Sangamon County Board members voted 17-10 to approve a $500 million data center project on April 7, just weeks after the board tabled the proposal following hours of constituents’ complaints. Once again, the meeting was moved to the BOS center with hundreds of residents turning out, many holding signs or speaking in opposition to the project.
Democrats Marc Ayers, Linda Douglas-Williams, Reggie Guyton and Vera Small voted against it, as did Republicans Pam Deppe, Abe Forsyth, Craig Hall, David Mendenhall, Cathy Scaife and Tracy Sheppard. Republican Jeffrey Thomas abstained.
Democrats Sam Cahnman, Tony DelGiorno, Kevin McGuire and Gina Lathan voted in favor, along with Republicans Casey Constant, Justin Davsko, Jennifer Deaner, Harry Fraase Jr., Annette Fulgenzi, Tim Krell, Tom Madonia Jr., Brad Miller, Tom Rader, James Schackmann, Greg Stumpf, Joel Tjelmeland Jr., and Paul Truax.
County approval comes as the country hits a boiling point over the idea of data centers, with technology executives suggesting the idea of building the massive projects in space to avoid resident pushback and an Indianapolis council member’s residence being shot at after that council approved a data center.
The motion to remove CyrusOne’s zoning proposal from its tabled status passed with a 23-5 vote. Democrats Marc Ayers, Linda Douglas-Williams and Reggie Guyton were joined by Republicans Annette Fulgenzi and David Mendenhall in voting against bringing the proposal back up for discussion.
During the March County Board meeting, it took two votes to table the proposal, following an emotional plea from District 7 board member Craig Hall, a Republican who represents Talkington Township, where the data center would be located.
After the vote tonight to bring the CyrusOne proposal forward again, Hall made a motion to postpone the final vote. It failed by a vote of 17-11, with several board members commenting that the project deserved a final vote.
Democrats Sam Cahnman, Tony DelGiorno, Gina Lathan and Kevin McGuire voted against postponing the vote, along with Republicans Casey Constant, Justin Davsko, Jennifer Deaner, Harry Fraase Jr., Tim Krell, Tom Madonia Jr., Brad Miller, Tom Rader, James Schackmann, Greg Stumpf, Jeffrey Thomas, Joel Tjelmeland Jr. and Paul Truax.
More than 60 people were signed up to speak, and the public comments began with statements from Ryan McCrady, president and CEO of the Springfield Sangamon Growth Alliance, and Aaron Gurnsey, president of the Central Illinois Building & Trades Council and a Growth Alliance board member. The two men, who spoke in favor of the project, were responsible for a mass text message sent to many Sangamon County residents last week expressing union support for the CyrusOne project.
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Mass text message
Tensions ran high during the public comment portion of the meeting, and multiple opponents of the project were escorted out after disrupting the proceedings. Board chair Andy Van Meter announced public comments would be capped at one hour, unlike the March meeting. Board member Reggie Guyton, a Democrat representing District 21, made a motion to extend public comments for another 30 minutes. The vote was 14-14, but Van Meter broke the tie with a vote against extending the comment period.
The one-hour cap resulted in approximately a dozen public speakers, mostly union leaders or workers, sharing support for the project. Just three opponents of the proposal were able to speak during the shortened public comment period.
Board member Marc Ayers, who stepped down from his seat at the conclusion of the meeting, mentioned an email that was sent to him indicating that CyrusOne asked at least one union, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, to “sign up early for this to try and take the oppositions (sic) spots in the order.”
CyrusOne officials, when questioned by Ayers, admitted to requesting unions sign up for public speaking spots.
Ayers decried the decision to limit public comment.
“This is a stain on this body,” he said. “We should be allowing public comment, we should be allowing that.”
Incentives
CyrusOne previously outlined projections to pay the county $98 million in property taxes over a 20-year period. At the March County Board meeting, company representatives proposed community investments totaling roughly $19 million across local fire districts, water projects and STEM-related school programs.
While the private-equity backed company has said it’s not pursuing local tax abatements or contesting property valuation in order to pay less in property taxes, CyrusOne has taken advantage of state tax breaks for other projects in Illinois. The company received more than $147 million in tax breaks from three data centers in DuPage County and one in Kendall County.
The Sangamon County plan would provide CyrusOne a minimum of $31.25 million in state tax breaks through the Data Center Investment Program.
Campaign donations
Only two board members, District 18’s Sam Cahnman, a Democrat, and District 9’s Tom Madonia, Jr., a Republican, have received campaign contributions from local unions since March, according to Reform for Illinois’ Sunshine database.
