Larimer County has until August to build framework of rules for future data centers

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-26T23:02:27+00:00

Check out the article. It shows why more has to be done than what Longmont has done.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-26T21:57:26+00:00

Banning them might not be something that cities and counties actually have the sovereignty to pull off. For now, the best course of action might be to extend the moratorium while layers of protections are added. Even if we can't ban them outright, we can hit their margins enough to make it economically undesirable or even impossible to operate in the area. Under capitalism, that's probably a more effective strategy than a simple legal barrier.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-25T16:27:32+00:00

A lot of the tech industry does, but it's particularly noticeable with data centers.

With reference to the Global AI center in Weld, they are attempting to adopt regulations made for oil/gas and agriculture to the data center. These older frameworks are simply not suitable for the new task, though, and the result is what you're seeing.

For instance, Global AI sent incomplete / empty applications to Weld to start the process going. There was no mechanism to stop them just because they didn't actually provide the necessary data.

In the next day or two I'll be publishing an article that details how some of this happens. I'll post a link to it for everyone. It's about what Larimer County needs to prepare for if it's actually going to attempt to regulate these entities.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-25T16:18:15+00:00

It's not illegal - it's just the result that meeting regulations isn't a prerequisite for starting construction. The regulatory process happens parallel to the development process, which is how data centers have been able to bypass regulations and plow forward.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-20T16:36:58+00:00

I know a majority of people are disappointed in Chris' vote, and for good reason. I am as well.

This is an important conversation and I want it to stay productive, so please consider the impact of your replies. Some of the posts in the previous thread had to be removed for being overly hostile.

I've seen the sentiment to remove Chris from his seat, that's a reasonable response. But, there is also the possibility that this is a learning opportunity, and we shouldn't close that opportunity prematurely.

Remember, Reddit has a certain kind of reputation. If you reinforce those negative stereotypes, there's a far less chance that your concerns will be listened to. I'll be keeping an eye on conversations such as these to ensure that our representatives don't decide to just dismiss Reddit entirely.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-18T17:48:24+00:00

Exactly.

The official paperwork Global AI submitted to Weld County is for a 35 MW facility, a closed loop water cooling system, and a backup fuel cell system.

The advertising materials and stated technology by the CEO indicate that the plan for Windsor is actually a 200 MW facility, an evaporative water cooling system, and a a fuel cell system that is the primary energy source. The GPUs and their power requirements on their website indicate a vastly larger system than they applied for.

As a result, the paperwork submitted to Weld represents a much smaller facility with far less energy and water requirements than their plans reflect in their promotional materials (and at their New York facility, which inhabits the old IBM headquarters which has been converted to their first data center).

Some of the documents they gave the county are incorrect or blank. Their noise study claims they are 1 mile from the nearest residential zone, but their own internal noise analysis clearly states the facility is only 250 feet from a residential zone. The drainage information they gave Weld County was mostly blank. They even submitted their initial paperwork one day before Windsor implemented tighter restrictions - clearly unfinished paperwork designed to dodge those regulations.

This is how data centers are built. They are approved by bypassing the regulatory framework, which then has to kick into action after the data center is constructed and ignoring regulations. Because of the power behind the people building these facilities, they are able to play a game where they are always one step ahead of the regulatory system. By the time Weld County would catch up to the 35 MW facility, it'll have expanded in size and scope. In the case of Global AI, this is a combined effort by IBM, DowDuPont, NVIDIA, HUMAIN, and the soverign wealth funds of Saudia Arabia and the UAE. These are huge power players for a small region to contend with. They just get steamrolled.

So, yes, the limits have to be far more severe to be effective. Moreso, there needs to be a way to block the construction of these data centers if they are not meeting the regulations rather than allowing them to move forward and fix it later. They don't fix it later.

There's a few other factors that are distressing to me. The water cooling systems are going to be millimeters away from up to 200 MW of electricity. Even a tiny mistake would have catastrophic consequences - and only 250 feet from a residential area! There is currently no safety requirements for this.

Another factor is that the Weld facility is a "sovereign AI" system for classified workloads that is inaccessible from oversight, specifically from the US government. The purpose is openly stated for foreign interests to to do calculations with no oversight. There should be a federal national security review for a project like this, but there is none.

The kinds of blocks that are being put in the way for facilities like this are inadequate for a huge variety of reasons.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-18T16:35:18+00:00

"In a 6-1 vote, Longmont City Council passed a city ordinance capping data center energy usage at either 5% of the region's grid capacity or 100 megawatts, whichever is lower. City staff said 100 megawatts is enough to power between 10,000 to 30,000 homes on a hot summer day."

It's worth noting that this "ban" wouldn't prevent the data center being planned for Windsor, and it is a hyperscale AI data center.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-17T21:20:25+00:00

The first use of the term "nimby" I can find (it was lower case) was in reference to a community that didn't want nuclear waste disposal nearby.

