The Checklist, and the Case For and Against Hosting

Everything in this module comes down to two jobs. One is knowing what to ask for at each step, so that the decision rests on documents instead of a slide deck. The other is weighing the result honestly. The checklist below handles the first. The second half of the lesson lays out the strongest planning-level arguments on each side.

The step-by-step checklist

Step	Questions to ask	Records to request	Where
Land option and purchase	Who is the buyer? What else has it bought? Price per acre versus recent sales?	Deeds, recorded options, LLC filings, registered agent and organizer	County recorder; Secretary of State
Early talks	Who signed NDAs, when do they expire, and do they carve out records law?	NDAs and signer lists; calendars; emails by code name and LLC	County and city; economic development office
Utility request	How many MW, by what year? Which phase? Applied to other utilities?	Any filed special contract or tariff request; utility load forecast	Idaho PUC case search; utility resource plan
Annexation	What services will the city provide, at whose cost? What zoning comes with it?	Annexation plan; notices; consent forms	City clerk; planning department
Rezone, special use permit or text amendment	Which use category? Which parcels does a text amendment reach? Setbacks and height?	Application, site plan, staff report, notice proofs and mailing list	Planning department
Conditions	Each condition: what number, measured how, where, by whom, with what consequence?	Noise study with inputs; lighting plan; generator specs; decommissioning estimate	Planning department; hearing packet
Development agreement or CBA	Recorded? Binds successors? Remedies, cure periods, security?	Every draft; date first received; final recorded version	County clerk and recorder
Tax incentives	Which exemptions? Which taxing districts lose what? Clawback and security?	63-602NN application and notice to districts; assessor projections; incentive agreement	County clerk; assessor; company
Water	Average and peak day? Source? Priority in shortage? Who pays for new wells?	Will-serve letter; capacity study; water service agreement; IDWR applications or transfers	City utility; IDWR
Air permit	How many engines, what tier, what testing schedule? Comment period?	Permit to construct application with modeling; draft permit	Idaho DEQ
Power contract review	Minimum bill, term, exit fee, collateral, who pays for each cost bucket?	Application, staff comments, intervenor testimony, order	Idaho PUC
Construction	Haul routes, road repair, worker housing?	Road use agreement; pre-construction road survey; building permits	Road agency or highway district; building department
Operation	Did the promises hold?	Noise verification; generator logs; metered water; job reports; CBA annual report	County, city, DEQ, company

Records requests under Idaho law carry working-day deadlines, so the date each request went in matters. The Idaho Open-Meetings Compliance Tracker keeps the meetings in view, and the Idaho FOIA / Public Records Letter Generator formats the requests.

The case for hosting, at full strength

The broad national case was laid out in the case for and against lesson of the impacts module. Here is the version a supporter would make at a county planning table.

A large tax base that asks little in return. Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission found in 2024 that in five localities with mature data center markets, data center revenue ranged from under 1 percent to 31 percent of total local revenue. A campus sends no children to school and, after construction, adds little traffic. In Idaho's budget-based property tax system, new taxable value spreads the same budget over a bigger base. In lesson 6's invented county, a fully taxable $1.2 billion campus cut a typical homeowner's county tax by about $357 a year.

Conditions and agreements can handle the physical impacts. Supporters point to places that wrote strong terms and still got projects. Kent County, Delaware's July 2026 ordinance set 300- and 400-foot setbacks, a 55-decibel property-line limit, weekday daytime generator testing and 100 percent decommissioning security. Lancaster, Pennsylvania got $20 million in community funds, a 20,000-gallon-a-day water cap per campus and an ambient noise standard, with no city tax breaks. The argument: say yes with teeth, instead of no.

Measurable local economic gains. Dany Bahar and Greg Wright, in a Brookings analysis updated August 2026, compared counties that got large data centers with counties whose announced projects were canceled. They found data processing employment up about 56 percent and telecommunications employment up about 43 percent over the first decade.

Ratepayer protection can be written. In the Brisbie LLC case, Idaho PUC staff found that transmission costs up to the delivery point would not be borne by other ratepayers, and the commission added further safeguards before approving the contract. A county that intervenes at the PUC can push for more.

The case against hosting, at full strength

The biggest costs are the hardest to fence off. Ari Peskoe and Eliza Martin of Harvard's Environmental and Energy Law Program, after reviewing nearly 50 proceedings, argued that special contracts often shift data center power costs onto other ratepayers. JLARC estimated a typical Dominion residential customer's generation and transmission costs could rise $14 to $37 a month by 2040 under strong data center growth. A substation can be charged to the customer; shared lines and new power plants are divided by cost-of-service methods, and in Idaho that method is being argued right now in IPC-E-26-07, where the Idaho Irrigation Pumpers Association asked for a technical hearing.