Cahnman, who lost his primary election on March 17, received $2,000 total from Local 137 and Operating Engineers Local 965 on March 23, the date of the County Board’s March meeting. Cahnman initially voted against tabling the CyrusOne proposal at that meeting, but by the time of the second vote he was a yes.
Cahnman emailed Illinois Times after the April 7 meeting, writing that the donations “were reporting errors that are being corrected on my quarterly report, which will be filed on or before” April 15. “The monies reported on the Illinois Sunshine website were never deposited in my campaign account.”
Madonia, who is not up for re-election until 2028, received $1,500 total from IBEW Illinois and Operating Engineers Local 965 on March 29, about a week after the County Board voted to table the proposal. Madonia voted against tabling the proposal during both votes that night.
Madonia told Illinois Times the donations stemmed from fundraising and had no influence on his votes. He said he’s proud to have union support.
“(Just) because I had a fundraiser a month ago, it has nothing to do with the data center,” he said.
Madonia said he was fundraising even though he’s not in an election cycle “because you always need money. It helps keep your opponents leery of running against you when they see you have money in the bank.”
The $4,500 Madonia collected from five labor unions in March equals about 42% of the board member’s annual salary.
Protest
One day before the County Board approved the measure, a small group of protesters gathered outside the Springfield Sangamon Growth Alliance office downtown to criticize the public-private entity for a marketing campaign they called invasive and out of line with taxpayer priorities.
Dr. Ashraf Tamizuddin, who was in attendance, stressed his concerns about the wave of data centers and how the power needed to supply them could accelerate environmental damage.
“My main opposition is environmental,” Tamizuddin said. “No matter how you look at it, whichever study you look at, national, international, it says there’s no environmentally friendly way of having a data center.”
He stressed the immediacy of the impact.
“We are in denial and this is happening right in front of our eyes. We are not talking about 50 years, 100 years. We are talking about right now,” he said.
Tamizuddin said a lot of people close to him are also against the project. He said the claims of job creation seem overblown and CyrusOne’s tactics to promote the data center are what people across the country have been agitated about.
“A lot of times it is being projected as generator for work,” he said. “If you look at the statistics, they are not real, they’re inflated. This is very common. We’re seeing it all over the country – it’s big corporations which are gaslighting us. They come out with numbers which have no real meaning and they present it in a very professional way.”
During the March County Board meeting, Bradd Hout, CyrusOne’s location and power strategy director, said that CyrusOne, a company operating in nearly 10 countries, has about 700 employees.
CyrusOne has said the Sangamon County data center will employ 500 people during construction and create more than 100 permanent positions. State reports show large data center projects from 2020 to 2024 hired between 150 and 300 construction workers.
A Sangamon data center with 100 full-time employees would account for more than 12% of the CyrusOne’s total workforce, not accounting for other projects in development. That many full-time employees would also far outpace the rate of hiring for other data center projects in the state, which create an average of about 20 new jobs per data center.
Tamizuddin argued the entire idea of data centers are a waste of energy and money. He said it is something the global stock market hopes to disprove following years, and massive sums, of investment in artificial intelligence systems.
“There’s no comparison to any other industry (with) the amount of energy that they are wasting,” he said, referencing how little value most Sangamon County residents see in the return on investment.
Vote them all out
Sam Cahnman came door-knocking at my house, and the main thing he brought up was opposition to the data center, which I told him I was also opposed to. And now he broke ranks to vote for it? What am I supposed to think, except that he got paid off to change his vote? All this for probably 20 permanent jobs. Why not build something that would actually benefit the community, like new library branches?
OMG! It’s a huge building with a bunch of computers inside! We’re all gonna die!!!!
One important thing to keep in mind when dealing with the environmentalist commies is that they will forever oppose ANY form of development unless the developer is their political ally.
For example, if the data center in question was being built to house an AI supercomputer which would be used exclusively to censor conservatives online, the environmentalist commies would be screaming in the opposite direction, insisting that the data center MUST be built.
The environmentalist commies use the environment as their political weapon in order to destroy America and usher in the communist utopia. That’s their singular motive – the environment is simply a convenient tool to achieve their goal.
The enviornmentalist commies would burn millions of acres of farmland and poison billions of gallons of water if the end result is getting Trump out of office.
0/10 rage bait. Try harder next time.
This comment is 100% unhinged. Some people are so kooky!
Hi Greg,
You think that a warehouse filled with computers is somehow going to harm you. And you think I’M kooky? hahaha
Sounds like its time for all the people opposed to the project to start boycotting the unions?
The candlemakers opposed the electrification of America. The buggy whip manufacturers opposed the “horseless carriage” also known as the automobile. They and other now niche businesses predicted Armageddon.