Organized labor showed out in force at a public meeting Dec. 3 to support a proposed $500 million data center in southwest Sangamon County, while a smaller yet vocal coalition of critics questioned the project’s long-term impact on the local economy and electric rates.
“This project is about more than steel and concrete,” Aaron Gurnsey, president of the Central Illinois Building and Construction Trades Council, told the audience at the BOS Center in downtown Springfield. “These people are your neighbors.”
Gurnsey and Brad Schaive, retired business manager of Laborers Local 477, told the Sangamon County Board, which took no action at the meeting, that board members would be supporting middle-class families by granting zoning approval for the project.
Schaive called members of building trades unions “the absolute economic engine” of Sangamon County. “Our success is together,” he said.
Gurnsey agreed, adding, “If your electric rates were to rise, it’s not because of this data center.”
Union supporters applauding their leaders appeared to represent the majority of the more than 500 people at the peak of attendance during the five-hour meeting.
CyrusOne plans to seek an advisory recommendation from the Sangamon County Zoning Board of Appeals for a conditional permitted use in an area zoned for agriculture after a Jan. 15 zoning board meeting.
Company officials said they hope the full Sangamon County Board will take a final vote on the zoning issue by the end of March. Construction on the first of six one-story, 232,000-square-foot buildings would begin later in 2026.
Few board members appear to be concerned enough about the proposal to vote against it.
Dallas-based CyrusOne says the project – on 230 acres of farmland in the 13000 block of Thayer Road in rural Talkington Township – would create more than 500 temporary construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs. The company says the 636-megawatt complex, which would be completed over a six-year period, would support at least 350 other permanent jobs in the community.
Opponents, led by the Coalition for Springfield’s Utility Future, didn’t question the number of potential new jobs. They said profits related to artificial intelligence – the technology fueling the national data center building boom – could fall, prompting CyrusOne to close or abandon the site in the future.
They also questioned whether any projected new property tax revenue created by the six one-story, 232,000-square-foot buildings would decline significantly after construction if the company appealed the buildings’ assessed valuations.
“Are we relying on promises and assurances that are not legally binding?” asked Robert Hirschfeld, director of water policy for the Champaign-based Prairie Rivers Network.
He called upon the county to hire an outside property tax assessor and not rely only on estimates from Sangamon County Supervisor of Assessments Byron Deaner.
Deaner estimated the project would generate about $98 million in total new property taxes over the next 20 years for area taxing bodies. That amount would work out to an average of about $5 million a year to spread among several taxing bodies, including the North Mac school district, Sangamon County government, Lincoln Land Community College, Talkington Township and Virden Fire Protection District.
Opponents said they fear that the data center, which would be the largest indoor construction project in the county’s history, would contribute to rising electric rates and help prolong the lifespan of climate change-causing power plants burning fossil fuels.
Some opponents said they don’t want prime farmland taken out of production. And some said they don’t want Sangamon County to contribute to an AI-fueled future that could eliminate jobs in the longer term and promote online surveillance that infringes on individual rights.
Hirschfeld said he understands the allure of jobs and tax revenue.
“But do we even want to build the thing that we are building?” he asked. “Many of us are building a technological world we don’t even like.”
Anne Logue, a member of the coalition, said, “Rural communities have been targeted by these data centers because they haven’t protected themselves.”
Potential property tax revenue impact
If construction on the data center buildings begins in 2026, taxing bodies likely would begin to see additional revenue in 2027, Deaner said. The project would use 0.06% of the county’s farmland, he said.
Critics of the project pointed to Prince William County in Maryland, where some of the biggest technology companies in the world, including Microsoft and Amazon, are suing the county to reduce their property tax bills. Deaner said he doubts Sangamon County would face such legal challenges.
Deaner said CyrusOne’s buildings – which would rent space to contracting technology companies for those companies’ computer servers – would go onto the tax rolls one at a time, every year to 18 months, giving the county and the company more time to work out accurate assessments and resolve disputes.
And he said he was conservative in his estimate of total fair-market value of the project at completion – $212.5 million. Deaner said he was careful to subtract costs that wouldn’t be considered for property taxes, such as costly equipment that ensures no power interruptions at the complex.
He said he examined nine CyrusOne projects constructed in recent years – including two in the Chicago area and several in suburban Cincinnati and northern Virginia. CyrusOne appealed its property taxes for only one those centers – in Florence, Kentucky. Deaner said the company’s dispute appeared justified.
CyrusOne officials said they have never appealed tax assessments for the company’s data centers in Illinois, which are in the Chicago suburbs of Aurora and Lombard and smaller than what is proposed for Sangamon County.
A second CyrusOne campus is being built in Aurora, a Wood Dale campus is under construction, and ground is expected to be broken in 2026 for a campus in Yorkville that would be similar in size to the Sangamon County project, according to Bradd Hout, CyrusOne location and power strategy director.
CyrusOne previously told Illinois Times that promising tax benefits in Sangamon County and then seeking substantial reductions would be “disingenuous,” “unheard of” in the company’s history and “not aligned with CyrusOne’s commitment to being a transparent, responsible partner in communities where we operate.”
Power rates and capacity
The entire 632 megawatts of electricity that CyrusOne would need to operate the completed data center in Sangamon County could be supplied without a problem by the regional power grid, according to the grid’s nonprofit regulator, known as Midcontinent Independent System Operator Inc., based in suburban Indianapolis.
Mark Pruitt, an Indiana-based consultant hired by Sangamon County, said in his analysis that there would be “not much, if any” impact on energy prices in central Illinois energy costs because of the increased demand from the Sangamon County data center.
Pruitt’s analysis didn’t examine the overall impact of data centers on regional and national power costs.
He told Illinois Times that short-term price increases caused by electric demand related to data centers may be offset by reduced rates in later years because that demand creates financial incentives for the potential development of renewable energy sources and new nuclear power plants.