EDITORIAL: A data-driven shock is speeding toward Port

In both physical and financial size, the hyperscale data center complex planned for Port Washington will be the largest land development ever in Ozaukee County. It will be one of the biggest industrial projects of all time in Wisconsin, surpassing the Microsoft data center on the Foxconn site in Racine County. It will likely be the biggest single user of electricity in the state and will rival or exceed the size of the largest data processing and storage operations in the country.

Its impact can only be enormous.

The elected city officials who invited this phenomenal industrial operation to the City of Port Washington need to pause and consider the consequences of what they think is a development coup but could be a historic mistake.

The last thing they should be doing is rushing to commit the city to accepting a developer’s proposal that promises increased tax revenue at the cost of warping the character that distinguishes this area of small towns on the Lake Michigan coast surrounded by the green spaces of farms and natural areas.

And yet, Mayor Ted Neitzke, at the urging of the developer and apparently with the support of the Common Council, is driving the data center in full-speed-ahead mode.

It has been only a few weeks since the data center proposition became known to the public, but already the city has pressured the Town of Port Washington into amending the border agreement that stood in the way of large-scale annexation of town land. Next up is Common Council action that will make the more than three square miles of land earmarked for the data center part of the City of Port Washington.

  Annexation is de facto approval of the data center. It means that, barring some unlikely turn of events, vast buildings housing countless computer servers feeding the worldwide data cloud in the age of artificial intelligence will be built on the newly annexed land.

Something is out of sync here. The development has in effect been approved by the city before there has been any meaningful discussion or debate in public about its impact, negative and positive, on the affected communities.

No one even knows what company will own the data center. The developer wants the land be annexed before it is sold to some buyer in the mega data realm of a Meta and Amazon, and the city will oblige.

The identity of the data center bound for Port Washington may not be known, but what it will be was explained in detail by the chief development officer of Cloverleaf Infrastructure in an interview with Ozaukee Press.

It will be an industrial complex sprawling over roughly 2,000 acres of what is now farm and residential land with multiple warehouse-style buildings housing banks of computer servers. Construction of the data center campus will go on for five to eight years.

We Energies will construct a substation on the property to feed a gigawatt of electric power to the data center unit, enough electricity to power 750,000 homes, more than twice as much as the first stage of the Microsoft data center in Pleasant Prairie.

The first building in the Port Washington data center will be worth about a billion dollars. When it’s completed, the complex will be a multibillion dollar property.

Of all the over-the-top statistics, it is the one that includes the word “billions” that is driving city officials’ urgency in making the deal. The enormous increase in valuation will eventually yield an annual windfall of tax revenue. The data center could also be a catalyst for additional tech-sector development.

Aside from tax revenue, the data center’s impact will be almost instant. Construction will start this year. It could be a long time, however, before city residents realize tax benefits. The city has offered the developer tax incremental financing for the infrastructure required for the project. For a period of years, the taxes paid on data center property will be spent on repayment of borrowing to cover the tremendous cost of extending water and sewer service to the site miles away from existing city utilities.

There is, obviously, a price to be paid for the returns on the inflated tax base. Data centers, besides their unattractive physical presences, are notorious noise nuisances that are controversial almost everywhere they are built.

The sound of thousands of servers operating around the clock seven days a week has been described as a constant humming and buzzing. Neighbors of data centers have compared the sound of their cooling systems to leaf blowers that never stop.

The developer’s representative said the Port Washington data center will have cooling systems that do not rely on loud fans. He likened the sound of the operation to the noise of a freeway. Highway noise equals about 80 decibels. The sound of conversational speech is about 50 decibels.

Before it makes any noise, or even exists, the looming data center is causing widespread consternation. Town of Port citizens who own homes in quiet residential neighborhoods that will be within earshot of the data complex are alarmed. Residents in the countryside closer to the operation fear it will make staying in their homes untenable but will reduce the value of their properties when they decide to sell. Reactions from the community indicate that many people who are not directly affected by the development also think it is wrong for Port Washington.

It would be a mistake to assume that opposition to the data center derives from some quaint notion that small towns should stay small and resist development. Most people understand that communities have to grow to remain vibrant and provide services that support a comfortable way of living, but they expect growth to be orderly, with reasonably paced industrial and residential development and, when needed, incremental extension of city borders.

The data center development will increase the City of Port Washington’s land area by more than 50% and will double its valuation. That’s not orderly growth. That’s shocking growth.