TheDGT.org Presents Pima County Supervisor Jen Allen on Project Blue and BOS Business
MMichael BryanJul 7 at 7:00 pm1h 3min
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00:00Joe D Daniszewski
You. So we get all sorts of great air conditioned air, and it's comfortable and ready to go. So see you then four, four to six on July 16. Okay, and Mike, did you have the our preamble you'd like to say, well,
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00:23Michael Bryan
we're right up against the noon hour, so let's go ahead and skip it this time we can. We can slap it in from from prior session. That's
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00:29Joe D Daniszewski
fine. I was hoping you're going to say that. So okay, we are ready to go. Is Nikki here? She is great. Welcome, Nikki. We appreciate your being here today,
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00:43Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
trying to, not trying to crash Jen's party. Just want to be on and support so I'll be in the background.
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00:51Joe D Daniszewski
Fantastic. We appreciate it. You're not going to be
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00:53Michael Bryan
in the background. You're going to be right up here in the foreground. I'm spotlighting you. Tough. Tough on you, Nikki. You're going to be on camera the whole time.
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01:00Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
It's okay. It's okay. I'm here for you guys, whatever, whatever that means today. Well, let's
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01:04Joe D Daniszewski
start off with a little you know, bio highlight. Jennifer, would you like to lead off?
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01:14Jennifer Allen
Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me, and it's always a pleasure to be with you all, and appreciated the opportunity during the campaign. It's now, what are we in now, six months into being the district three supervisor and vice chair on the Pima County Board of Supervisors. Prior to that six months, my whole 30 plus was a 30 plus, almost 30 years has been focused in working for social justice and environmental organizations at the local, state, national level. Most recently, I was the executive director of the ACLU of Arizona. Before that, I was a senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters, where I started up chispa, which is a climate justice organization that works in multiple states across the country, working on getting Latino families at the table in the fight against climate change, and then also a group called a program called democracy for all, which focuses on voting rights and voter registration in 17 states across the country. For that, I was an executive director of border Action Network working here in Arizona, from San Luis novas, Naco Douglas and little immigrant communities around the state, training folks in what their rights are, but also how to assert them and how to advocate at the local and state and federal levels. And then before that, I worked for an indigenous land rights organization working on treaty rights and environmental protection issues. I worked for the traditional government of the Western Shoshone. So all that has got me now, you know, I've been sitting on the other side of the table trying to push policymakers for a whole lot of years, and then I jumped in and and you all, many of you are familiar with the story, and decided to run for the Pima County Board of Supervisors. And so it is a huge, huge privilege and honor to be in this role and to be able to continue to work throughout district three, which is massive. It's about 70% of Pima County. The other four districts, the county is divided into five districts. The other four split up 30% of the county. District three runs from era vodka, a motto, some of saguarita and San Javier. District, it's got a finger that comes into Tucson from Grant Road is the southern boundary. The riito is the northern boundary. Swan road is the boundary on the east side. So that's the Midtown finger. And then it swings up and includes almost all of Marana up until the Pinal county line. And then just goes west until you hit the Yuma county line, all the way out past ajo including and then there that is 130 miles of the US Mexico border. And so it includes the entire Tohono O'odham Nation. Does not include possible yaki, but about a good chunk of possible yakis members live in district three. So it's rural, urban, suburban, indigenous border, an incredibly diverse district that I'm very excited to continue to get to know
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04:24Joe D Daniszewski
well, great, great. Nikki, could would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself?
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04:30Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
I sure can. I'll be honest everyone. I just wanted to be here just in case any questions came up around a particular project that a lot of folks have been talking about. But yeah, I am on my second term at the City of Tucson, representing the southeast portion of the city. Prior to that, I've been in tech, the technology and cybersecurity space is why I have my hat on today, because I haven't prepared for being on camera yet today. But I come from a cybersecurity background by way of the military, working in startup all the way to Fortune, 50 companies, and just privileged to be able to represent the southeast side of town on a variety of issues that we have similar to Jen, only not nearly the scale. Ward four does have several areas that are rural and suburban as well as urban. So I don't have the indigenous community that you do, Jen, but also variety of issues that come with those different types of spaces that we represent. So that's a super high level about me, and just happy to be here today and support any any opportunity to answer questions that may surface today.
