yes, i could have said programmers and most people will read it as programmers but truth be told, to the good people of this town - they're going to see these programmers as elites making money off their taxes when it comes to the time to those tax revenues matter... you know, when these companies inevitably ask for more because they got it to begin with
Look, the incentives are reductions in property taxes for building a $600 million data center powered by carbon-free electricity. That's 2.5% of the total investment into the property. The city and state will still pull in tax revenue from Google in the form of property taxes over the 20+ years it will run for.
Besides that and more to your point, coming from a small town myself, they're going to see these data center employees as peers and neighbors that spend money at their restaurants, retail, and other businesses supporting the local economy.
Economics is not a zero sum game.
growth is good, opportunity is good - not a single one of us disputes that. Google doesn't need taxpayer incentives to grow or remain competitive.
They're getting a discount on driving up the value of land and cost of living for local people when the real winners won't be anywhere near the datacenter and the company will cary an asset on their books worth much more money than what it cost them to build on the backs of tax payers who won't have the same experience of abated property values.
at least google is honest about school taxes... so yay, they're not screwing that over but meh.. the whole policy of tax payers funding winners and losers with games only big corporations are allowed to play BLOWS.
The bulk of data center jobs are for 50 trade skill type people but all of the brogrammers and developers will be in major cities working remotely since no one these days gets or needs access to any facilities and it won't be long before those 50 people are replaced by robots. This is google after all.