This week the Governor did something rural Texans have been asking Austin to do for two years: he told state regulators that data centers — not households — should pay for the power lines their machines demand, and he called for an end to some of the tax breaks that lured them here in the first place.
His directive orders state regulators to reduce the risk that ordinary Texans subsidize data center growth, calls for new reporting of electricity and water use, encourages water-efficient cooling technologies, and proposes ending certain tax incentives while studying additional ways to reduce impacts on local communities.
It’s a real step, and I’ll give credit where it’s due.
But we’re still talking about the wrong thing.
Abbott’s whole order is about cost. Who pays the electric bill. Who eats the transmission charge. Who absorbs the tax break.
And cost, while important, I’m here to tell you, is the smallest part of what’s barreling toward the Texas Panhandle.
I know because I just spent the morning in a room full of people who are already living it — ranchers, a city councilwoman, a mayor, a woman who drove from a few counties over to be there, grandmothers who had never spoken at a public meeting in their lives. Before it was over I’d stood up and said my own piece, and it was this:
We cannot let Austin turn this into a math problem about our power bills.
Because if cost is the only question being asked, the data centers have already won. They will always be able to write a bigger check than your county will ever see.
The Governor’s directive asks how we manage the impacts.
Rural Texans are asking something different:
Can a town our size handle something like this?
A data center needs three things — land, electricity and water — and these projects are often evaluated through those inputs alone. One woman testified that she was told the Panhandle is “uninhabited and unpurposed land.”
That’s the real divide.
The state sees a site. We live in homes and hometowns.
A site has inputs you can put a price on. Homes and hometowns have limits.
A town of 700 has only so many houses, so many water taps, one ambulance, a volunteer fire department, a two-lane road and a school that passed its last bond by a hair. Communities that are already facing infrastructure and funding challenges, and none of it appears anywhere on the Governor’s ledger.
You can cap an electricity bill from a thousand miles away. You cannot build a modest house, staff an emergency room or refill an aquifer that took ten thousand years to fill.
Supporters of these data center projects point to the jobs, tax revenue and investment they can bring. Those benefits are real. The question is whether anyone has seriously accounted for what these projects demand in return.
The construction crews come first — sometimes thousands of them — and they don’t fit inside the limits of these tiny towns. In other parts of the country, companies have responded with temporary worker housing and construction “mancamps.” If that’s where we’re headed, rural Texans deserve an honest conversation before the first shovel ever hits the ground.
The impacts hit our hometowns as rents rise, housing gets tighter and local infrastructure — much of it already due for upgrades — gets stretched even further. And the water it takes just to build these facilities gets hauled by the tanker-load from regions already struggling with drought.
That is not a simple cost problem.
You cannot be reimbursed for a town that no longer works.
The question then becomes not how much growth we can attract, but how much growth a community can absorb.
Rural Texans are being asked to trust that the experts, consultants and policymakers have already thought through the consequences. Maybe they have. But if they have, they haven’t shared that analysis with the communities being asked to live with the results.
I’m a lifelong Republican, but I need to say the hard part out loud. The same officials wringing their hands this week are the ones who spent years rolling out the welcome mat — the abatements, the incentives, the promises and the laws that leave counties with limited authority to slow, shape or reject these projects once they arrive.
The cost frame is the comfortable version of this debate. It’s the version where Austin gets to look responsible while the premise goes largely unchallenged.
Our vote is the only leverage we have that these companies can’t outspend. But it’s leverage only if we use it to protect the things that made these places worth living in to begin with.
There’s more to consider on the data center front as communities weigh the impacts on water, housing and infrastructure while trying to figure out where the line is.
For now I only want to change the question. Don’t ask simply what data centers will cost us.
Ask whether a town our size can handle something like this — and what we’re being asked to trade in return.
Suzanne Bellsnyder is editor and publisher of the Hansford County Reporter-Statesman and Sherman County Gazette. Subscribe at www.TexasRuralReporter.Substack.com