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05:41Joe D Daniszewski
Well, we've had a lot of interest in the topics today, and we have two people that are right on the front line. So let's go right into the questions. If you'd like to raise your hand, go down to the last bottom of the horizon where it says reactions, and click on that, and you hand electronic hand will go up, and I will call on you. Or you can also write your question in the chat, and Mike will be gracious, and he will read that question for you. Okay, so let's see. Do we have any any questions? Would
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06:26Jennifer Allen
it be helpful, Joe, if I just kind of do a little high, you know what we know and where we're at, or what's happened and where we're at now? Yeah, the ball rolling. So we let's see let's see how we there's something like little little strains to it. So, June 17, the board of supervisors had two agenda items. One was a sale of land. The other was a amendment to our comprehensive plan, our land use plan, and a rezoning the they so these ended up being the two items that the Board of Supervisors voted on that were related to Project Blue. We learned we knew very, very little about the project, largely because the county had, county staff had signed a non disclosure agreement, and, and, and, you know, we're learning more about the use of non disclosure agreements as a it's a common practice within economic development. You know, they folks will sort of explain that that increases the competitiveness that they can protect certain information and and so. So we learned very little. We had a presentation from the developer who is purchasing the land that is Beal, B, E, A, L, E, and so we had a little presentation, a little slide deck. It's actually very similar to the slide deck, in fact, I think was the same as what was shared at the Board of Supervisors meeting. So that slide deck is all now public. And what you know, what we learned is that it the bill was purchasing this land to be able to build data centers and and I'm trying to be clear that it is plural and it's not Project Blue, as we continue to kind of dig into it. It is a, it is a, I think it is a broad project that has different locations and different phases, that is intending to build a number of data centers. Maybe at a minimum of 10. I've heard somebody was trying to dig in and tease out upwards of 20 plus data centers spread across some different sites. We were told a story, right? I think data centers are incredibly prevalent. There's more than 3000 of them across the United States. There's about 80 of them just in the Phoenix area alone. And what they are is essentially a thing, like a warehouse that is just filled with servers. And so it is, it is, it is it's actually it is the cloud, and that is where data gets stored. And as we watch, you know, Kitty videos, that is what enables us to be able to see kitty videos. And for AI to answer our questions about, you know, what is the best kind of ice cream to eat on a hot day. So they're all over the place. We we the biggest, I think the biggest issues, the most common issues with them, is their water consumption, their energy consumption. For some of them, it's and depending on kind of where they're located, it's the noise, noise pollution. And some of them also is air pollution. I know less about the air pollution piece, and I think some of them have different mechanisms that they use and to keep them cool, which results in different degrees of of air pollution, depending on what type, how it's how it's used to keep the air cool. So I am not that will give and Nikki jump in here on this like my attempt to explain why they need so much water and energy. So, you know, basically, like, they have this little graphic that they show that's got, like, data centers here, like little, not data centers, I'm sorry, like servers and then, and then the space in between that, like, pretty much, they all need to be kept cool, otherwise the the components will not work. And so in order to keep the electronics, all the pieces of it cool, they use, they you basically use water and air to keep them cool. There's, there's different kinds like so I talked to a city council member in in the Silicon Valley, where they have oodles of data centers and and he says there, he's, like, send them my way, right? Like, because the temperatures there, the out, the outside temperatures are, you know, it's like 85 degrees. And so they don't really use any water, because they don't, they don't need water to try to cool it down. They're basically like swamp coolers that are just pumping water and blowing the air and trying to keep the temperature down. So they take up so much water and so much energy here, because it's so hot outside like this is one of the worst environments to put something that needs to be cool like this. They the data center folks like it because it's dry, which is also good for the components of the servers, for the electronics the computer. I don't know what done. I'm clearly not the technical person, but we'll just call the, you know, the wiring, but it keeps, keeps it dry, and so they look for the dry climate, but the heat is the thing that they then the trade off and and, but it's, but it's our water and it's, and it's our energy that gets used to accommodate their preference for having the dryness. Does that? I don't know. Is there a better Nikki?
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13:06Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
Then I have no authority to do this, but I'm going to give you an honorary bachelor's degree in computer science today from I don't know, whatever place, but you did a great job of explaining it, and I was digging in as well. I've been following these types of developments for years, because I come from this space, and I'm curious, because the capability exists to put in a closed loop water system, because supervisor Allen is right, it's just the mechanism, and water has the ability to absorb heat, and it's just a trade off, As the supervisor said, between energy and water. I pushed that question forward to the Project Blue Team, and said, why not? Why not a closed loop system? Essentially, you fill it up once with maybe, I don't know how many gallons, millions of gallons of water, but you fill up the system once and you don't have to touch it again. And that obviously would reduce the water consumption. But the answer I got is, well, then it takes more energy. So they're looking at what's the most cost effective way for us to operate, is it to buy water cheaper or buy electricity cheaper? And in this particular instance, they're looking at the system that uses more water and less electricity. And my guess would be it's a cost element. So you did a great job explaining that.
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14:25Joe D Daniszewski
Thanks. Okay, well, I've got a thought, is the water potable water, or can it be recycled? You know what? What's the way it works?
