I don’t need to tell you this, but everything is getting more expensive by the day.
With this affordability crisis impacting all of Florida’s working families and seniors, you would hope our elected officials in Tallahassee would be spending this year’s legislative session looking for ways to lower our costs, raise our wages and provide us with the tools we need to live our versions of the American Dream.
Instead, some politicians want to let billion-dollar companies add to that burden by building huge data centers that need enormous amounts of electricity, drive up our utility bills and destroy our environment and quality of life without a public debate.
They’re doing this through Senate Bill 1118, what we’re calling the Data Centers Secrecy Act, in Tallahassee. If signed into law, the Data Centers Secrecy Act would create a one-year public records exemption for data center planning records held by local cities and counties.
Why would they want to keep local communities in the dark about if a data center was being planned for your area?
It’s simple.
The Big Tech billionaires building these data centers know local communities don’t want them, with the vice president for state policy for the Data Center Coalition telling the Florida House Economic Infrastructure Committee in December that, “To say that data centers are unpopular right now is probably an understatement, to say the least.”
He’s not wrong. Everywhere these hyperscale data centers become a reality in the backyards of everyday Americans, they are revolting against the negative impacts they have on the places they call home.
What are those negative impacts?
At a time when costs continue to rise, data centers are leading to skyrocketing utility costs for communities that are being forced to pick up the tab for the increased energy consumption needed to power them. In fact, some of these data centers use the same amount of energy per day as a small city, leading to higher than average utility rate increases in states with the highest concentrations of them.
In addition, at a time when Florida is on the verge of experiencing a water shortage crisis, data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, draining local water supplies. Not only that, they can lead to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, creating electronic and toxic waste runoff, and generating noise pollution from the constant hum of servers that impact surrounding neighborhoods.
While our groceries get more expensive, many of these data centers are placed on agricultural farmland, such as the one now being proposed in St. Lucie County, which has led to pushback from local ranchers worried about the impact this would have on the industry.
Too often, data center deals are rushed through with secrecy, tax giveaways and pressure from powerful corporations. That’s wrong.
We deserve transparency, local input and real decision-making power, because while these data centers make wealthy tech executives and corporations even richer, it is our local communities paying the price through higher utility bills, water shortages, pollution and lost quality of life.
As of now, the Data Centers Secrecy Act has passed two committees in the Florida Senate with only one no vote at each stop.
That means there’s still time to fight back to preserve our right to choose what’s best for us, so the working people, family farmers, and small businesses that power our economy can continue championing solutions for the places we call home, without politicians in Tallahassee and corporate elites in boardrooms sticking their noses into our affairs.
Politicians shouldn’t be able to sell out communities and our local freedom to Big Tech behind closed doors, especially not while they are raking in the cash as we’re struggling to make ends meet.
It’s time to tell legislators that when it comes to whether a data center is placed in our community, we’ll choose our power to make that decision over giving it away to Big Tech in the dark.
Natasha Sutherland is the executive director of Florida Watch, a nonprofit communications and research hub.