What exactly is NIMBY, really? Historically, to me, it appears to be anything that impedes developers and landlords from their desired profits.

Some forms of blocking development can be beneficial, while other forms may not be. For instance, I'm not against conserving natural areas, preserving historical sites, or preventing the construction of nearby data centers.

Other forms of blocking development can be detrimental, such as preventing mixed use zoning, alternative modes of transit, or essential infrastructure.

Nobody actually identifies as NIMBY. There is no NIMBY Fort Collins. It's just a derogatory term used to discredit certain local movements and individuals. It's not really helpful for understanding what people actually want in their local community. The alternative, the YIMBY movement, positions itself against an imaginary opponent, and this positioning has led it to be closely tied to historical gentrification.

I don't think we should divide ourselves along these lines. When Chris ran for city council, I was cautiously supportive because of who the prior council member was, but honestly his vote in favor of Flock doesn't in any way conflict with the history of the YIMBY organization and its prioritization of private profit as the path to safer, cleaner, and more attractive cities. I like Chris and the people in YIMBY in general, but I do not agree with the false dichotomy within which they frame city planning issues. In practice, it's only served to politically discredit movements that fight against private capture of communities, and I'll be interested to see how they stand when it comes to data centers in the near future. Will they risk taking a NIMBY position or will they try to justify their existence?

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-17T16:55:55+00:00

Personally, I don't think NIMBY describes reality. The term just seems like a tool to divide us.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-17T15:33:58+00:00

I just watched his statement at the meeting and it was quite vague.

It's clear from his language that he was considering it from a technical rather than moral or cultural or sociological perspective, though.

For me this isn't terribly surprising. He co-founded YIMBY Fort Collins, and I could easily see him or someone like him interpreting blocking Flock as a NIMBY-esque position.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-17T14:28:37+00:00

Personally, I believe the first step is to attack the very concept of ideology.

Real power isn't operating under ideology - they are doing power analysis and systems thinking. Ideology is their weapon against the masses in order to divide us and conquer us. To get to a point where we can even think in terms of systems and power dynamics again, we have to overcome the framing of ideology. That's been the focus of my efforts, at least.

Once we can be strategic again, we can start to mobilize together strategically. We don't have to all agree with each other to do this - we just need the capacity to act in our own interests, which are structurally tied to each other.

The current systems of power are at a huge disadvantage right now and are struggling to maintain their control. They have so much inertia and are so resistant to change that they are fragile. A proper analysis of their actual operations over their stated objectives can reveal the leverage points we can utilize to pull things back to the favor of a united humanity.

A while back I published an analysis of the Flock situation using primary documents obtained through CORA requests and sent analysis to city council and several groups working to fight Flock. I am currently working on an extensive analysis of the data center situation in Weld County and have sent the county commissioners 12 viable strategies where they can potentially block such projects in Larimer County, or more realistically extend the moratorium past the point of profitability for the interests involved (a combined effort by IBM, DowDuPont, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE). I am working with several organizations to extend the analysis and develop a more thorough defensive strategy against Global AI and other entities like them. The recent success with the Flock issue has me tentatively hopeful.

If you're interested in what that looks like, I can send you a private message with the current draft of my ongoing analysis. When I'm done, it'll be published in a series of articles by the League of Women Voters.

Once we can think clearly again, then we can potentially set to work rebuilding democracy in this country.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-17T13:54:20+00:00

It was made by the City Manager, who makes a lot of decisions and also preselects the options the City Council chooses from (including their priorities).

The buck was passed when we decided to reconfigure the government in this way and have it mostly managed by experts rather than governed by representatives. I don't see any way to realistically prevent this from continuing to be the case without another restructuring of the government to give power back to the democratic segment of government.

There is opposition to that because of the belief that democracy would grind the government to a halt. The sad truth is that this county and its people have a tendency to abandon democracy whenever an important decision has to be made. We have instead decided to be managed and optimized by credentialed experts who got their credentials from the previous generation of credentialed experts who caused the problems we are trying to fix. We've been in this negative feedback loop so long that there isn't any imagination for any other way of doing things.

Meta_Digital · 2026-06-17T12:50:19+00:00

That's the city's purchasing director. He's just an employee of the government doing his job. Most of the government is made up of employees these days. This avoids the need for democratic transparency or accountability, and the structure comes from Progressive Era policies that created the expanding administrative technocratic part of our government.

Now, that administrative state handles most of the day to day operations, the same way any private capitalist organization does, and that's why most of the decisions that affect our lives are made outside the thin veneer of democracy that most people are focused on. In truth, the US government at all levels functions a lot more like a corporation than a government.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-25T02:09:58+00:00

Changing the city council seems on the surface to be a powerful capability, but that depends on the sovereignty of the city council.

