OSAWATOMIE, Kansas — Kids take their chances squeezing through the stationary rail cars that regularly cut this small town in two. Sometimes they brave the high, narrow road bridge leading over the tracks.
That gives Bret Glendenning, the Osawatomie city manager, worries about how he’ll make things safer. He wonders how the town can afford to fix the once-elegant — now rusty — bridge that spans the Marais des Cygnes River. Or if it’ll ever catch up on basic street maintenance.
But the railroad business that helped build Osawatomie is long gone, taking away hundreds of jobs and leaving a hollowed-out tax base that leaves Glendenning struggling to pay for roads and scores of other things to fend off rural decay.
Now come plans to build a mid-sized data center flush with cash that would make the long-ago railroad boom look puny.
“I mean it’s huge,” Glendenning said. “It’s massive.”
Compared to anything that’s come to town in his lifetime, Glendenning said, “it’s like comparing the Earth to the Milky Way.”
Yet data centers are wildly unpopular right now for straining electrical grids, drinking oceans of water, generating noise and powering artificial intelligence that’s increasingly seen as a threat to your job — or even your species.
Cities and states that last year coveted the investments that data centers could bring have now begun to ban them, or at least impose enough regulation to force them to somebody else’s backyard.
That could let places like Osawatomie — small, rural and in need of investment — extract more from a data center-building industry that’s finding it ever harder to secure homes for its trillion-dollar investments.
That gives local officials like Glendenning new leverage in negotiating terms for a data center considered for a weedy, 20-year-old business park that’s yet to see any actual business.
“It’s always been planned and hoped that (something like) this would eventually happen,” he said.
Now, Osawatomie and its some 4,000 residents have developers promising that a data center could revitalize the town about an hour’s drive southeast of Kansas City.
“They’re just going to sit on the edge of town and print money for the city,” said Charles Tinsley, a vice president with MDH Partners, the Atlanta firm financing the Osawatomie data center proposal.
“They’re not going to be asking for tons of tax breaks. They’re not going to be consuming a bunch of municipal services,” he said. “They’re not going to add more students to the classroom.”
Tinsley said the city could collect fees on the 500 megawatts of power the data center could use, as well as collecting sales and property taxes. Tinsley said the city could see an extra $30 million a year. The school district would collect an extra $10 million a year, and so could the county.
“This is huge,” said Glendenning. “It’s going to allow us to do a lot of things that we have said we wanted to do for 20 years.”
Like cutting property tax rates. Since Osawatomie doesn’t have a lot of commercial development, the city leans on homeowners for almost 80% of its property tax revenue. (For context, the $10 billion the data center would cost — mostly for advanced computer chips and other hardware — would be enough to buy every parcel of taxable real estate in the city 239 times over.)
“It’s very close to unlivable here, due to the property taxes,” said John Fletcher, a retired engineer who volunteers at the city historical museum. “The only way to alleviate property tax is to get somebody in that’s going to pay a big chunk of it and take it off the backs of the people.”
Fletcher says there’s a model for this kind of turnaround an hour southwest of Osawatomie, the Wolf Creek Nuclear Generating Station.
“Back in the ’70s, the most horrible thing in the world was going to happen down by Burlington: this big scary nuclear plant,” he said.
Nuclear plants stirred up as much wrath in the 1970s as data centers do today. But Burlington, Kansas, welcomed the project, and the plant has picked up much of the tab for schools and roads and helped drive down everyone’s tax burden there for more than four decades.
Still, “NO DATA CENTERS” signs have popped up across Osawatomie.
Emotions boiled up at a city council meeting this summer. It stretched for four hours and gave residents a chance to unload a range of worries: about whether their water supply would run dry; if they’d still have enough electricity to heat their homes; and whether the hum of computer servers would disturb patients at the state mental hospital in town.
And they wondered if the facility would be used for data harvested by Flock Safety and other license plate reading cameras.
“It’s going to be used to trample on our liberties and our freedom,” said Lee Brewer, a resident who was ultimately ejected from the meeting.
Developers envision a gradual buildout over at least six years. If all seven buildings go up, the project will cover up to 200 football fields and employ about 90 people.
The developers haven’t lined up a company to bankroll and use the complex. They say securing all the land and permits will make the site attractive to technology companies in a hurry to build.
Osawatomie will hook the data center up to the city water treatment plant and supply 80,000 gallons a day for cooling. Glendenning says that’s about 10% of the usual production. The city has also agreed to waive half the property taxes for 10 years.
Some residents cringe at the thought of bountiful cropland paved over for a warehouse crammed with cables and computer servers.
And like many, Michael Hursey’s not buying promises of free millions for Osawatomie.
“The billionaires know how to play these country towns,” he said. “The people around here don’t know how to play that game or they don’t know the level they're playing at.”
But recently, battles over data centers increasingly tip to opponents. The group Data Center Watch claims that citizen-based initiatives blocked at least 75 data center projects, worth about $130 billion, in the first three months of this year alone.
The arguments are likely to play out in Osawatomie for months. The Osawatomie City Planning Commission is looking at whether to recommend it to the City Council. If the proposal clears the local government hurdles, developers still have to get a builder interested.
Fletcher, who worked at that nuclear plant near Burlington for much of his career, doesn’t expect that kind of longevity from a data center, and he’s not quite ready to get behind one for Osawatomie.
But he recognizes the stakes.
“This town has to do something,” he said, “or it’s probably going to go under.”
