Data Centers and how Rice County can protect us
Thank you for joining me. To my friends and neighbors in Faribault, across Rice County, and throughout the State of Minnesota, welcome.
A few weeks ago, I announced my candidacy for Rice County Commissioner. I live in District 3, which means I will be running against the incumbent Commissioner Gerry Hoisington to represent the east side of Faribault.
One of the top concerns I’ve heard from my neighbors is the prospect of data centers being built in Rice County. It is a top concern for me as well. In my opinion, our current county commissioners have not acted to protect us from hazardous data centers. As your county commissioner, this would be my first order of business, and I already have a mechanism ready to propose — and to have staff and the County Attorney review and further develop — on day one.
Data centers have been proposed across Rice County. Most recent is the potential Archer data center in Faribault: 87 acres, up to 500,000 square feet of buildings, and a plan that calls for as much as 120 megawatts of power. This week the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that the City of Faribault's environmental review of that project broke state law, because they did not take a "hard look" at how it would affect air and noise pollution before approving it.
But that project specifically is under the purview of the Faribault city government. The County doesn't have the same oversight as cities, but it does have tools that our current county commissioners have not seen fit to use. I would use them.
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There are two categories of tools I’ve identified to protect us from data centers.
First, the money. Many of these projects come asking for tax breaks: tax increment financing and tax abatement. The county is not required to give away its share of the taxes. I would vote against deferring county taxes for data centers, every time. It is not the kind of business we need to subsidize, especially with so few permanent jobs created. This is a mechanism designed to include and exclude industries based on public priorities.
Second, and this is the one that reaches countywide: the county is the public health authority. Under Minnesota law, the county has both the authority and the obligation to protect the health of the people who live here. This is the same authority counties have used for decades to pass countywide smoke-free ordinances — Olmsted County has run one since 2002, explicitly governing municipalities within its borders like Rochester, with no successful legal challenge. Using this authority is not new and it is not novel. It lets the county set health standards that apply in every city, township, and village in Rice County, not just on county land.
So, what are the health standards we can regulate that would protect us from — among other things — data centers?
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Data centers are not all the same, and the worst versions are a genuine threat to public health. So let's zoom out and not just talk about the proposed Archer data center in Faribault. They're the closest to the finish line, but they're not the only game in town. Most data center companies are not as transparent about their development deals. And that lack of transparency rarely means they will be more conscientious about public health.
First and foremost: our water. According to the International Energy Agency, a single 100-megawatt facility can consume around 530,000 gallons of water PER DAY — about what 6,500 homes use.
That is one facility using as much water as one quarter of the households in our entire county.
The data center proposed in Faribault would draw even more, because it is planned at 120 megawatts. Pulling that much water that fast doesn't just decrease the water supply. It changes the chemistry of the aquifer itself. The U.S. Geological Survey has documented that heavy groundwater pumping can release naturally occurring arsenic and manganese — including in Minnesota's own glacial aquifers — turning water that was safe into water that isn't. Nitrate, already a known problem across thirty-six percent of our county, sits closest to the surface where that same hard pumping can pull it down into drinking-water wells.
These contaminants do the most damage on the most vulnerable. Nitrate above the safe limit can cause "blue baby syndrome," starving an infant's blood of oxygen. Arsenic raises the long-term risk of cancer even at levels the law calls acceptable. Manganese is harmful to the developing brains of babies and young children. Infants, the elderly, and people already managing a chronic illness are the most impacted by the contaminants data centers can pull to the surface.
Thousands of households in Rice County rely on private wells, drinking unfiltered and largely untested tap water. Thirty-six percent of Rice County's land already sits in the high-risk zone for nitrate. When the county offered free well testing to families with infants, most of the results showed elevated arsenic or manganese. For those of us on city water, the supply already carries naturally occurring contaminants: radium in Faribault and manganese in Northfield. Radium is a carcinogen for which the EPA's health goal is zero. Because of manganese, Northfield warns that infants under a year old shouldn't ingest the city's tap water or have formula made with it. A data center drawing hard on the same aquifers could make contaminants like manganese, arsenic, and nitrate worse for every community and every tap in the county.
We do not have adequate laws in place to protect us, neither at the state nor local level. We have watched this happen close to home: Just across our eastern border, the eight-county Southeast Karst Region — which includes our neighbor Goodhue County — has roughly 95,000 residents drinking from private wells. State and local authorities did so little for so long that the federal EPA had to step in, invoking emergency powers, before the State of Minnesota produced a plan to get those families safe water.
Meaning: we cannot rely on higher authorities to protect us locally. We must take action ourselves.
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We’ve covered what can happen as a result of the water data centers would take from us. But what would they be putting back into the water?
Depending on the cooling technology, some data centers use "forever chemicals" in their cooling fluids and fire suppression. We often cannot tell which ones do, because nothing requires them to disclose it. We don't have standards in place requiring them to monitor for leaks, to build in failsafes that catch a leak before it reaches the water system, or even to tell us when a leak has occurred. “Forever chemicals” do not break down. And they have been linked to certain cancers, immune-system suppression, thyroid disease, and reproductive and developmental harm.
