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.


Massive water use
Huge electricity demand — electrcity network upgrades, increased electricity prices for all. Constant demand 24/7.
Combined means higher utility bills for local households
Pollution risk — Backup generators and construction equipment
Noise pollution, 24/7 — Constant hum from cooling systems and periodic backup generator tests.
Industrial look & feel — Large, windowless warehouse buildings clash with residential or rural aesthetics,
Traffic & construction disruption —
Limited long-term jobs — very few local long-term positions are created.
Tax incentives - Benefit companies, not locals.
Property value decrease.
Lack of transparency - deals made behind closed doors. Compute could be used for war crimes.