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14:41Jennifer Allen
So I will say that there are, there are two things that are good about Project Blue, what, and they are not outweighed by other things, but, but just to you know, two things that are great. One is that to build it, it would take, it would get us about 3000 short term construction jobs. That is, that is a very helpful thing, especially for labor unions, who send their members up to Phoenix all the time for projects and construction jobs, right? Like we need more jobs here, and especially for building out and strengthening the trades unions. The second thing that is good about the project is that they have committed to building a wastewater pipeline that would go from a wastewater treatment facility down to Project Blue, and they would be using wastewater. And the thing that's helpful about that building the pipe is not only facilitates their use of wastewater, as opposed to groundwater or reclaimed water, is that we could also then the city would be able to connect into that wastewater pipe and be able to use wastewater for other projects that currently don't have access to wastewater. So those are its two kind of strong suits. However, you know, it's not like wastewater is, you know, just something that we just, you know, throw out it too. Has value, significant value, especially considering that we've been looking at these ways in which we can make reclaimed water into potable water. So it's it is high value water. So
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16:32Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
I can add to that too, everything that the supervisor said. And also to your point, the Reclaim water is highly valuable, and we are working on building an advanced purification capability in the city that will take that reclaim water and obviously purify it very well, so that it can go back into our drinking supply, as the supervisor was talking about. So the things that I'm thinking about and my colleagues are thinking about is if we're allocating a certain amount of water to any project that sort of takes it out of play for other uses in the future. So what's the trade off? How do we approach this? Those are the big questions that we're asking. So, and that is a big question, so, and the other piece about this is one of the things I've asked, and we should have a draft development agreement on Monday of next week, on the 14th that will answer the questions that I've asked and that are in the newsletter. But one piece is, how long would this project have to be on potable water before the Reclaim infrastructure is in place? And how do we ensure that that timeline happens? For example, how do we say, okay, you can't build phase two, or you can't execute certain milestone until this reclaimed infrastructure is complete, if this were to move forward. So those are the things we're thinking about and trying to put in place to protect the community during this process.
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17:53Joe D Daniszewski
Okay, you ready for some questions? Okay? Russell and Lhasa
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18:00Russell & Lhasha
Lhasa actually say again, my wife Lhasha,
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18:07Joe D Daniszewski
well, that's much nicer.
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18:10Russell & Lhasha
So the closed loop system will probably never be done because they've been saying that they would be doing closed loop for nuclear and gas and coal for decades, but nobody ever does it. And the reason why it isn't done is you have to have massive radiators and a huge amount of maintenance on those radiators. Essentially, they're like car radiators. You know, you're, you're putting out loops with fins on them to take the power, take the energy away, you know, the heat away from the water. And the problem is, when your radiators are in an ambient condition, and it's 105 degrees in the ambient condition, it doesn't really cool your water down enough to be able to do that. So they've never done, you know, dry cooling, essentially with water, where you have a limited set of water. So that's really a non it just isn't going to happen. The cost would be enormous, and the results would be minimal from it, especially during the about six months of the year. So then, now recycled or potable, Palo Verde gets water from the Phoenix sewage effluent plant on the west side of Phoenix, and it gets shipped by pipeline 36 miles to Palo Verde nuclear plant. And that water is primarily treated. It goes through primary treatment, and then it goes through secondary treatment. And when it goes through secondary treatment, it's better quality than the cap water. By far. It's you can look up the water quality content of Palo Verde of the Phoenix sewage, excellent plant, which I've done, and it's far less than 500 parts per million total dissolved solids. And the CIP water is over 900 parts per million. I think it's over 1000 now, but I'm not sure. I haven't checked on that recently. So, so this water that's secondary goes through secondary treatment. The reason why they do that is because it efficiently rules. When it goes through secondary treatment, it doesn't have as many particles in it, so the cooling towers don't get as much gun build up, and it cuts down on maintenance quite dramatically so. So they're probably going to require secondary treated water, which would be better quality than what we're getting from the CIP. So this is better quality than average, because we're getting what, 63% of our water from cap in Tucson, something like that. So this would be better quality than what we already have, that they would then be using for. So when we're saying treated water, it's kind of like a denigrating term, but it's actually a bettering term. Or there, there are, it's, it's far better than what we're normally getting so we're wasting high quality water, higher quality water than average. And then they use evaporative cooling towers, because that's more efficient than HVAC for heating, ventilation, cooling and air conditioning. Sorry. So that HVAC aspect will probably not be used because it's more expensive than evacuate cooling towers. That's why they use cooling towers at Palo Verde. They have three cooling towers per reactor at Palo Verde, it's the most of any plant in the nation. All the other plants either have zero or one cooling tower, and these cooling towers are evaporating 78,000 acre feet a year for Palo Verde alone. And 78,000 is 78% of what tucson water uses. Tucson water uses 100,000 a year, and a lot of that's reclaimable, whereas the 78,000 that's evaporated is just lost to the to the planet's atmosphere. So those are just some of the points that I'm concerned with. We shouldn't be having data centers in an area that is in danger of losing its water, like the CIP if that goes away, Tucson is going to be in a massive water crisis. We should not be using data centers in this area. Phoenix has a lot more water, replenishable water. It's a much bigger watershed, much bigger watershed than than our watershed. They have the Salt River, the Verde River, the the New River, and they have two other rivers flowing into their system. We have the Santa Cruz. And the retail is not really, you know, considered a regular river. So we have basically one river to their five rivers, and they have a much bigger, you know, watershed, so, so they get a lot of replenishment of water we don't. So I'm saying that essentially we should be, you know, making it illegal through requiring water. You know, water self sufficiency. They could do solar. It might pan out. The solar is right now, two cents per kilowatt hour on average. If you look at the LBL spreadsheet on water, on PPAs power purchase agreements. There are about 1000 power purchase agreements from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. So those are issues to consider, too. If they're required to do solar, and then they they would HVAC all of their cooling, then they wouldn't have to use any water, you know, evaporative cooling towers. So anyway, that's my background. Is power plant economics, and I've been working on this kind of issue for a long time, and now this becomes a huge threat to our water and they keep talking also about how, sorry, I don't want to dominate, but they keep talking about how the energy costs are going to be kept reasonable for the you know, the given population, that is not possible. That's not how utility economics works. Whenever you get new higher cost energy systems in play, or have to put in a huge amount of money up front, the entire rate base pays for that, and that's not regulated by the city or the county. That's regulated by the Arizona, Arizona Corporation Commission.
