ASHFALL INSTITUTE | SUBDUCTION ZONE
Building Bridges — Episode Three
WHO PAYS, AND WHO IS ALLOWED TO READ THE CONTRACT
P. A. Moore
Ashfall Institute | Subduction Zone
Written under the collaboration disclosed in Time Is a Wheel and We Are the Ground. Concept, argument and judgment: P. A. Moore. Research and composition: Claude Opus 5.
I want to tell you about a document you paid for and are not permitted to see.
When a data center comes to a county, there is a negotiation. On one side, a company with a market capitalization larger than most national economies and a legal team to match. On the other, a county commission — five people, part-time, who also handle the roads.
They arrive at an agreement. It sets out the tax abatement, the water allocation, the electrical interconnection, sometimes a road, sometimes a payment in lieu of taxes. It commits public money and public resources for twenty or thirty years.
And in a great many cases it is sealed under a non-disclosure agreement.
The residents whose electricity rates will move, whose water table is involved, whose county will forgo the revenue — those residents cannot read it. Sometimes they are not told which company it is until the deal is done. There are counties in this country where the commissioners themselves signed NDAs before they were shown the terms they were about to vote on.
I want to be precise about what that is.
It is a contract executed in your name, obligating your money, which you are forbidden to read.
Everything else in this episode is arithmetic. That part is the insult.
Let’s do the arithmetic anyway.
A million dollars per job.
Good Jobs First has been tracking state and local subsidies for twenty-five years. Their finding on data centers is that the public cost routinely exceeds one million dollars for every permanent position created.
Sit with that. A county gives up a million dollars of public revenue — schools, roads, sheriff’s department — to produce one job. Which is generally a good job. Forty to sixty of them, typically, in a building the size of forty football fields.
For comparison: the median cost per job across all economic development incentives is somewhere in the tens of thousands.
The states. Georgia is forgoing roughly two and a half billion dollars a year on data center incentives. Virginia about one point six billion. Texas around a billion.
Georgia’s entire state contribution to the university system is in that neighborhood.
Now the part that makes it worse, and this is the part I’d like people running for office to be asked about.
Most of these abatements have no clawback.
A clawback is a simple thing. It says: you promised four hundred jobs, you delivered sixty, so you return a proportionate share of the money. It is standard in ordinary commercial contracting. My father would not have shaken hands on a fence line without one.
In data center agreements they are frequently absent, or written so loosely as to be unenforceable, or the enforcement is left to a county with no budget to litigate against a company that has more lawyers than the county has employees.
So the numbers in the press release are not commitments. They are estimates, offered by an interested party, with no consequence attached to being wrong.
And they are always wrong in the same direction.
I said I’d talk about who decides.
The formal answer is that county commissions decide, and county commissions are elected, so this is democracy working.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
A site selection consultant approaches the county under a code name — Project Falcon, Project Redwood. The identity of the client is confidential. The consultant is simultaneously talking to four other counties, in two other states, and everyone knows it.
The county is told, accurately, that the project will go elsewhere if the terms aren’t met.
The commission has perhaps a month. They have no in-house counsel with experience in utility rate structures, no energy economist, and no way to independently model what a nine-hundred-megawatt load does to the local grid over thirty years. The company has all three.
Then there is a public hearing, at which residents who have not seen the agreement are invited to comment on it.
That is not corruption. Nobody in this story is doing anything illegal. It is an asymmetry so extreme that the outcome is determined before anyone sits down, and calling it a negotiation is a courtesy.
The fix for this part is unusually simple, which is why I want to be loud about it.
Make the agreements public by statute.
Not voluntary. Not disclosed after signature. A condition of the abatement: no public money moves until the full agreement, including the utility terms, is published and has sat in daylight for a fixed period.
Notice what that does. It doesn’t ban anything. It doesn’t chase anyone to another state — a company that genuinely intends to keep its commitments loses nothing by publishing them. The only party disadvantaged by transparency is one whose terms wouldn’t survive being read.
And it changes the asymmetry, because a county commission with no energy economist can still be assisted by a state that has one, by a newspaper, by a university, by a retired engineer who lives there and knows what a substation costs.
Secrecy is what converts a bad deal into a betrayal. People will accept a hard bargain they were allowed to see. What they will not forgive is discovering the terms afterward.
I want to add one piece of history here, because I don’t think this arrangement is new and I don’t think we should pretend it is.
We have done company towns before.
Pullman, Illinois. Built in the 1880s as a model community — housing, church, market, all owned by the Pullman Palace Car Company. Rent deducted from wages. When the depression came in 1893, wages were cut and rents were not, and there was no mechanism by which a worker could contest either, because the landlord and the employer and the store were one entity.
The coal towns of Appalachia and Colorado ran on scrip — money issued by the company, good only at the company store.
And a substantial share of the people living under those arrangements had arrived recently and did not read English. The contracts, where they existed, were not written for them to understand. That was not incidental. It was the point.
We fixed that eventually. Not by banning company towns — by requiring that terms be legible, enforceable, and contestable by the people bound to them.
The mechanism was daylight. It has always been daylight.
So here is the ask for this episode, and it is small enough to fit in a state bill:
One. Every data center agreement involving public money is published in full before it takes effect. Including the utility terms. Especially the utility terms.
Two. Every abatement carries a clawback proportionate to the commitments that justified it, with the enforcement cost borne by the state rather than the county.
Three. Counties negotiating these agreements get access to state-level technical assistance — an energy economist and a utility rate specialist — because a part-time commission should not be expected to model a thirty-year load profile alone.
None of that stops a single building being built. None of it requires anyone to believe anything about artificial intelligence.
It requires only that the people paying be allowed to read what they’re paying for.
Next time: the tax question — and why the fight isn’t really about rates.
Sources: Good Jobs First, subsidy tracking on data center incentives. State forgone-revenue estimates: Georgia, Virginia, Texas. Federation of American Scientists on non-disclosure in community benefit agreements. Pullman: Report of the United States Strike Commission, 1894.
Building Bridges is a fourteen-part series. Previous: Episode Two — Why We Need the Buildings. Next: Episode Four — The Loop.
P. A. Moore is the pen name of Pamela King, philosopher and artist. Available through the Ashfall Institute.