After discussing the sweep of anti-data center votes, the host singles out one local ballot measure he sees as a blueprint for other towns, aimed at developers who over-promise jobs and tax revenue.
…job away. And that keeps getting glossed over. We have a guest who is an often chair in the Twit TV network who likes to use the phrase radical self-reliance, which is just another nice way of saying, yeah, you got to fend for yourself. I don't think that's as winning a message as they think it is.
…and oversight, and the AI companies need to be made to pay for that. And I think it has to be independent of them. We don't trust them to do it. And so I hope we see that to me would be the wise course of regulation is to create independent oversight and that we don't have to pay for it.
I do want to bring up one specific ballot measure because I think it is unique and I think it's a blueprint. So in Perry, Ohio, this tiny little village in Ohio, 87% of the voters approved a measure that would require any data center that wants to build in their township that is seeking tax breaks, that they must give a financial bond-backed guarantee of those benefits. So in other words, if a data center developer comes in and says, oh, this is going to generate 1,000 jobs and it's going to bring in millions of dollars in taxes every year and it's going to have minimal impact on the environment. The city said, yes, you can do that. But if you do that, we want you to put your money up. We want you to create a bond and fund it so that if those things don't materialize, we get to take that. We get the benefits that you promised us. I love this. I love this approach. I wish everyone would use this for data centers because in Nevada, which is now my home state, they were debating this. And you had a data center developer who was coming in and saying, look, if we put one in Clark County, it's going to be 10,000 jobs. It's going to generate $300 million in tax revenue a year. I knew that was BS, but people were…
sell. I agree. I mean, I think this is a fantastic spin on this. Specifically, it's informed by all the times this hasn't worked before. For all of these sort of tech infrastructure projects, we've seen time and time again that developers will make a lot of big promises and then they will not…
And I should mention that this is not just a data center-related issue. I mean, this has happened all the time. The famous example is Foxconn. Do you remember when Foxconn came into Wisconsin? And they were promising tens of thousands of jobs and then add-on jobs and revenue in the billions. And…
In New Jersey, there's a lot of empty office buildings. And the question is about how to develop them. And the towns are desperate enough to redevelop this stuff. They give them a long-term tax break and the town gets nothing. And residents are enraged. It's just bad negotiation. They're acting too…