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25:04Joe D Daniszewski
Could this be a good time to go to someone else with a question? Yeah, you look like you're running out of gas. So Lillian Fox has her hand up.
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25:20Lillian Fox
Thanks, Russell. Okay. I thought that was great. You know, I really appreciate what you had to say. My question is, there's all kinds of garbage in the newspaper about how wonderful this project is and all these things are going to do, but if this is not written into a contract with the county and the city, it doesn't have to happen. And so one of the things I wonder about is they're saying they're going to build an 18 mile long wastewater pipeline. Well is that? Is that in any contract that they have to do that? And then the other question is, they also claim they're only going to use potable water, in other words, our drinking water for two or three years. Is there anything written down that requires them to switch over and quit using our potable water, and that's it for now.
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26:08Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
Yeah. Well, Lillian, first of all, thank you for alerting us that this event was happening. You were the reason that I'm here today, and the mechanism for answering those questions, and what a potential contract I'm using air quotes would look like, is the development agreement, and we will see the draft of that development agreement next week, and that will be the vehicle that will be the legally binding contract, or agreement, if you will, that would have enforceable mechanisms again, to make sure that the infrastructure will be built based On a certain timeline, and really the vehicle to protect the community. That's our portion of the negotiation in this sort of agreement. So that's why, on my Facebook videos and stuff, I keep talking about how important that document is, because that's really the legal mechanism for for those things to be solidified, if that makes sense.
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27:00Joe D Daniszewski
Thank you. Okay. Mike Humphrey, you have to unmute yourself. Mike,
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27:11Mike Humphrey
am I okay? Can you hear me? I'm not. Mike Humphrey, I'm married to him. I think, Jen, you know him. You've met, I think you guys have met a couple times. Mike's on the Pima County Board of Health, and he and I both are very interested in this topic and want to become involved. I guess I have just a couple of questions, and then he asked me to pass along a question, and mine is, is everything I've seen so far in reporting on this has been that the they've not revealed, Bill has not revealed the amount of water or the amount of energy that they would be using. I'm I'm mostly concerned with water issues, but both of those are crucial. Is there any more information on that? You have any idea how much water is involved.
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28:01Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
I can also answer that one. But supervisor, Allen, if you want to jump in. No, that has not been made clear. I have asked. That's the number one question I ask in my newsletter, is, how much with the disclaimer at full build out, specifically calling out at full build out, so all sites, all phases. How much water are we talking about? That has not been made clear to me. That should be listed out again in the development agreement drop that we see with those estimates. But most importantly, I've asked two follow on questions. That one is, what? What are the assumptions that have been made in the modeling that generated those estimates? Because that's so important, right? If we are basing a decision as a community around estimates, how were those estimates calculated, if you will? And the other piece is, if these estimates are completely low balled, for lack of a better word, how do we protect the community if they far exceed what their estimates are. So those are two more detailed questions that I've been asking because I think they're important. Any company can come in and say, Yeah, this is what we're going to do, but if we don't have a mechanism to hold them accountable to those estimates and truly understand how those estimates were calculated, we're not doing our due diligence. So that's something I've been pushing heavily on for answers.
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29:21Mike Humphrey
Oh, that sounds great. And would they be providing a draft development agreement? Is that where it would come from?
