Zach Lahn

Because what used to be these small farmsteads dotting all these places and known by the last name of the people that lived there for a hundred years are just being bulldozed, farmed over, and forgotten.

But when you talk about bigger efforts, you talked about, you know, data centers, there's many examples of how this is happening across the country and what's happening in Iowa too.

You know, if you go to the south of Cedar Rapids, so if you're in Cedar Rapids, you head south towards the airport, you will drive past what used to be farmland that had been farmland for generations and generations.

that now looks like a military installation is being put in.

I've never seen so many pieces of heavy equipment in my life.

I've never seen something built so quickly in my life.

And what it is, is two companies, Google and QTS, have bought 1400 acres of farmland and they're building data centers there.

Now, I'm not gonna get into the debate about whether we should have data centers or not.

I think we're being a bit premature on this, especially with Elon Musk talking about putting them in space.

But there's a broader issue here of we're not thinking through at all what AI is going to do to us as a people or our communities.

So I could come to that discussion in a different way, but just from a policy perspective or just a principle perspective on this, the city of Cedar Rapids gave one of those data centers $529 million in tax rebates.

What?

Half a billion dollars in tax rebates to come to Cedar Rapids to put this data center in.

And let me just say this.

In the contract, they're contractually obligated to create jobs as part of this to receive these tax breaks.

For $529 million, they're contractually obligated to create 30 jobs.

$17 million a job.

It's a big paycheck.

And what I say is like, look, you want to build a data center in Iowa?

I'm going to charge you far more in property tax, and I'm going to use it to lower the property taxes of the people in the communities that you're around.