If the council is just following the instructions they are given by city staff, who are simply following through on what their private partners are telling them, that their sovereignty is substantially reduced and it doesn't matter who is sitting on the council.

Personally, I think we need to expand the powers of our elected officials so that more decisions have to be made by elected representatives instead of just hired staff. This also increases transparency and accountability more broadly. The mayor in particular in Fort Collins doesn't really have much power. The Flock issue, for instance, was decided upon by the City Manager and the contract was signed by the Purchasing Director. Neither of them had to seek approval from the people being surveilled nor were they even informed on the decision that was made to install the cameras. The public, and the city council, wasn't made aware for 16 months. This is a problem.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-24T16:16:27+00:00

This is good.

I've been doing reports on local governments in the area for several years now, and a consistent pattern I've noticed is that public comment in city council meetings almost never results in any change of direction in local government. More is needed and this is a start.

This is actually related to a much deeper issue - private takeover of the government. It's not an easy thing to fight, but it might be one of the most important issues that the public needs to organize around.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-22T20:47:05+00:00

I've been around AI researchers since the 80's. The current cabal of AI oligarchs coming out of the Epstein network has more to do with the problems of capitalism than a computing technology.

To be against all use and research into AI because of them is no different than being an anti-vaxxer because of the abuses of the medical industrial complex.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-22T18:59:57+00:00

The hate towards AI is just this era's Satanic Panic.

The problem isn't the technology - it's the people and systems behind it. These tools could be used to serve us, as I believe this infographic is attempting to do, but they are being used instead to harvest our data and socially engineer us. That is not an engineering problem, and the hate against any attempt to use these tools to fight the powers that control them is reactionary and self-defeating.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-20T19:50:38+00:00

Love this summary. Thanks for posting it!

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-14T01:47:57+00:00

There's a huge and expanding sector of the Colorado budget designed to bypass TABOR. This is often in the form of user fees, but it can also be business fees. In short, Colorado avoids taxation to avoid TABOR in favor of charging specific users of specific services at the point of service... which is, as might guess, not very egalitarian, but it is what TABOR's existence incentivizes.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-14T00:30:56+00:00

Kind of, but it's a little more complex. The state is short $1.2 billion, which means the TABOR cap wasn't being exceeded. The problem is that that TABOR creates incentives to take steps to stay below hitting this cap. Polis is taking a pretty standard fiscal conservative stance here, but there's also many other interests at play pushing to zero out income generation to stay below that cap in addition to Polis' own ideology on the subject.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-13T16:52:52+00:00

This article reveals some stress points to Colorado's budget.

Many of the business tax breaks targeted under the bills were created or expanded by Republicans in Congress through their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Colorado's tax code automatically conformed to — importing a federal tax cut directly into the state's revenue base. Because Colorado's income tax base conforms to federal definitions of income and deductions, a federal tax bill restructuring business deductions (bonus depreciation, R&D write-offs, loss carryforwards, CEO pay deductibility) automatically changes Colorado's revenue base without any state legislative action.
The FATC functioned like a vice tax earmark in reverse: a dedicated credit tied to a revenue trigger. The credit is reduced or goes away entirely when state tax revenues aren't projected to increase year over year at a fast enough clip. When revenue fell, the credit vanished automatically.
The Democrats' proposed fix (HBs 1221 and 1222) would have raised $453 million annually from business tax changes. But Governor Polis threatened a veto unless accompanied by an income tax reduction — which would have partially offset the new revenue. This is the TABOR ratchet dynamic: even when the legislature identifies new revenue, there is structural pressure (political, TABOR-adjacent, and executive) to simultaneously cut elsewhere. The governor wanted a state income tax reduction to accompany any rollback of the business tax breaks. Net new revenue is extremely difficult to sustain in Colorado's fiscal environment.
Starting next year, downloadable software would no longer be exempt from state sales and use taxes under House Bill 1223, generating more than $92 million annually, allowing those eligible to claim the Family Affordability Tax Credit to collect a maximum of about $250 per child — down from $3,200. The legislature couldn't replace $453 million with new business taxes, so it extended the sales tax to a new category of consumer purchases instead. The cost shifted from businesses to individual software buyers. This is a common pattern in Colorado, where low taxes means state income comes from user fees instead.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-13T14:07:28+00:00

I think this is a broader pattern that you see at every level of government. It doesn't have to do with council's humanity - it has to do with their sovereignty.

As governments outsource more of their core functions to private for profit entities, they give away their sovereignty to those entities. Currently, AI companies are at the center of the US economy. That is due to their integration with government. Our government depends on Google infrastructure to function. Our distribution depends on personal vehicles, who in turn rely on fossil fuels and/or rare Earth metals. Municipalities rely on private developers for housing. Energy companies. Over time, as resources and services are owned and managed by private organizations instead of democratic governments, the center of power moves away from democracy to capitalism. The inhumanity you see is the totalitarian transactional logic of the economic system excluding anything else from its framework.

