Across Minnesota, opposition to data centers is a political campaign season rallying cry

At about 4 p.m. every day, Mark Lang readies his knuckles as he starts knocking on doors in the neighborhoods of Pine Island.

He’s running for mayor in this community of 4,000 people located just north of Rochester.

Lang is a corporate pilot and first-time candidate who said community concerns over a hyperscale Google data center proposed for Pine Island prompted him to run. Like some of his neighbors, he has questions about the massive development’s environmental impact and its location so close to town.

But the most common refrain Lang hears while going door to door is that many in Pine Island feel as though the project came out of nowhere, saying plans for it seem to have been hashed out in secrecy.

“[Residents] feel betrayed, let down,” Lang said. “Everyone feels that this should have been something put out to a vote, or at least some kind of say in it from the people."

Lang is one of at least three candidates running for local office in Pine Island who are doing so because they oppose the current data center proposal. Google plans on building a massive facility on about 88 acres of land, and the project could eventually expand to more than 400 acres. It’s temporarily on hold after a judge halted construction until a lawsuit over the project's environmental review can be heard.

Data center proposals are roiling communities large and small across Minnesota this election season, unifying people on the left and the right and prompting civic engagement among people who, until recently, paid little attention to local governance.

It’s a backlash happening in a moment of growing unease about the fast-paced development of artificial intelligence and the huge data centers that power AI — with political candidates up and down the ticket taking on the issue, too.

In Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, for example, Democratic candidate Jake Johnson said recently he supports a data center moratorium in southern Minnesota. Meanwhile, Sen. Grant Hauschild, a DFLer from Hermantown, where Google proposed building another enormous data center, is airing campaign ads touting his support for state restrictions.

Benefits to the community

In Pine Island, data center opponents accuse city officials of being too cozy with big tech, developing Google's proposal in secret and agreeing to a plan that will drain resources and pose health risks.

Amidst the fervor, Pine Island's mayor stepped down earlier this year, citing work obligations. City Council member Brandi Veith Staloch replaced him as interim mayor and is running this fall for a two-year term.

“I think [the data center] is an amazing opportunity for the community,” she said.

Google and its developer have promised the data center will employ 100 people full-time and create around 500 construction jobs while it’s being built. And while the city provided $36 million to Google in tax incentives to locate its facility there, proponents like Veith Staloch say Pine Island can expect $131 million in new property tax revenue because of the project. About $25 million will go to the Pine Island schools to support science and technology education, as well as to modernize classrooms, said Veith Staloch.

“And there's things that aren't even really being advertised that they have helped with,” Veith Staloch said, citing the tech giant’s promise to update the HVAC system in the town’s middle school.

“The newest part was they're going to update the playground equipment for the kids,” she added.

And Veith Staloch said that the city can continue to refine the project to address residents’ concerns as it moves through the permitting process.

"I feel that the way we have it laid out right now, we have enough protections in place and a very good relationship with the project team and Google that we can fluidly change things in the process as we need and still be sure that we are protecting our community and our assets,” Veith Staloch said.

A lack of transparency

As with many communities weighing data center proposals, some senior city staff members signed non-disclosure agreements, limiting what they could say about the project as it was being developed. For months, it wasn’t clear that a data center was even being proposed for the site, and it wasn’t until earlier this year that Pine Island residents learned Google was behind the project.

Veith Staloch insists the city did everything it could to communicate what they could about the project, short of going door-to-door. And she said she takes the transparency concerns seriously. If elected to a full term, Veith Staloch said she plans to hold regular office hours and vows to respond to constituent concerns raised at City Council meetings quickly and in public.

Pine Island business owner Nicole Mills opposes the project and is a member of a group working to stop it. She said a lack of transparency may have benefited the project’s backers.

"If they had said, ‘Hey, here's a generic environmental study on a 400-plus acre development for a huge hyperscale AI data center,’ I bet you a few more people would have turned out [to City Council meetings],” she said. “And now that it's been all approved, every time we open our damn mailbox, we’ve got something from Google telling us how wonderful this is going to be."

First-time candidate Tosca Wohl is running for City Council and echoes concerns about transparency. She said the city’s roll out of the data center project eroded trust in local leadership.

“Prior to the data center situation, I had a positive image of the City Council,” Wohl said. “I just feel like there are some serious issues of transparency and the duty to notify the public.”

Wohl said, data center aside, she’s running in part to ensure that development projects that come before city leaders get the public scrutiny they deserve and that the community’s small businesses are able to thrive.

“If I get elected, I'm in office for four years, and this data center… will resolve one way or another,” she said. “And I'm not campaigning just off the data center. I want to serve this community. I love this town. I love this community.”

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