It's Data Center Season in Texas

San Angelo Live's Joe Hyde interviewed San Angelo Mayor Tom Thompson regarding water and the proposed Skybox Data Center for the new northeast portion of town.  Negotiations with SkyBox have been ongoing with City Council approving a letter of intent for the land sale in March 2025.

The pair talked numbers, $ of investment (which ranged from $7 to $27 billion) and city tax proceeds (roughly $50 million on the lesser $7 billion valuation).  

Jobs came up in the discussion of impact on the area once the project is complete.  Thompson threw out the number as 40 employees and said "you aren't bringing in a lot of people."  The Development Corporation was created to create or retain primary jobs. 

Thompson's verbal description of the tax rate had two more zeroes than the stated amount and he quoted last year's rate, not the rate for 2025-26, which is .7947.

Next, they discussed the benefit of that new tax revenue: 

Former City Engineer Clinton Bailey addressed City Council on this failure before he moved on the Fredericksburg. Texas.

Clinton Bailey spoke to City Council on February 26, 2013 about his recommendation to create a comprehensive street maintenance program for the City of San Angelo. He did so by describing the life cycle of a street and the City's abysmal performance in maintaining streets.

Thompson said the City had finished its street maintenance program.  The City borrowed money for street maintenance and those borrowing/interest costs go into the tax rate. 

They closed with the prospect that Skybox might not be the only new data center in town.  Thompson's new city revenue shifted from $50 million to a range, $30 to $50 million.  

The Mayor did not detail how the data center's coming "saves" hundreds of millions of dollars over seven, eight, nine, ten years."  That may be revealed or it may not.

As Thompson said and Joe Hyde punctuated, the Mayor has nothing to hide.  

Update:  FoxWestTexas reported that data centers are choosing rural communities for low costs and provide few high tech jobs.  The study said:

We see little evidence to suggest cloud providers will spread their data centers to any but a small number of low-density locations. Our findings support speculation about the likely direction of changes as demand shifts to the cloud, and the location decisions begin to concentrate in the hands of cloud providers.