Where were you?

“Where were you?”

Good question. 

Asked by a man who had attended numerous Port Washington Common Council meetings since January to register his opposition to the Vantage Data Centers, the question was aimed at some of the anti-data center protestors who overwhelmed City Hall last week. He followed up: “Where were you months ago with the annexations and approvals?”

The protest was valid. The Port Washington elected officials who sought and approved with consistent unanimous votes the takeover of nearly 2,000 acres of land for what will be one of the largest data centers in the world deserved to hear the expressions of worry, fear, contempt and outrage voiced at the Oct. 6 council meeting.

But the protestors in the crowd of more than 100 people got to City Hall too late—by months. The land was already annexed to the city, ordinances were codified, a developer’s agreement approved, signed and recorded, construction contracts in place, TIF funding on the verge of being certified. It was just too late to stop the data center.

Some of the people who spoke at the protest seemed to think the data center was a recent development, a sneaky action taken overnight behind a locked door at City Hall. It seemed some had just heard about it. Informed Port area residents in the crowd who had been sounding their alarm over the development for months must have rolled their eyes. 

Ozaukee Press broke the Port Washington data center story 10 months ago. The headline at the top of page one in the Dec. 19, 2024 issue read, “Town land sought for sprawling data center.”

Since then, the Press has published a combined total of exactly 100 news stories (thousands of words of in-depth reporting about the data center citing numerous informed sources), editorials (uniformly opposed to the data center) and letters to the editor (for and against the data center).

The banner headline in the Jan. 9, 2025 Ozaukee Press made it clear: “Massive data center complex planned for Port.”

The Press has more than 15,000 readers. People who were not among them had other opportunities to learn about the data center looming over Port Washington. Alerted by the reporting in Ozaukee Press, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel assigned reporters to the story and published a number of articles. The Milwaukee’s two business publications, the Business Journal and BizTimes, covered it. Milwaukee TV stations picked up the story with coverage that was typically superficial but informative enough to get viewers’ attention. In addition, Facebook data center chatter has been going on since the first Press story was published.

Some of the speakers at the City Hall protest suggested that city officials were not fully disclosing data center information to the public. On the contrary, Mayor Ted Neitzke has been open and responsive to press inquiries and has generated his own flow of data center information into the community in the city newsletter, in published statements, speeches and at public information meeting. Perceptive readers and listeners recognized that the Neitzke info came with a thick coating of positive spin, but it nonetheless has added to the understanding of the enormous impact of the development.

Over the months the data center momentum has been growing, Common Council members, marching in perfect lockstep with the mayor, have been unmoved by the appeals from their constituents and Town of Port Washington residents whose homes are near the data center site. The data center developers heard only murmurs of discontent from residents. But an early organized show of opposition on the scale of last week’s protest would have captured their attention and could have slowed the development, reduced its scale or even stopped it.

That was demonstrated, ironically a day after tardy protestors showed up at the Port City Hall, when Microsoft Corp. announced it was abandoning its plan to build a data center in Caledonia “based on the community feedback we heard.”

In Port Washington, the loud feedback came too late to make a difference. 

If there is a lasting impact of the protest, it should be as an object lesson on the importance of an informed citizenry.