Mike Johnston

speaker

226 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Mike Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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On with Kara Swisher · Three Mayors of Blue Cities in a Polarized America · 3 Sep 2026 podcast

You know, we're in a drought state and so we can't spend a quarter of a million gallons of water a day on one data center.

There are concerns about cost of electricity in a place where that's the second or third biggest bill that people pay each month on affordability, that matters.

And the third was on on noise impact.

And so what we found, and they didn't exist in our zoning codes.

So people could just buy a plot of land and suddenly build a data center next to your house the way they could build a single family home.

And so for all those reasons, it was right to stop.

I think there are good solutions out here to both solving the impact on electricity rates that Quentin mentioned, the impact on water.

But normally what you're gonna want to do to make that work is you're gonna wanna have significant geographic space where you can build self-contained systems.

You wanna have solar

Panels that you can use to power these.

You want to have closed loop water systems.

And these data centers do not have to be in the middle of city centers to serve city centers.

And so there are a lot of rural communities that would benefit tremendously from this infrastructure build-out.

I think what we'd love to do, I think, at the Conference of Mayors with Q and Helena is think about how can we make this an urban-rural partnership where we can say a lot of rural communities would love to have these.

Urban communities commit to being consumers and buying a lot of

A lot of the the capacity that's generated, but I think it's not gonna make sense to cite a lot of these in the middle of dense residential neighborhoods in major American cities.

And I think that's not the path forward.

Uh yeah, I mean our um our federally documented number is now a a sixty-four percent drop in street homelessness.

And so we did this through a couple of avenues, as you said.

The first is you have to bring on a large scale of transitional housing units that you can build quickly and cheaply.

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