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29:27Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
That's correct. So we should on Monday, and I just dropped the draft or a tentative timeline into the chat for everyone. I put this out on my social media platforms on Saturday, the 14th is going to be a big day for us. But also, since we're kind of talking about this, I pushed back quite a bit to make sure that we could have a public meeting before the mayor and council talk about potentially starting a process or not, to annex this land into the city, which is really the mechanism that would deliver water. So that's kind of the key to it, right? If we don't annex the property that the county sold, they don't have a delivery mechanism for the water that they need. So that's the that's the piece, right there. We are having a neighborhood meeting. I requested we have a meeting. Typically, that doesn't happen until the vote happens to begin the annexation process, and then it triggers a series of public engagement opportunities. But I didn't feel that that was sufficient, because of how large this project is and how much secrecy has surrounded it, we need to have these public conversations. So today or tomorrow, I will have details with the date, time and location for a public meeting that will be out here in Ward four, just because I've been pushing forward, and that's where the development possibly could occur. But everyone is welcome, and I've also pushed that that is recorded and or live streamed, so that everybody across the city can have access to the same information, whether they can make it out or not. So timeline is in the chat. I hope it, it helps people kind of understand where we're at and the things to look forward to in July and August. Oh,
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31:05Mike Humphrey
that sounds great. And would that be, that information be on your Facebook?
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31:08Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
Yes, we will put it on Facebook. We will send out an email blast. In fact, I'll put the link to my Facebook page as well as to my newsletter. We'll be communicating it as widely as possible, as well as to the Democrats. I live in LD 17. We'll be sending that out to the LD 17 Dems and as many folks as possible to communicate that information.
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31:30Mike Humphrey
That sounds great. And just one more thing, Jen Mike asked me to ask you, as his as a member of the Board of Health, if you might ask for a community health assessment of Project Blue. I know he's very concerned with the energy usage, and what happens if their energy usage strains the system, etc, etc. You know, do we lose our all lose our air conditioning in the summers, real worried about the health consequences, right? Great idea. Thank you. Okay, thank you.
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32:13Joe D Daniszewski
And go ahead next time and change your mic to your first name. That'll be
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32:22Mike Humphrey
that'll be great. And my last name,
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32:24Joe D Daniszewski
oh, well, well, two for two, that's That's great. Well, let's see, Mike, did you pass a couple
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32:32Michael Bryan
of questions in the chat that I think we usefully pose? One is basic question as to whether or not we can enforce any desire to use solar as the primary or sole means of power for these for these data centers, whether that's practical and whether or not you know we have the ability to force that decision on them, either one of you can answer that.
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32:58Jennifer Allen
I mean, my understanding is that they will develop an agreement with TP and and that is sort of the, the energy use, the in generation agreement, it. And then, you know, this, this is the thing that that is so that feels to me, like I It feels like we're giving this away, right, like we are, you know, for lack of better term, like we're like we are a cheap date, and we should be demanding more again, like in talking with other other elected officials who have made these decisions about data centers in the past, or who Have many data centers, and have since learned about the things that they should be putting in place, and one of them is, and this is what happens in California, is that they are data centers in the Silicon Valley have to be carbon neutral. They generate or they do that. Either they generate their own electricity, or they and, or they purchase credits to help offset their energy consumption, and, and, you know, I don't know we talked to TEP, I'm sure Nikki's had more conversations, and then we've had and it, you know, it was not very confidence inspiring, to be sure. So I'll pass it over to the council member.
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34:32Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
No echo, everything without the supervisor said, and I've not gotten clear answers, either in terms of the amount of energy consumption or the plans, you know, I talk to people in Midtown and in the southeast side of town, and there are rolling brown outs from time to time when we have these high temperature days, and we all know that we're having more and more triple digit days, more strain on the grid. So there's a lot of concerns that residents have expressed to me and and that has been a black hole for me, a black box in terms of what's going on with TEP. I just get that. Oh, yeah, we can handle it. We've got it. But again, like, how do we reassure the public, and how does that become more of a transparent thing? And to hear, you know, companies say that we can't share how much water we're going to use, or we can't share how much energy we're going to use because it's proprietary. I don't think so. I mean, I understand we don't need to know the mechanisms of the internal workings of the equipment inside the buildings, but for those two key pieces of information, I think that the public has a right to understand that.
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35:38Michael Bryan
Yeah, and I guess following on that is there, is there a way in which we can conditionalize our contracts with them to ensure that they're not using additional water or that they're using AC for cooling instead of water and and? Or this was a question in the chat, is there a way we can force them to use grandfather water rights within the AMA to supply their water?
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36:06Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
Those are all things I can ask about when it comes to the development agreement, because I don't know how prescriptive we have the ability to be, and we may be able to be very prescriptive with respect to the way the energy is sourced. So I will take those questions down and see what I can uncover.
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36:23Michael Bryan
Yeah, that's, I think we're caught up in the chat now.
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36:26Joe D Daniszewski
Hey, thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. Lee Oler, you have your hand up.
