After almost three hours of constituents mostly deriding the idea of a data center in Sangamon County, the County Board voted 15 to 13 to table the CyrusOne project that would occupy more than 280 acres of farmland.
More than 700 residents of Sangamon County, and other counties, attended the Sangamon County Board meeting on March 23, with a majority of the audience cheering as speakers described a variety of reasons why they do not want a data center built nearby. The meeting was held at the BOS Center, rather than the County Board chambers, due to the anticipated large public turnout.
Prior to the public comment period, a vote to table the proposal failed with only 13 members initially voting in favor of tabling it. District 7 board member Craig Hall, a Republican who represents the area in southwest Sangamon County where the data center would be located, requested a second vote to table the resolution following hours of public comment and rebuttals.
“I know these neighbors. I know this land. I know the smell of this land. Our township is doing well,” Hall said. “We don’t have an earning problem. Some people have spending problems. Our township is frugal, that’s who we are.”
He explained that the local governing body had little interest in any incentives CyrusOne could offer.
“I asked our board of trustees to our township, ‘Do we want to approach the company to see if there’s anything we could benefit?’ and I was really proud when they said, ‘We’re not for sale.’ I would like to ask this board to listen tonight, and I would like to ask if we could take another vote to table this, please.”
This time it passed, 15 to 13 with District 18 board member Sam Cahnman, a Democrat, and District 26 board member Justin Davsko, a Republican, switching their votes the second time around.
Other County Board members who voted to table the proposal were Democrats Marc Ayers, Reggie Guyton, Linda Douglas-Williams and Vera Small, joined by Casey Constant, Pam Deppe, Abe Forsyth, Annette Fulgenzi, Craig Hall, David Mendenhall, Cathy Scaife, Tracy Sheppard and Joel Tjelmeland, Jr., all Republicans.
Board members who remained opposed to tabling the resolution were Democrats Tony DelGiorno, Kevin McGuire and Gina Lathan, plus Republicans Jennifer Deaner, Harry Fraase, Jr., Tim Krell, Tom Madonia, Jr., Brad Miller, Tom Rader, James Schackmann, Greg Stumpf, Jeffrey Thomas and Paul Truax.
County spokesperson Jeff Wilhite told Illinois Times that a County Board member would have to make a motion to bring the resolution forward for it to be revisited at the next meeting. The next County Board meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, April 7.
Tara Bergschneider, a cardiac nurse and resident within the county district that would host the data center, took issue with CyrusOne promoting a project labor agreement with local construction unions as a means to get the data center approved.
“Using union workers against community members is appalling. The appearance that rejecting this project should somehow threaten their ability to feed their families is repulsive,” said Bergschneider, whose comments were reiterated by a handful of other speakers. “Using workers as the emotional buffer for a billion-dollar corporation does not build support. It manufactures pressure and it divides our community.”
CyrusOne previously outlined projections to pay the county $98 million in property taxes over a 20-year period. At the March 23 meeting, company representatives proposed community investments totaling roughly $20 million across local fire districts, water projects and STEM-related school programs.
CyrusOne, which has two other Illinois data centers in Aurora and Lombard, has already taken advantage of $132.5 million in tax breaks from a state program providing tax exemptions to data center companies. It’s unclear how much CyrusOne might receive in tax breaks from the Sangamon County project but it appears to meet the state program’s guidelines to qualify for such incentives.
Although CyrusOne is no longer publicly traded, an investment report from 2016 shows that CyrusOne’s Aurora data center, which was purchased from CME Group, was receiving about $20.5 million in annualized rent payments from digital tenants. It’s unclear how much revenue has changed a decade later, though there has likely been a surge in clients as artificial intelligence models demand more computer racks.
The Data Center Investment Program reported CyrusOne’s Aurora location produced 20 new jobs. Only one project lists more than 29 new jobs – the Meta data center in DeKalb reports 50 new positions. CyrusOne has claimed a Sangamon County site would offer 100 permanent jobs.
Some key requirements to qualify for the state’s data center tax incentives are:
- Capital investment of at least $250 million
- The project must result in at least 20 new full-time or full-time equivalent jobs
associated with the operation or maintenance of the data center. Jobs must have total compensation that matches or exceeds “120% of the average wage paid to full-time employees in the county where the data center is located” - “Within two years of the project being placed in service, demonstrate that the data center is carbon neutral” or attain a specific green building standard
- Data center “must require its contractor to enter into a project labor agreement” approved by the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity
The two centers in DuPage County are considerably smaller than what CyrusOne has proposed for Sangamon County, which would be classified as a hyperscale data center with a 634-megawatt capacity once fully constructed. Although it has dozens of data centers operating across the U.S. and Europe, the largest operational data center that the private equity-backed CyrusOne has built possesses a capacity under 170 megawatts, according to its website.
Since 2014, CyrusOne has paid DuPage County a total of $10.6 million in property taxes for those two data centers. The Aurora data center is one-fourth the size of the Sangamon plan and has a capacity of 109 megawatts, while the one located in Lombard is comparably miniscule with a capacity of 12 megawatts.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a federal agency created in 1975 to address nuclear energy safety, cites how one megawatt “equates to about the same amount of electricity consumed by 400 to 900 homes in a year.”
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That means 634 megawatts of electricity could provide enough power for anywhere between 250,000 and 570,000 homes annually; Sangamon County has fewer than 100,000 housing units. County officials have said the project won’t affect consumers’ electric rates and the Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative, which operates the grid the data center would pull electricity from, also claims such a project would not lead to an increase in electricity rates.
Sean Middleton, president and CEO of Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative, spoke at the March 23 meeting and said the utility company would not experience overload or increased rates from such a data center.
