We welcome letters. Please include your full name, address and telephone number. We edit all letters. Send them to editor@illinoistimes.com.
LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES
Sangamon County has already been bought and sold on the data center by CyrusOne, and the public hearing was a joke. The project is being rushed forward on the basis of info overwhelmingly produced by the developer, not impartial experts. The self-serving Q&A page on the county website is extremely biased and includes no fair and alternative analysis; the main “source” the county uses to answer any questions is CyrusOne, not independent experts.
This massive project only creates 100 permanent jobs, and the economic promises CyrusOne makes are vague, inflated and structured to evaporate over time. The project relies on temporary construction labor and yields tax revenue that can be aggressively appealed the moment the facility becomes operational (as has happened with data centers across the country).
The environmental impacts are far greater than CyrusOne will admit, and their promises of “no increase on electric bills” or “no impact on water” cannot realistically or scientifically be kept. Data centers are one of the fastest-growing drivers of carbon emissions, electricity consumption and diesel exhaust in the U.S. Look at what happened last week at the CyrusOne data center in Aurora, where it shut down for 10 hours from overheating. These centers become de facto diesel plants during grid stress, injecting particle pollution, nitrogen oxides and carbon emissions directly into our vulnerable local environment.
As for water, no independent hydrological study has been released and no maximum buildout numbers have been provided, so analysis of seasonal stress, drought years or emergency cooling scenarios has not been outlined by CyrusOne. A closed loop system still requires chemical treatments and periodic replacement. CyrusOne’s claims that it will have no meaningful impact on groundwater or septic discharge strains are simply unscientific, vague promises.
We can never go back if we approve this project. It will be a permanent resource basin for corporate data processing and we, the people, will absorb all of the environmental, infrastructural and land-use impacts while the majority of profits leave our region.
Nicolette Maler
Springfield
BAD TRADE-OFF
Around 100 permanent jobs will be brought to town at the expense of potentially raising electricity rates for every single customer up to 267%, according to a Sept. 29 Bloomberg article about a project in the Washington, D.C. area. We owe it to the citizens of Sangamon County not to place subsidizing a tech bubble ahead of the wallets of regular people.
It would be different if they were actually building something and putting out a tangible product, not fake pictures of celebrities in compromising positions or writing an essay for a junior high student who doesn’t want to write for themselves. Another factory the size of Bunn would be a shot in the arm to the local economy and would actually provide a product that adds to the greater economy.
If CyrusOne has $500 million to spend on turning power into cat pictures, could we make the approval contingent on providing more power to the grid? All they are adding is a drain on local resources for 100 jobs. Yes, there will be a construction boom which will last for a few years while the center is being built.
We will be putting a giant albatross around the neck of future taxpayers with this data center. There is a saying when it comes to speculative investing: “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” No one can predict when the AI bubble will burst, but when it does, this massive building full of used computer equipment will be nothing more than another Pillsbury Mills – a problem shuffled around for decades until the taxpayers have to foot the bill to have it torn down.
John Baermann
Springfield
This article appears in December 11-17, 2025.