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36:32Lee Oler
Do Yes, I have my hand up. I'm concerned about as Jen would, sat through it the other day. I wasn't there, I wasn't there, but I heard about it. I I'm very concerned that other supervisor members don't realize what they're voting for, and I don't know what to do about that. I always say what Matt Hines knows better, and he does. I don't know what's going on with Rick Scott. Why he voted for this one, as I understood it, he even said that my constituents want me to vote no, but I'm voting yes. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. Well, thank you. I was a friend of mine told me that. And this is ridiculous. These people are elected by us. And the map, I guess, wants to kind of back up and redo it. I don't know if he can get away with that or not. I hope so, but he's, as I said, he knows better. Why? Why does he do this? So what can we do to work to get when, even if you can present these good arguments that I've heard today, how can you get these other people that I just mentioned, and then there's a Republican down there that I don't remember his name, but I should say, maybe he's excused, I don't know, but still, a four to one vote would do it. What's What can we do about that?
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38:11Jennifer Allen
Well, I mean, I'll see from the supervisors, right? And this is one of the things where, where I've realized how my background of having worked for community organizations and fighting around environmental justice and social justice, just because Fox show up with, like a whole fleet of people who make promises about the you know that that, in fact, they're going to be water positive, and they're going To be negligible impacts on our on our energy bills, and it's all okay. It's great. We care. I don't believe it for a second.
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38:49Lee Oler
Of course not. It's not true.
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38:51Jennifer Allen
I think other they, you know, they came across, they did a presentation. I think people were impressed. They were impressed that they addressed and the guys, kind of, what I heard, they were impressed that they addressed the big concerns of water and energy. And, you know, my take was like, Well, of course they did. Those are their biggest Achilles heels. That's what they have to address, because that is where, that is our greatest source of concern about these projects. And so it was just, you know, it was like green washing of a project one on one. So you know, we got to build up the hearty and robust skepticism amongst folks who make these decisions and so and the ability to like pick and poke and prod and push until we and to draw the line too, because I continue to get all this sort of pushback, of like, oh, well, you're going to make it so that we never get jobs here. We're not going to be competitive and and, like, that's, I think a bunch of BS, I have far more confidence in our region and all of the many attributes that we have here, that this is not a like one and done, and know, if we don't get data centers, then there's no chance for economic development here and jobs to come here. I think that there's, I think we can do better, and I think instilling that and and pushing your Fox, I think we did here, but, but I think there might be a little bit of buyer's remorse and regret on the board of supervisors, but, but, you know, we need to, we need to hear it, and we need to feel it.
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40:33Lee Oler
One of those people that I mentioned. I tried him every time I see him about a vote he made a couple of years ago, probably. And he said, well, the staff said, and how much do you trust the staff to make a good decision? That's, I guess, my second question, because if they're they're saying it's okay, and people believe it, certain people believe it, something's got to be done with the staff,
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41:05Jennifer Allen
and we have amazing staff, but folks also have blind spots, and that is why we have city councils. We have boards of supervisors, because we bring other perspectives to the table that are incredibly important. And so it is. It's supposed to be a collaborative effort to where, you know, staff give us information, and they've, you know, they've got tremendous expertise, but, but there's blind spots there, and our job is still to push and demand the information, to ask the questions based on our experience, but also based on our constituents, our region, etc. And so I think understanding that push and pull dynamic is really important, and all of the board supervisors and council members need to understand that the relationship with staff has got to always be a push and pull and not just like, Okay, you say it's great, you know, they don't want that.
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41:59Joe D Daniszewski
We've got, we've got four hands up,
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42:02Lee Oler
yeah, let me just have one more thing now that the thing it seems like the decision, as Nikki had just had said before that, next week, did I hear this correctly? Next week, you're going to make some other decision that might be binding,
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42:17Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
is that, no, no, so no. So this is, this is super important, Lee, so I really appreciate you bringing this up. Next week. We're going to have a draft of a development agreement that's going to be sent to Mayor and Council and therefore the public. So that's just going to be a document that answers a ton of questions that all of us have been asking. We will have a neighborhood meeting out here the week of the 21st of July, the first conversation that mayor and council is going to have as a team is going to happen on August? Is it the sixth in my list here? Yes, August the sixth. So as a mayor and council team, we have not discussed this. So basically, what happened, because it does get a little wonky, is that the Board of Supervisors Pima county owned the land, so their role in this was whether or not to approve the sale of the land. And I just want to applaud supervisor Allen for all of her work and really digging in and looking beyond just the presentation we got. So yes, clap to that. Now the ball has gotten passed over to the city, and the next step would be for mayor and council to decide if we will begin the annexation process. I don't know if that vote is going to happen on the 19th of August or not, if it does happen and if it does pass, and both of those are ifs, it would initiate a process that would include multiple public engagement opportunities, followed by a future vote to annex or not to annex. So I want to be very clear on that, just because I don't want people to fret too much that something is happening like immediately on this vote, there's still some time, and there's a lot of information that needs to to come to the surface for the public prior to an actual vote,
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44:01Joe D Daniszewski
right? Okay, let's go. Let's go to Lillian Fox. Lillian,
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44:10Lillian Fox
okay, first of all, Math has been told by the county attorney that he can't revote that that's done. It's a contract. It was signed. It's over. So we really need to focus on the city council members, because the supervisors can't redo the vote. The other thing is, people kept, keep bringing up solar. Solar is not 24 hours a day. In order to do solar, 24 hours a day, you need enormous batteries. There's no guarantee that the technology exists. You know, maybe I forgotten his name of Rush, Russia knows the answer to that. Is there even a battery, an affordable battery system that would allow the solar to be used for 24 hours a day?
