will house the University of Delaware’s Associate in Arts Program and Delaware State University’s College of Public Health at the former Bracebridge IV building.
Meanwhile, the former Bracebridge II will be the new home for Widener University’s Delaware Law School which is moving to the legal district in downtown Wilmington within walking distance of state, federal and bankruptcy courts.
It also puts the school’s no-cost legal clinics right in Wilmington’s business district.
“This move did not become about a building. It was about people and serving this community, and everything that we did from that moment was calibrated to being downtown to serve the people of this community. And so I am thankful today to be a part of that vision,” said Delaware Law Dean Todd Clark.
Delaware’s top federal judge rejected on Tuesday the state government’s attempt to withhold employment records from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation of more than a dozen businesses, ordering officials to hand over the data.
In a 27-page ruling that smacks of incredulity in recounting the Delaware Department of Labor’s reasons for not complying with a federal subpoena, Delaware District Court Chief Judge Colm Connolly wrote that “these are not close calls.”
The ruling was largely expected after a hearing earlier this month, when a skeptical Connolly picked apart the state’s arguments and told the defending counsel that her legal brief was not written on her “best day.”
After asserting that complying with the subpoena was in the federal government’s legitimate interests and denying that doing so would endanger Delaware’s unemployment trust fund, Connolly surmised that the non-compliance was simply “a political argument; not a legal one.”
“This court is not the proper forum in which to air [DDOL’s] generalized grievances about the conduct of government. It would be wholly inappropriate for me to consider this line of argument, and I decline to do so,” wrote Connolly, a former U.S. attorney who was appointed to the bench in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term.
You Just KNOW Who Has Profited By The US-Israeli War On Iran…:
The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30m every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran, according to exclusive analysis for the Guardian. Saudi Aramco, Gazprom and ExxonMobil are among the biggest beneficiaries of the bonanza, meaning key opponents of climate action continue to prosper.
The conflict pushed the price of oil to an average of $100 (£74) a barrel in March, leading to estimated windfall war profits for the month of $23bn for the companies. Oil and gas supplies will take months to return to pre-war levels and the companies will make $234bn by the end of the year if the oil price continues to average $100. The analysis uses data from a leading intelligence provider, Rystad Energy, analysed by Global Witness.
Aramco is by far the biggest winner, estimated to make a war profit of $25.5bn in 2026 if the oil price averages $100. That is on top of the huge profits habitually made by the majority state-owned Saudi company – $250m a day between 2016 to 2023. Saudi Arabia has for decades led successful efforts to block and delay international climate action.
You Just KNOW Who Has Paid For These Profits:
The excess profits come from the pockets of ordinary people as they pay high prices to fill up their vehicles and power their homes, as well as from businesses incurring higher energy bills. Dozens of countries have cut fuel taxes to help struggling consumers, meaning those nations, including Australia, South Africa, Italy, Brazil and Zambia, are raising less money for public services.
What do you want to talk about?