By admin 
My neighborhood Facebook group was recently up in arms about the prospect of a data center coming to Woodland. The comments were full of the usual outrage: traffic, noise, water usage and aesthetics. Never mind the fact that Woodland sits in Pacific Gas & Electric territory, meaning the crippling power costs make it one of the last places on earth a hyper-scaler would actually build a data center.
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What struck me was not the economics, but the attitude.
California built the modern digital world. We take immense pride in being the global engine of technological innovation. Silicon Valley is the birthplace of the artificial intelligence boom currently reshaping human civilization. Yet, across our state, local governments and angry neighborhood groups are racing to oppose and pass moratoriums on the very physical infrastructure making that future possible.
It is civic hypocrisy. Almost everyone wants to use AI. People expect instant responses from Grok, seamless cloud storage, and flawless high-definition streaming. But when it comes to housing the servers required to power those algorithms, California’s standard knee-jerk reaction takes over: not in my backyard.
The real hypocrisy is that those objecting to data centers often organize opposition on social media platforms that use data centers for functionality.
We treat data centers with the same disdain we reserve for prisons, landfills and affordable housing. Everyone acknowledges they are essential for a functioning society, but nobody wants to live anywhere near them. Recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California confirms what anyone in local politics already knows: Voters overwhelmingly dislike the idea of a data center operating in their municipality.
Here is an inconvenient truth: If you turn up your nose at the infrastructure, you should not get to enjoy the service. Expecting endless digital compute power without building data centers is like expecting clean tap water while banning water treatment plants. Just don’t use AI.
What makes this opposition in the Sacramento region so shortsighted is that we hold a rare economic trump card: public power.
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Data centers consume immense amounts of electricity, and power costs are their single largest operational expense. In PG&E territory, commercial electric rates are among the highest in the nation. But in Sacramento and Placer counties, local utility providers — specifically the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and Roseville Electric — offer power rates that are roughly 35% to 50% cheaper than neighboring PG&E.
Because of SMUD and Roseville Electric, our region is one of the few places in California where tech companies actually want to invest billions of dollars. While towns trapped in PG&E territory are priced out of the tech boom before they even start, local governments in our backyard have massive leverage.
Instead of hiding behind bans, we should look east to see how pragmatic governance handles this growth. In the suburban jurisdictions surrounding Washington, D.C., most notably Loudoun County and Prince William County in Northern Virginia, local officials did not panic over data centers. They negotiated, and they did it well.
Through smart developer agreements, Loudoun County now generates roughly $890 million annually in local property and equipment tax revenues from data centers. That revenue has allowed county supervisors to repeatedly lower residential property tax rates for over a decade while fully funding public schools, state-of-the-art libraries and top-tier emergency services. In Prince William County, data center revenues jumped to nearly $300 million annually.
Data centers are, in many ways, the ideal municipal neighbor. They pay millions of dollars in taxes, demand zero public school desks, generate virtually no traffic after construction and don’t call 911 on weekends.
Passing a moratorium or shutting down data center proposals in SMUD or Roseville Electric territories is not brave community defense. It is actively flushing away a generational competitive advantage and millions of dollars in tax revenue. If California wants to remain the technology capital of the world, we have to stop pretending we can have the benefits of tech without its physical footprint. It is time to stop banning the digital backbone and start negotiating like smart stewards of the public dime.
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Matt Rexroad is an attorney, political consultant and certified fraud examiner.