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44:58Joe D Daniszewski
Is that Russell,
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44:59Russell & Lhasha
yes, there are plenty of systems that, in fact, if you go to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory website, they and anybody that can email wants to email me. I'll put my email in the discussion. But they are, they're doing out literally over 1000 power purchase agreements, and many of them have robust battery backup to solar. So solar has become 24/7 now it's not. It isn't an intermittent source anymore when it's used with robust energy backup. And the energy backup with solar that's robust is is now costing four cents per kilowatt hour for production. So you have to add to that delivery, which is like six cents or so, so it's cheaper than what our electricity is right now in Tucson, which is 15 cents a kilowatt hour.
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45:51Joe D Daniszewski
Okay, okay. Lillian,
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45:54Lillian Fox
yes, thank you.
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45:56Joe D Daniszewski
Okay. Cathy, Bliven,
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46:01Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
hi, it's in the chat. But my question was, if, if the land is not annexed, what, what do we think they will do with the land or, or does that is the deal contingent on it being annexed? And then I noticed Wendy had something in there about, what if they just walk off or go bankrupt? Then what I've seen things happen with cell towers, so that it's kind of two questions. Well, I know that the sale was not dependent on annexation, right? So Jen that would still sit in the county. So you may want to take that one
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46:46Jennifer Allen
well. So I mean, I my understanding would be that they would still have the the and correct me if I'm wrong council member. But the the motive for the annexation is that they would be within the service area of tucson water which, which means lower water rates. So outside of, if they are outside of the service area, the water rates would be significantly higher, and making the project less appealing, oh, like Trico or something. I they would still be in Tucson water service area, but they would be an unincorporated which will have a higher a higher water rate. And there's council member of the motive for, well,
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47:33Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
the city of Tucson is required to provide service to any customer that is inside of the city of Tucson limits, and so that's kind of the key factor. If this land becomes annexed, and it becomes part of the city, then the city is obligated to deliver water service to that area. So that's kind of the mechanism. So if an annexation does not happen, my guess is they already spent $20.8 million I think, purchasing the land, and that would maybe be a sunk cost, I don't know, because really, the only thing that's going to make this viable is to have water going out to the property. So I don't know what the company would choose to do, but they did purchase the land, so that would be theirs, and I don't know if they would resell it, or exactly what they would do.
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48:18Joe D Daniszewski
Okay? Robert Bulechek,
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48:21Robert Bulechek
oh, my question on a completely different topic is that it seems that Pima County has been doing a pretty good job in electrifying their fleet. They have, to the best of my knowledge, way more electric vehicles than the city of Tucson does, and they've been putting in chargers for their use. But my question is, there's all these chargers that Pima County seems to be preventing the public from using, even though they may be in public locations. I'm thinking of the Pima County Public Service garage downtown, where in a public parking garage, the county bans citizens from plugging in their cars there and then that's an area with not many chargers. And of course, many people who are working or visiting downtown would like to be able to charge their cars where they're there. So my question is, what would it take to get Pima County to quit hogging their chargers and share with the public the Chargers they had already paid for? And when I visited that public service garage, there were, like, 10 chargers unused. You know there were there. I forget how many charges there, 10 or 12, something like that. Maybe more. And you know, there were two county cars plugged in and 10 empty chargers. So what you know, can we get Pima County to stop hogging the chargers and share them with the
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50:00Jennifer Allen
public? Well, now that I have access to chargers for me, what do I care? No, let me ask. I'll check with our facilities folks and and see, and I know we talked to a question about getting a charger out in cells, and there's the ball is rolling. There conversations are happening. We have a high speed charger, the nation is interested, and so we're trying to make that happen so, but I'll figure out if we can switch that up and keep you posted. Robert, thank you.
