"We'll build somewhere else." No, they won't.

The threat

It arrives in every hearing, in almost the same words: if you don't grant this abatement, this rate, this exemption, we'll build somewhere else. It's delivered with a folder of comparative site data and the quiet suggestion that the neighboring county is more reasonable.

What actually put you on the shortlist

Data centers site around five constraints, in roughly this order:

1. Firm power — 50 to 500+ MW available on a utility that will interconnect this decade, not next.
2. Fiber — dense, redundant, low-latency backbone within reach.
3. Land — flat, cheap, out of flood plains, in an industrial or industrial-adjacent zone.
4. Water — reliable municipal or well supply, or a permit path to it.
5. Speed of approval — a jurisdiction that will say yes on the developer's schedule.

Tax abatements sit below all five. They shape the last mile of the decision, not the shortlist. The team on the other side of the table has already spent months of siting analysis to conclude yours is one of the very few parcels that clears the technical bars. That analysis is a sunk cost the developer doesn't want to redo.

The revenue left on the table

Because officials treat the abatement offer as an all-or-nothing question, the negotiation collapses into whether to give it rather than how much. A different starting question changes the outcome:

The gap between what a hyperscaler is willing to pay for a 200 MW parcel and what it usually ends up paying — after abatements — is the opportunity cost. Loudoun County, Virginia is the counter-example that proves the frame: by declining the standard abatement package, its data-center property taxes now fund roughly a third of the county budget while keeping residential rates among the lowest in the state.

A tax break is not a one-line item. It is one line in a much longer ledger the community rarely sees at once.

The full menu of giveaways

By the time a project is approved, the same community has typically handed over some combination of:

Individually each line looks modest. Stacked, a single hyperscale campus can extract billions of dollars in combined public support over its lifetime — from some of the most profitable companies in the world.

The right test

Before approving the next package, the question is not does this attract the project? The project is already here. The question is:

Does this deal serve the public interest — or is it padding the profits of some of the world's wealthiest corporations at the community's expense?

The answer depends on the numbers, not the rhetoric. Every hyperscaler publishes its revenue. Compare it to the value of the package on the table. If the ratio doesn't make sense on that math, it's not a good deal — no matter how many jobs are in the press release.

What to do with this at your next hearing

1. Ask the developer, on the record, for its own siting analysis — the ranked list of alternative parcels considered and the reasons each was scored below yours. They rarely produce it. That refusal is itself the answer.
2. Ask your assessor to produce the full stacked value of every subsidy line — local, state, utility, and federal — over the life of the abatement. Insist on a single dollar figure.
3. Ask the developer to identify which subsidy lines it would walk away over. If the answer is "all of them," the bluff is exposed. If the answer is specific, you know what's negotiable.
4. Bring the case-studies page. Loudoun County declined abatements and still hosts more data centers than any jurisdiction on earth. Precedent matters.
5. Use the CBA clause library to trade specific tax concessions for specific written commitments, not soft promises.

Generate a meeting brief with these questions pre-loaded → Full hearing checklist