Data center will slash Oldham County property values while LG&E gets rich | Opinion

By Rob Houchens

In addition to losing our property values so that our elected leaders can line the pockets of LG&E and one of our local developers, we are losing something irreplaceable.

I was recently told by a local realtor to prepare for my property value to drop by half if the proposed data center goes through. My property is near the proposed data center, but this will impact the full county.

Proponents of the project, and by proponents I mean corporate powers wishing to line their pockets at your expense, say the data center will generate more than $1 billion in local revenues. The Economic Impact Study we received through an open records request is full of these lofty claims. The numbers are irrelevant, because they aren’t remotely true.

If you read the fine print at the bottom, you’ll read that this information isn’t reliable enough to be used for issuing bonds “as there is no assurance that the actual impacts and revenues received will be sufficient to repay any obligations.” It goes on to say that the preparers of the report “cannot guarantee their accuracy,” and that the trends and assumptions that the report is based on “usually result in differences between the projected results and actual results.”

The developers are awaiting a variance from local planning and zoning laws to allow them to build the center up to 75 feet high, or 5-7 stories high. They are also contending that they are exempt from local planning and zoning approval generally because, as the documents in our open records request show, they are trying to pass off a data center as a utility. I’ve read KRS 278.010. It doesn’t seem they have.

If they build this data center, what we'll lose is irreplaceable

In addition to losing our property values so that our elected leaders can line the pockets of LG&E, some Fortune 500 company like Amazon or Google, and one of our local developers, we are losing something irreplaceable.

Data centers across the country have caused environmental damage, including significant cooling of ecosystems dropping in temperature due to the vast amount of water these centers use to cool the machines that are gobbling up kilowatt hours that strain their local grids. They are notorious for noise and light pollution, not to mention the hefty emissions they pump into our air.

The property they have purchased is zoned for agricultural use. If we allow them to use the weak argument that they don’t have to follow the rules because, rather than providing energy to the public like an actual utility, they are going to be drawing energy from a multi-county area to feed this beast.