It’s not just Amazon and Apple
that expect massive taxpayer subsidies in exchange for locating
physical plant in your town: when Google builds a new data-center, it
does so on condition of multimillion-dollar “incentives” from local
governments – but Google also demands extraordinary secrecy
from local officials regarding these deals, secrecy so complete that
city attorneys have instructed town councillors to refuse to answer
questions about it during public meetings.
Data-centers consume massive amounts of electricity and water, and so
companies are always on the hunt for low costs for these necessities.
Sometimes, those savings come from geography – siting a data-center by a
river or lake, or in a cooler climate – but they can also come from
sweetheart deals from local power and water companies.
The Partnership for Working Families has been fighting for transparency
on these deals since Google’s first wave of data-center buildouts in San
Jose in 2006. They recently filed public records requests in eight
cities where Google has built or is building data-center and seven
cities with Google offices.
The records reveal a pattern of extreme secrecy: Google uses
special-purpose, anonymous LLCs to do its deals, sometimes using
multiple LLCs for different parts of the deal (for example, one LLC
might acquire the land, and another might develop it).
Google binds the cities it deals with to vows of silence, through
extensive nondisclosure agreements. The agreements prohibit cities from
revealing Google’s power and water usage, payroll data, and investment
level. Google argues that these are trade secrets that might reveal
sensitive competitive data, but this is also the information that voters
need in order to assess whether they are getting value for money when
they hand over millions to one of the world’s largest, most profitable
companies.
What’s more, the NDAs also prohibit disclosure of the existence of the
NDAs themselves – a kafkaesque American version of the UK’s notorious “super-injunctions” – further shielding these deals from democratic scrutiny and debate.
For example, if it wasn’t for the Partnership for Working Families’
records requests, the people of Council Bluffs, Iowa would not know that
the city government sold Google 850 acres of land for one dollar; the
people of Midlothian, Texas would not know that Google got a ten-year
tax-holiday from the city in exchange for creating a mere 40 jobs; and
so on.
The secrecy doesn’t end after Google opens its data-centers, either. In
Berkeley County, South Carolina, Google formed a new LLC to apply for
additional water usage permits, years after it had opened its
data-center. The people of Berkeley County are not allowed to know how
much water Google is already drawing from their local aquifers, but the
new LLC was applying for permission to be the county’s third-largest
water user, and its link with Google was only discovered because the
company made the mistake of listing it as sharing an address with the
other anonymous LLC it had formed to build and operate its data-center.
Long-serving local officials defended the secrecy and the subsidies,
saying that corporate America expects democratically elected governments
to negotiate in secret to pay companies to operate in their
jurisdictions.
