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Hermantown approves controversial Google Data Center during late night meeting

26 points tech-pulse 2 hours ago 11 comments

Dylan16807 48 minutes ago | parent

Well I guess the question is whether those protestors were representative of the community as a whole. 3 million dollars in tax revenue per year is a pretty good upside.

DangitBobby 44 minutes ago | parent

Doesn't really seem like the city was interested in finding an answer to that question.

Dylan16807 35 minutes ago | parent

They refused to reschedule to a larger venue (and more hours?) but since they can count how many people showed up and watched and emailed my guess is that wouldn't have given them a much more accurate picture. In some ways I feel like they should have done it anyway, in other ways I don't know if it would have made any difference. It's certainly a lot less illuminating than a community vote...

When the article says "most" people spoke against the proposal, that's an unfortunate gap in the reporting. Was it 60% or was it 95% or where in between?

SoMomentary 36 minutes ago | parent

Anecdata to be sure, but I can tell you that no one I've talked to was pro data center. I'm sure those people must exist somewhere but somehow I've never run into them in real life.

Dylan16807 29 minutes ago | parent

For datacenters being built at all I want them to invest enough in power production to avoid contributing to price spikes. And for them being near me I want strict noise controls.

But if both of those are met, I'll be pro-datacenter if it can offset checks the size of Hermantown $800 per household per year in taxes.

aprilthird2021 35 minutes ago | parent

> We are angry that our local city council is representing a corporation instead of the citizens that they are supposed to. We're protesting against citizens losing their rights in their own city. No amount of money is worth that.

What rights are they losing?

defrost 28 minutes ago | parent

Representative government in which sufficient time is granted for all with an opinion to speak, a broad community vote on specific decisive issues.

You know, the opposite of a very few deciding without paying attention to the many that stood outside locked doors in the cold.

Dylan16807 24 minutes ago | parent

I like the idea of everyone speaking, but 4 hours of speakers with 3 minutes each should have been more than enough to hear all the important viewpoints.

If they didn't listen, it wasn't for lack of physically hearing the arguments and seeing significant support.

paulryanrogers 12 minutes ago | parent

If there's enough interest to fill 4h of 3m speaking shots, maybe it deserves a direct vote by the people?

defrost 12 minutes ago | parent

That's one of two things mentioned.

There's the lack of a specific community vote on a large decisive issue affecting the entire town and utility availability and prices for at least a decade.

For small towns such things are over and above the usual day to day of town council business and often warrant a community referendum and some time spent on presenting options.

JumpCrisscross 13 minutes ago | parent

We need a framework for permanent funds, modeled on that in Alaska and other petro-economies, where a fixed fraction of revenue from the facility is put into a fund that pays out a cheque to residents.

Maybe if a company complies they get expedited federal review or something.