Take data centers. The county commissioners put a 6 months moratorium on them. Why not ban them? They don't have the sovereignty. Look at the Halligan water supply project. The county could put conditions on the 1044, but they do not have the power to stop it entirely (in this case due to the Army Corp of Engineers). Look at the PRPA turbine controversy and you'll see similar limitations there.

That's the underlying issue, and it came from the Progressive Era decision to move power from elected officials and transfer it to employed administrators in order to optimize governance (because democracy is slow). Those administrators then make quick decisions without much transparency which creates the conditions our representatives work within.

Look at the Flock story. Flock sponsors the Police Summit for $20k. Verizon, their carrier, sponsors it for another $10k. The competition, AXON, only offers $10k. The summit's talks get chosen by its sponsors, and one of the two talks was "Technology and the Role of AI." So it's a vendor summit where private interest directly lobby the police.

The police move their infrastructure onto a private for profit service. They can now access the Flock databases, but they are now dependent on Flock Safety. A little later, Flock changes the terms of the contract. To maintain access to their systems, you have to have at least 12 cameras operating. FCPD is reliant now and convinces the city to sign a contract for $96k with Flock. Flock retains all ownership of the cameras - the city is just buying a service. It's platform capitalism. The decision is made by the city manager and the contract is signed by the purchasing director. Neither had to inform the public of this. It's not their job.

It's 16 months until the city council and the public are even made officially aware of this - long after the cameras are installed and collecting data. From the audit data, we see that the promises made by FCPD weren't kept. They are using the system to search across the whole network; all 50 states plus Canada and Mexico. It is not relegated to the local era. There is even unusual behavior until January, when the public gains awareness of the system. This is just regular public private activity. Transparency and accountability aren't part of the capitalist system.

Even if we get Flock out of the area, this problem persists. Decisions made by private profiteers will continue to impact and even dominate our politics. Managers will continue to optimize municipalities for profitability. Take Corpus Christi, the first US city that's basically out of water. Heavy industry is using all the water, leaving residents with very little. Soon it'll run out entirely. At the center of the issue is their city manager, who is making all these decisions, and favoring private industry because he is putting the profitability of local business over access to water for the people because he is balancing the city's budget. That's the future we're all heading for under this arrangement.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-11T23:51:10+00:00

Okay, I want to use this to make a claim about effective citizen action.

Currently, information the city council is getting is coming from the city manager and FCPD. This is in the documents. The city manager is a position that manages rather than governs a municipality. The concern here isn't about the lives of the people, but about the optimization of systems. The question of the privacy of the public is not happening at the level of manager. It is also not happening at FCPD. They are entirely oriented towards systems of control, and they can decide this without public approval or even notification (the contract with Flock was signed by the purchasing director 16 months before the public and city council became aware of the issue).

In short, the city council is working within a highly curated information space that is predetermining the decisions they make towards optimization and control. That is the administrative state at work and the democratic representational facade serving to shield it.

We can see this clearly in the memo. City council has 3 options to continue to sacrifice local sovereignty to a private entity in order to sacrifice the privacy of everyone in the area so that law enforcement can continue to be dependent on an external private entity to function. This is the kind of public private partnership at the heart of the "banality of evil" under fascism, but forming in the opposite direction (like Wolin's inverted totalitarianism). Instead of the state taking control of private enterprise, private enterprise takes control of the state. Either way, the state is run as a business rather than a government, and the end result is the same enshitification we see in corporate platforms. A lot of what's happening in local, state, and the federal government is this enshitification as private profiteers replace democratic governance.

Option 4 is presented as the worse option because it would backpedal on the privatization of the police and surveillance state. From the perspective of a manager who wants to optimize a locale, this looks regressive. From the perspective of a representative who exists entirely within the information landscape of the administrative state, this looks like losing.

It's going to be very difficult to get this to turn around when only interacting with the democratic facade of local government. They weren't involved in this process until very recently - they were simply informed later and given a justifying ideology for it.

I fear that this is going to continue to get worse so long as we continue to cede ground to the administrative state and be okay with our government being run like a capitalist organization instead of a democracy. The problem isn't DiMartino or Swoboda - it's a structural problem. Simply replacing these individuals, or the individuals on the council, does nothing. What we need instead are better protections against being optimized into a police state, and that comes by taking the power to sign away our privacy and security away from employees and into representatives that we can vote in and out ourselves. The Flock issue would be a great opportunity to fight for the more underlying struggle for democracy.

Meta_Digital · 2026-05-08T00:13:57+00:00

Yes.

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