As someone who works in tenant rights advocacy and rents my own home, I understand how much every dollar matters for working-class families like mine. That’s why I also recognize that if a data center’s energy consumption pushes up local electricity rates, it would devastate the carefully managed budgets we’ve worked so hard to balance.
A single hyperscale data center can consume as much energy as 50,000 homes. The U.S. Department of Energy projects that data centers will account for up to 12% of all U.S. electricity consumption by 2028, with more than half of their electric power generated from fossil fuels. They have driven up electricity costs for hundreds of thousands of Americans, including right here in Oregon, and they place additional strain on power grids that are already overburdened. As a candidate for Springfield City Council, I am firmly against higher power bills being forced on Springfield residents or our neighbors.
Beyond the financial strain, there’s also the harm these facilities cause to local communities. One large data center can use up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day , enough to supply thousands of households or farms. They produce high-pitched humming noises that disturb wildlife and nearby residents. Data centers also raise local ambient temperatures, creating “heat islands,” which is especially alarming as the Pacific Northwest now sees triple-digit summer temperatures.
The damage these sprawling facilities inflict on our cherished wilderness runs directly counter to Oregon’s core values. A single data center can irreversibly damage the water, landscape and health of a given city, and yet AI companies keep pushing to build and expand.
While the technology has some potential, AI remains a relatively new and dangerously unregulated industry. AI serves as the foundation for mass surveillance, has flooded the world with misinformation, and is built on stolen work that is never compensated. AI jeopardizes our personal privacy, our wellbeing and everything that makes Oregon such a special place to live.
AI companies point to job growth and economic opportunity as appealing reasons to permit these data centers, but while they do generate temporary construction jobs during the building phase, they do not provide meaningful long-term employment once they are operational. The already questionable benefits simply do not outweigh the very real risks. Let’s put our tradespeople to work on green energy projects that will strengthen our community instead!
It is for all of these reasons that I am completely opposed to the construction of hyperscale data centers, and so I stand alongside countless community members in calling for a moratorium on new data center development, along with statewide regulations on existing facilities that, at a minimum, address power consumption, water usage, pollution, heat emission and negative health impacts on surrounding communities.
Working-class families should not be expected to shoulder the burden of increased utility costs caused by data centers. Springfield deserves better than to have its resources exploited by multi-billion-dollar corporations while they infringe on our rights to privacy and a livable city.
More than 100 communities across the U.S. have enacted moratoriums. We should be one of them.
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