I’m requesting assistance to draft an email to our city council here in small-city-near-a-big-city Canada to help them decide to not allow an AI datacenter to be built. They said they won’t read a big long letter with citations and everything which is sort of unfortunate, because it’s what I had prepared, but I feel I’ve got to write something.
Is there a list of punchy and true reasons why a small community would absolutely not want one of these things up in Canada here in a short form? My habit of over-writing things will only hurt, so it needs to make sense to people only barely tech-literate. This is why I need help.
Background: I run a medium-sized IT firm and am very familiar with how they operate and what they entail. In fact, my company was selected to help implement the center until we saw the plans and the future scale (more than 10x) with the lack of care they envisioned and chose to back out completely.
Curious who “they” is ? Whoever told you that thinks they’re doing you a favor “Don’t spend days writing a thesis because we won’t really know what to do with it”.
You’ll get a lot further by talking to your representatives on the council. Here in Australia they’re very accessible, they publish an email address and phone number and are fairly responsive.
You basically want to tell them that you have some concerns and ask where they are in their approval process. There’s a range of possible answers which will be disappointing. One is that they already did environmental and social assessments and approved the development a year ago. Another is that the land is already zoned for this use and they can’t block or approve any specific plan for the property.
That said, they might tell you that there’s an upcoming request for public comment, or that there’s a semi-formal group of people that have already expressed some concerns and you might be able to slot in with them.
Alternatively, ask them whether they have any concerns, and what benefits they think the centre will deliver. At least then you can address your letter to the rep you spoke to and speak directly to the benefits they’re seeking.