“This data center represents a new era of investment,” Middleton said. “No one gets affordability more than your electric co-op that’s been here for 80 some years, and why would we enter into an agreement that was going to raise our rates? I can only be emphatic about the fact that the board of directors and your local electric cooperative is intending to utilize the margins we receive to take pressure away from future rate increases.”
Bradd Hout, location and power strategy director for CyrusOne, reiterated the company’s community benefits agreements it seeks for localities.
“We want water, reliable water. We need water as well. Our facilities are built for 30, 40, 50 years. A lake that is becoming less available in capacity is obviously not great for us as well,” Hout said, referencing Waverly Lake – where Apple Creek Water Cooperative purchases water for its service areas, which would include the data center.
“They have a real need to improve the capacity of that lake, to restore the capacity of that lake, and to improve the overall ability of that lake to serve its residents. There’s no funding available for that right now. There’s none. And there’s not programs available to accomplish that,” he said. “We are aligning our private investment in that public project to take that water scarcity and that water risk off of the table. Sure, it benefits us, but it also benefits the 900 people that are served by that lake.”
Laura Cottrell, director of environmental compliance for CyrusOne, said the facility would adhere to regulations within the Clean Air Act and permitting for the data center would be done through the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.
Auburn resident Alexa Martinie owns and lives in a “home built in 1877 that sits along Route 104, just a few miles from the proposed data center site.” She emphasized concerns about rural land across the country. “I’m very worried about my community, my family and the future of rural America… There are so many downsides and seemingly very few positives, and the positives seem to touch very few people.”
Eliot Clay, an Auburn resident and Martinie’s husband who mentioned past experience as a Senate Republican staff member who worked on environmental committees, also spoke against the proposal in its current form.
“I’m speaking on my behalf, just as a private citizen right now but having worked in the policy field regarding environment issues in agriculture – to reiterate what my wife Alexa just said, there has never been an industry in the history of the world that has self-regulated,” Clay said. “We don’t even require that CyrusOne is going to file a surety bond on this thing to cover with the deconstruction or contamination.”
He stressed how he’s not against the idea of a data center but wants more protections for county residents in the event of a natural disaster, an AI crash or other unforeseen circumstances.
“I’m not against this happening necessarily, I just want to know that there’s assurances in there legally that we’re going to be protected in the event that something does happen. I think that’s a very reasonable thing to ask,” Clay said.
The morning after the proposal was tabled, CyrusOne, through a public relations firm, sent a statement to Illinois Times regarding the tabled resolution.
“We remain actively engaged and committed to addressing questions, providing additional information, and continuing to work collaboratively with the community as this process moves forward,” wrote Fatimah Nouilati, a spokesperson for CyrusOne. “This project is designed to deliver meaningful economic benefits, including significant investment, job creation, and long-term support for local infrastructure and community priorities. We are encouraged by the ongoing dialogue in Sangamon County and the relationships we are building throughout this process.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
The misinformation around data centers isn’t just staggering — it’s manufactured. And the irony is brutal: the only reason these falsehoods spread at light speed is because data centers make it possible.
What really pushes this into clown‑show territory is watching the same people who shoved Springfield into wasting millions on those wind‑farm fantasies now pretending to lecture anyone about “truth” or “responsibility.”
At some point, the folks who pushed those disastrous decisions — including Marc Ayers and Donald Hanrahan — will have to answer for the financial damage their bad information and bad judgment have already dumped on this community.
Suckle those data center boots harder Paulie.
It’s adorable watching a ChatGPT user like yourself fight so hard for your digital girlfriend.
Hard news. People aren’t buying the lies, and people like you are selling out the future.
🤣
Stop using farm ground! We Need the ground to grow food. Once the ground is gone, it is gone. We do not NEED data centers.
These data centers concern me. The only thing I feel a rational person can do is significantly reduce their reliance on them. Until a person does this, they are complicit in their construction. I have to scratch my head when someone tells me that they are using the very infrastructure that data centers support (social media, namely) to oppose data centers. The response I’ve gotten is that it is difficult to get the word out in any other way. Therein lies the problem. When we collectively decided to hallow out the means of communication that we had come to develop — newspapers, radio, etc — we unknowingly voted for these data centers. There are two main groups opposing these data centers: people who are afraid of the effects near them (NIMBYs – “Not In My Back Yard”) and people who don’t want them built at all (BANANAs – “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone”). I actually have more respect for the second group, because for them it’s about the future of our society. The first group, the group that has no problem utilizing data centers so long as they’re not built near them, rattle me a bit. I truly think the best response to these data centers is to rely on them significantly less. It’s not just AI. It’s social media. It’s streaming. Admittedly, I have had less connection with people since leaving social media (once and for all). But that’s not because social media is necessary – it’s because I had become too reliant on it for too long. Now it’s back to old-fashioned (“heh”) blogs, email, websites, and RSS feeds. Oh, and newspapers like the Illinois Times – cannot leave them out.
Adapt to a changing environment as society moves forward. At one point everyone was up in arms because automated machines were going to take everyone’s jobs. Should we go back to all automobiles being completely hand built? If you are that concerned about AI taking your job, adapt. Learn a new skill or trade. Become an electrician or plumber. AI wont be able to wire a house and fix a toilet. Or learn how to utilize AI or other resources in your current role to make yourself more efficient.
Maybe if they really want to build Data Centers, they should build their own power source and any extra they don’t use is shared to the community. Also, instead of using freshwater and farmland, build it near salt water and build desalinization facilities. They could use the steam to drive steam turbines to Create additional power. But use cooling towers instead of releasing it into the atmosphere to create more weather issues elsewhere. Also reduces the need for the chemicals in a closed loop system that is subject to leakage.