Here in Minnesota, we are no strangers to the consequences of unregulated forever chemicals. 3M manufactured them for decades and polluted the drinking water in Washington County.
Amara Strande grew up in that pollution. She was diagnosed with a rare cancer at age fifteen and spent the last months of her life at the State Capitol testifying for a forever chemical ban. Amara died before it passed. The Legislature named the new law after her.
Amara's Law is now the strongest forever chemical regulation in the country. But it predates the current surge of data center construction. The ban was specifically on some forever chemicals in consumer products. It doesn't regulate their use in facilities like data centers. So even the cutting edge regulations championed by Amara and her allies won’t protect us from the speed at which these companies are demanding our compliance.
What poisoned Washington County happened over decades, before the law was paying attention. The data-center risk is the opposite: it's right in front of us in Rice County, and we can write the rules before the first one is running. I'm not telling you a data center would give someone Amara's cancer — we can’t know that, and that’s the point. I'm telling you the same family of chemical, with the same unknowns, is moving into our county faster than the law that's supposed to watch it.
The laws protecting everyday people and the water we drink have not kept up with the all-consuming greed of tech billionaires and their investors. I do not want us to pay the price.
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That was a lot. Let’s take a breath, lower the volume, and talk about the noise and the air.
Data centers run 24 hours a day. The constant low hum from cooling systems and backup generators is well documented to disrupt sleep, raise stress, and raise blood pressure — with the heaviest burden falling on children, the elderly, and people already managing chronic illness. Communities from Arizona to Texas have fought data center developments specifically over the noise and have found some success.
Then there's the air pollution. Many of these sites run on-site diesel or gas generators that release emissions into the air we breathe. The Archer data center review was supposed to analyze exactly this and did not — which is a large part of why the court sent it back. When the reporting and the safeguards are this feeble, we cannot take a developer's word that the air will be fine. They need to prove it first and the laws need to require that they do.
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So, we've established that there is a substantial public health risk and a massive gap in our regulatory safety net. That gives the Rice County Commissioners ample justification to take action, and that is what I will do once I am in office.
Using its public health authority, the county can pass a package of health performance standards that applies countywide. The standards are simple in principle: a data center must protect our water, our air, and our quiet — and it must prove it BEFORE it gets built. If a data center can meet those standards, it gets approved like any other business. If it cannot, it has no business being in our community, sucking up our resources and spitting poison back at us.
For the unincorporated parts of the county, we can pair this with an interim ordinance while the permanent standards are written, so nothing gets rushed through in the meantime. Our neighboring Le Sueur County did exactly this in May, pausing new data center proposals in its townships for up to a year precisely because it had no performance standards on the books to protect itself. Wright County and the City of Minneapolis have taken similar steps this year. This is not a fringe idea. It is what careful local governments across Minnesota are already doing.
My proposal is not anti-business. It is the opposite. It keeps the field level for the good operators who already care about doing the right thing. More importantly, it protects every one of us: our health, our wells, our sleep, our air, and our electricity bills.
If you want to help put these protections in place, I hope you will help get me elected to be your next Rice County Commissioner.
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In closing, I will leave you with a quote from Amara Strande. She spent the last years of her life fighting to make sure no one else got left behind because the laws protecting us didn’t keep up with the science. At fifteen she was diagnosed with a rare cancer she believed forever chemicals caused. She was dying, and she used the time she had left to ask the Minnesota State Legislature to make the law catch up before it reached one more family. At twenty, she delivered the following testimony:
Unfortunately, people being subjected to dangerous chemicals unknowingly happens far too often. It’s a repeated offense that has festered in our land, water, and bodies for decades. And despite public knowledge of said environmental waste dumping, little has been done to clean up or hold those deemed responsible for the deadly cause and effect that has robbed my community.
We have all paid a high price due to large corporations carelessly dumping known toxic chemicals. However, we have yet to see public health repaid for the time, money, and the emotional turmoil inflicted by these same chemicals at the expense of our lives.
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Through no fault of my own, I was exposed to these toxic chemicals. And as a result, I will die with this cancer.
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In my community, I see neighbors and friends who have also been affected by these toxic chemicals. This is not just an individual problem. It’s a community problem, and it’s time for action to be taken.
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But it is not just about me. It is about the health and safety of all of us.
We must come together to demand change and hold those responsible accountable for their actions. I urge all of you to take a stand against these toxic chemicals and demand change.
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Amara was born after me and she died before me. She did not live to see her twenty-first birthday and she did not live to see the law passed that was named after her.
There were parts of her testimony that I did not feel right reading for this fireside chat or including in full for the article. It detailed her ailments, her treatments, and how her aggressive cancer proved impossible to treat. I'd rather you read her words in full, or watch her deliver them herself. Clean Water Action shared the recording of her testimony and the transcript in coordination with Amara's family. I hope you will seek it out. https://cleanwater.org/2023/01/25/MN-PFAS-Amara-Strande
The forever chemicals in a data center's cooling system are not the exact fight Amara fought. But the failure is the same: laws written to shield the polluter instead of the family drinking the water. In Rice County, we don't have to wait until the harm is already done. Let us resolve to honor Amara’s memory and continue her fight by being proactive about protecting our public health.
Please join me in the fight to protect us all.
— Sam Temple
