Data center. (CC0) During last week’s election, voters across Wisconsin cast ballots for judges, school boards, county boards, mayors and city alders. And from the northwest to the southeast, some people voted with one big issue on their minds: data centers. As communities across Wisconsin grapple with these proposed developments — and the commensurate possibility for economic opportunity, or consumer costs and environmental degradation — voters are increasingly tuned into this issue, experts say. “Data centers are bringing out … a broader range of concerns from community members,” said Hannah Wiseman, who directs the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State’s law school. “This is drawing growing political interest, and candidates are certainly going to get more questions about their stance on this issue.” In Wisconsin, increased awareness has translated into a more negative perception of these projects, across party lines. That was evident in Port Washington, where voters made national headlines when they approved a first-in-the-nation referendum to give citizens more input over data center development plans. And in Janesville, where a proposed data center at the site of the former General Motors plant has sparked tremendous community engagement, a political newcomer named Cassandra Pope was elected to city council after organizing against the proposal. Her platform included promising more transparency in development. Those who support data centers point to job creation and tax revenue. People who oppose their arrival worry they’ll correspond with increased energy costs, use up water and create noise and light pollution. Recent polling from Marquette indicates that, increasingly, a majority of Wisconsinites, both Republicans and Democrats, think the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits. That poll also indicated that Republicans have grown increasingly cautious over time. “It’s a bipartisan and nonpartisan issue, for different reasons,” said Matthew Crowe, who just ousted a 16-year incumbent in the race to be mayor of Menomonie. “The more Democratic or more liberal voters are worried about the environmental footprints. … the more conservative voters don’t want something like this in their backyard and taking farmland, including the culture and the rural values.” Crowe said he didn’t run directly on opposition to data centers. Instead, he said, many of the issues he heard about from voters were directly downstream of concerns that came up as a $1.6 billion proposed data center project in Menomonie played out. Last fall, community members pushed back against the proposal, eventually pausing the project. The city council — on which Crowe served — later passed an ordinance to restrict their development in the future. “The data center is more of a symptom of a lack of development” in the community, he told WPR. “However, because we lacked that strategic growth over the years, and we lacked that additional tax base and additional revenue, the data center, I think, looked appealing to certain people on paper.” The process also brought up concerns about transparency in government, government accountability and the growing role of AI — which relies on the processing power of data centers — Crowe added. Wiseman, the energy policy expert, says those amalgamated concerns mean that people who might not usually vote the same end up united on this issue. “It’s not just opposition to the infrastructure,” she said. “I think there’s growing awareness of the large amounts of money and political power and corporate power associated with these data centers, the nondisclosure agreements and other tools that are being used by these parties to move their projects forward, and I think that that brings in more bipartisan concerns.” Elsewhere, data centers have motivated local political change. A suburb of St. Louis last week ousted four city council members in what was described as backlash against a proposed $6 billion data center there — and the officials who supported it. Listen to the WPR report Up and down the ballot, data centers are becoming a motivating issue for voters was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