Decisions get made before the public arrives. FAS found that data center CBAs are often negotiated behind closed doors under NDAs, and could get some of them only through records requests. In Arizona, a county NDA was described as covering all 7,000 county employees. In Lancaster, a community group said it got the draft agreement two days before the vote. By the time a hearing opens, the land is bought, the utility studies are done and the incentive talks are well along.

The land and water commitments are long. A campus fixes land use for decades. In Virginia, the American Battlefield Trust campaigned against the Prince William Digital Gateway to protect Manassas National Battlefield Park, and a court later voided the rezoning over notice defects. In Idaho, new consumptive water rights are suspended across much of the Snake River basin, so new supply often has to come from transfers out of irrigation. Idaho Code 42-222 bars transfers that would significantly affect a local agricultural base, and the 2026 law in Idaho Code 42-252 goes further for data centers: consumptive cooling water for a new one must come from a municipal or district system, with legislative findings that data center water use conflicts with the local public interest.

Few jobs and quiet costs. Idaho's sales tax exemption requires 30 permanent jobs for $250 million of investment. The same Brookings study that found data processing job gains found no change in wages and home prices up 2 to 5 percent, which helps owners and hurts renters and first-time buyers. And as lesson 6 showed, an exemption's cost in Idaho shows up as tax relief residents didn't get, which rarely gets noticed.

The third answer: wait

Some places have answered with not yet. The Data Center Knowledge roundup of April 14, 2026, by Nathan Eddy, collected the pause proposals and the arguments around them.

Proposal	What it would do	Status
Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act (Sen. Bernie Sanders; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House)	Halts construction or upgrades of AI data centers, defined as AI work "at scale" or over 20 MW with dense racks or liquid cooling, until Congress passes laws on federal pre-release review of AI, worker protections, no bill increases, no subsidies, community approval and union labor	Proposed; draft text posted by Sen. Sanders' office
Maine LD 307	Temporary statewide moratorium on data centers over 20 MW through November 2027, plus a coordination council	Passed the Legislature; Gov. Janet Mills vetoed it April 24, 2026 because it did not exempt a project at the former paper mill site in Jay; the override failed April 29
Local fights, no formal moratorium	Microsoft's proposed Caledonia, Wisconsin campus	Halted after local opposition

Mills' veto letter is the interesting part. She agreed a moratorium was appropriate, citing environmental and rate impacts, and said she would have signed the bill with the exemption. So the fight in Maine came down to one project's carve-out.

The two sides of a pause look like this. For it: Mary Johnston Turner of the research firm IDC told Data Center Knowledge the proposals reflect real worries about affordability, quality of life and sustainability, while saying it is too early to judge the effect on buildout. The pressure is measurable. The article cites Data Center Watch for at least 36 projects delayed or blocked between May 2024 and June 2025, an estimated $162 billion in investment; Data Center Watch's report page, as fetched for this course, still shows its earlier tally of $64 billion through March 2025, so cite whichever version you can see and its date. Against it, or at least for a different fix: Amit Narayan of GridCare argued the bottleneck is underused grid capacity, not a lack of power, and Wannie Park of Pado AI warned that pauses raise execution risk, can strand capital and push builders toward friendlier states. Industry is already adjusting with self-powered campuses; a Bloom Energy report found a third of hyperscalers and colocation providers plan fully self-powered campuses by 2030, which moves the power question out of the utility commission and into air and land permits.

For an Idaho county, the pause tools are the emergency and interim moratoriums in Idaho Code 67-6523 and 67-6524, covered in the energy siting course lesson Moratoriums, and the Limits on Public Land. They buy months, not years, which suits the use Maine's governor endorsed: time to write rules, not a permanent ban.

Sorting the disputes

Question	Factual or values?	What could settle or narrow it
Will nighttime noise at the nearest home exceed 45 dBA?	Factual	Modeled study before approval; measurement after
Will other customers pay for the power supply?	Factual, with uncertainty	PUC cost-of-service testimony, contract terms, final order
Is there water on the hottest day of a dry year?	Factual	City peak-day capacity; IDWR records; shortage priority in the contract
Would the project come without the tax break?	Factual, hard to know	Site selection records, company statements, other states' studies
Should this valley host an industrial campus?	Values	Public process, comprehensive plan, elections

Where the evidence is clear, say so. Physical impacts like noise, light and generator exhaust can be limited by well-written, enforced conditions. Ratepayer risk depends on contract terms and cost allocation that are on the public record at the PUC. Water supply in much of southern Idaho is tight, and the law already treats transfers out of farming with caution. Job counts are small relative to investment. Whether the trade is worth it is a values question, and anyone arguing either side should say so plainly.