EDITORIAL: Residents need relief now from around-the-clock nuisance

In dealing with the data center campus and the impact of its enormous construction operation on the surrounding area, the City of Port Washington’s elected and appointed officials have gone out of their way to be helpful and accommodating . . . to the developer, not the citizens affected by the construction nuisance.

The daily living of those citizens, mostly Town of Port Washington residents but also some City of Port and Town of Belgium homeowners, has been upended by the unavoidable noise, dirt and truck traffic generated by what is likely the biggest construction project going on in Wisconsin. They’ve asked the city government for relief by limiting daily work hours on the site to a reasonable duration—and they’ve been ignored.

This is particularly upsetting to the residents because it was the city government officials who in their eagerness to please the developer made decisions that are causing some of the most annoying aspects of the construction nuisance.

In August,Vantage Data Centers agreed to work-hour limits of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday. But a few weeks latter,  the Plan Commission, without being encouraged or asked by Vantage, extended the work hours to 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Soon, even that was deemed not generous enough. In November, the Plan Commission, by a unanimous vote, scrapped the expanded work hours limits and gave the developer permission for construction operations to go on 24 hours a day on weekdays and from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

The engine noise of behemoth earth-moving apparatus and the amplified beeping of their backing-up alarms are audible miles away from the construction site day and night. Choking dust covers homes and vehicles with windborne dirt.

None of this is surprising. Critics of the city’s decision to go all in on the data center warned that a construction project on this gigantic scale would weigh on residents for years.

There is no way to build a data center campus of the staggering size and complexity of the Vantage project without disturbing people living around it with noise, dirt, traffic and other annoyances, which is why other Wisconsin municipalities with data centers under construction, including the Village of Mount Pleasant and the City of  Beaver Dam, do not allow 24-hour workdays.

The only way to mitigate the Port Washington nuisance is to give those impacted by it a break by limiting work hours.

As the record shows, city officials had more interest in giving the developer of the $15 billion project a break with the gift of virtually unlimited work hours than granting a small measure of relief to affected citizens.

At city meetings where more generous work hours were approved, concerns about the impact on residents living near the construction site were dismissed with the suggestion by several officials that the construction noise would be no worse than the sounds of farm work and freeway traffic in the area.

This absurd rationale does not pass the laugh test. The sounds of a tractor plowing fields or a combine harvesting grain and the hum of I-43 are whispers compared to the din of the earth-moving machines roaring on the data center site around the clock.

A Town of Port Washington resident quoted in the Press said, “It’s been 10 weeks of nobody in the township around that site having a sound night’s sleep.”

After voting for the 24-hour workday, Ald. Paul Neumyer offered the comfort of saying, “We have a fail-safe if it’s a problem. I’ll be the first to bring it back if we start getting complaints.”

Complaints have not just started, they have been voiced for weeks, reaching a crescendo at Tuesday night’s contentious Common Council meeting.

  After a year of controversy, the Vantage Data Centers Lighthouse Campus is a fact of life. Those who opposed it are left to hope that the benefits espoused by the mayor, aldermen and other supporters will one day be realized. But as this wonder of the artificial intelligence age takes form, the residents whose way of living has been upset by the enormity of a construction operation that will go on for years cannot be abandoned.

Most of them do not live in the city, yet they surely deserve the help of the city government that brought the miseries they are experiencing into their lives.

They need help too from Town of Port Washington elected officials, who have been missing in action in the data center disputes. The town chairman and trustees have no authority to act on data center issues, but as elected representatives of town residents they have a duty to advocate loudly and clearly on their constituents’ behalf for relief from the construction nuisance.

Their message to their counterparts in the city government should be that 24-hour work days must end and weekend hours shortened.