CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – I’m never disappointed when people bring issues they care about to local government, and they get their way.
That’s happened twice this month.
Flock cameras are unpopular in Wausau. Local residents don’t want to live in a surveillance state. Enough people have spoken up, and the Public Health and Safety Committee and the Finance Committee have voted to eliminate Flock funding. The will of the people be done.
In Wisconsin Rapids, residents don’t want a large data center at the site of the old Verso Paper Mill. Its been voted down unanimously by the city’s plan commission and the city council.
I’d like to talk more about data centers.
They’re so unpopular now that it’s almost impossible to get one approved anywhere. And most of the research against them is from China… a country that trails in the AI race, and would do anything to catch up with the United States.
So I ask this question: where are the reasonable, moderate voices on the data center issue?
Not all data centers are mega-projects like Microsoft and Google are building. Some are industry-specific, are much smaller, and are air-cooled instead of water-cooled.
Consider a data center that stores medical records. It would be smaller, accessed only by hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies. It would have a modest footprint. Other data centers might process only banking information, or package delivery data. Could smaller facilities like that still win approval… somewhere?
Take Marathon County, for instance. It is the largest geographic county in the state, with more than 4,000 square miles. Must all of it be off limits to data centers? Surely somewhere is okay.
The people of Wisconsin Rapids didn’t want a big data center at the entrance point to their city. And, for that project, there were legitimate power and water concerns. They got their way, and I’m glad. That’s the way the system should work. But now the discussion should shift to data center projects that reasonable people can support. China can’t be the only place where data centers are being built.
Chris Conley
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