LETTER: Data center opposition recalls a 250-year-old U.S. rebellion

To Ozaukee Press:

Two hundred and fifty years ago, American colonists stood up to an empire that taxed their resources, occupied their land, and dismissed their voices. This July 4th, as we celebrate that hard-won independence in a special 250th anniversary year, another rebellion is stirring—from rural Wisconsin to California, from New England to the Great Plains. And Ozaukee County finds itself smack dab in the middle of it.    

Ordinary citizens are rising up and pushing back against a new kind of power that threatens our land, our landscape and our right to be heard. Across America, grassroots citizen coalitions are organizing against the construction of mega AI data centers and the massive high-voltage transmission lines needed to feed them power.

In Ozaukee County, our own friends and neighbors have joined this movement, opposing the hyper-scale Vantage $15 billion  AI data center and ATC’s proposed 345 kilovolts transmission corridor that would cut through greenfield areas of pristine farmland, threaten irreplaceable cultural sites, plunder our precious environmental assets, and permanently alter the character of rural communities like ours.

The parallels to 1776 are striking. The American Revolution was fundamentally about protecting human and property rights from a distant authority that imposed its will without consent. Today, a handful of tech billionaires— commanding wealth that rivals that of the British Crown—are demanding that rural landowners, ratepayers and local communities bear the costs and burdens of their ambitions.

Data centers are consuming power equivalent to that used by small cities. Transmission lines are crossing private land by eminent domain and destroying natural resources. And billions in infrastructure costs are quietly being socialized onto ordinary electricity customers. Even worse, taxpayer dollars are being used to incentivize this rampant and minimally regulated development. This promises to forever change the fundamental character of rural America forever.

Like the colonists who protested taxation without representation, today’s citizens are told that their concerns are inconvenient obstacles to “progress.” Their voices are heard, then blatantly ignored, including by local governmental bodies like the Common Council of the City of Port Washington, which vigorously pursued the Vantage data center project over widespread public outcry and opposition.

But the colonists didn’t quit. And neither will we.

The 250th anniversary of our independence is a fitting moment to remember what this nation was built on: the conviction that no concentrated power—royal or corporate—has the right to override the people it depends on.  We must, and will, fight to protect our “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Our rights to life, liberty and property are well worth defending. And when we win, there must and will be appropriate accountability for those who have sponsored and executed the destruction of America’s heartland.

Joseph P. Gromacki

Fredonia