After selling more than 184-acres of city-owned land for $15.8 million to a data center developer, Yukon city leaders are hearing an earful from residents who don’t want it and accuse them of a lack of transparency and not being honest how the project came to exist.
Some residents went before the city council in the past week suggesting there had been no public hearing by the city planning board before rezoning the city-owned land on the west side of Yukon.
“This has been going on for a long time and there’s been lots of people kept in the dark,” declared one woman who went before the city council. “You don’t keep secrets. You don’t do things in the dark. And you don’t spring things like this on people.”
The rezoning occurred last month as city leaders said the land would be used to create a data center campus and an Atlanta, Georgia-based firm wanted to invest $1 billion in the project.
The Yukon Review reported the concerns of one resident about the amount of water the data center would consume in its operations. He raised questions about the impact it could have on nearby lake, the water table and those who rely on well water.
Donovan Furr also wondered how much residents might have to bear in terms of electricity costs for the power used by the data center.
“But for whatever energy the data center does not use, does that cost come to us the residents?”
Another resident, Julia Seay, accused the city of not properly informing residents about the planned data center project.
“I would suggest that we revisit and have a public hearing and have the citizens of Yukon get to weigh in on whether or not we want a data center here. It will wreck our town.”
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