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50:32Joe D Daniszewski
Okay, boy, lots of great insight and experience. There's lots of great stuff in the chat. There's some of the speakers that have just been compelling. Russell Lowe's, he's got his Gmail in there, so go ahead and reach out to him. And certainly Robert Bulechek has a great focus on all things electrical. And we appreciate him, and we appreciate all you. We don't have Democrats of greater Tucson Without you the participants. So there's some great information from James Stevenson about maybe even organizing a protest. So check that out, and let's see Mike. Do we have any other questions in the chat. I'm not
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51:21Michael Bryan
saying that any that haven't been addressed, certainly, if, if you have something that is burning a hole in your head and you need to get it out, you know, let it. Let me know. DM me, or just put your hand up and we'll get to you.
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51:34Joe D Daniszewski
Okay, so Lillian, up. Yep, you shifted on me. Go for it.
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51:40Mike Humphrey
It's Joanne again. Thanks. As a retired government attorney who practiced in Pima County, one of the I just want to make a comment because, you know, obviously we can't get in, I can't get into the legal stuff. But when I first heard about the non disclosure agreement, one of the first things that occurred to me was is, can water, amount of water use and amount of electrical use, can that is that information really proprietary in the fact that it's some kind of a trade secret? So I don't know if that's come up with the county lawyers, or if it's going to be coming up with the city legal staff. But I just want to throw that out there, because I used to work with Open Meeting Law issues and open documents, and that kind of rang a raise the flag for me. The other question, the question I have is, Jen, is there any now that the county has voted to has sold the land, what is the county's role? If any, going forward now that it's heading over to the city side?
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52:57Jennifer Allen
Well, so the first piece on the water question. So I did ask right in the little presentation from Bill Fox, say, Okay, well, is there, is there? Are we using new technology? Is this? Is the proposed data centers, some new use of water that that is never been used before, and that's why we can't get this information. And they and they laughed at me like, you know, Oh, you silly girl. No, no, this is technology that's been used over and over again. This is very commonplace and so so no, there is no, there should not be a trade secret or some sort of competitive advantage associated with the use how much water that they are using. And the disclosure of that is, it should, it sounds like they're, they're going to be using technology that is commonplace in data centers, which I will note is, is, you know, if you just look at what data centers are using in other places, it's one to 2 million gallons of water a day, and then the higher the newer data centers often can get up to 5 million gallons of water a day. One as the as the expansions of AI, these bigger data centers get upwards of 5 million. So there shouldn't be anything that is a, you know, sort of a protected, kind of trade secret associated with that. And I'll say that that, and that's why, and this is sort of the piece for the county's kind of next steps. I mean, most of it's really, it's going to be in the city's court, right? But what we are doing is now looking at, I had two things that got passed, approved at the last board meeting. One is reforming our use of non disclosure agreements at the county and making sure that, if, like, right now, we have, we've got kind of one template. And I'll tell you, almost every single NDA uses that one template. And so it's incredibly broad. It encompasses all sorts of things. And so if we're going to use an NDA and one, I need it to be really clear about why we must use it, and we need to be involved. We as the board, need to be involved in some of that decision making about that sort of cost benefit, or the the opportunity cost of whether we should sign an NDA or not, because sometimes we just need to say no, and it's okay to say no, but we need NDAs that are a scalpel and not and I've sort of been saying like a wrecking ball, like too broad and all encompassing. It needs to be precise, and they need to they the burden is on the business to prove the the trait what needs to be protected, right? We shouldn't just sort of let them throw a big cloak over everything just because they say that that's what they want. So, so we did that. The other thing is also requiring, requiring environmental impact analysis for economic development projects, we get all the numbers of how much jobs and investments and all of the sort of Dazzle, Dazzle, but we don't get the numbers about water use, energy use, how this is in conformance with our climate goals. Like we don't get that, how this complies with our conservation land system and the Sonoran Desert conservation plan. And, like, how is it in sync with all of those goals? We need to know that information for us to be able to make good decisions and for the public to be but feel that this reflects these decisions reflect our values and our future and our existential existence, right? So anyway, those are so now we're kind of doing some stuff to make sure that we don't get in a position like this again, because this is unacceptable.
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56:50Mike Humphrey
Yeah, yeah.
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56:52Joe D Daniszewski
Okay, we've got a couple other people, and I'd
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56:55Michael Bryan
like to interject something, if I could sure there was something, there was something in the chat that I think should go on the audible record here for later viewers, and that's regarding the tax break for the for the city, state and county transaction privilege taxes and the the property taxes, essentially on the equipment that goes into these centers. Nikki pointed out something very interesting here. Will you you want to continue on that, on that, Nikki, and make that more available to the to the viewers?
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57:26Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
Absolutely, it hasn't popped up yet in the in the conversation piece, but Bryan had asked if there were tax breaks involved here, and in peeling back some of the layers of this onion, I learned about the Arizona computer data center program, which is a state level incentive that was established in 2013 that basically waives taxes that a company would pay on qualifying data center equipment for up to 20 years. And this was renewed to go through 2033 and what this means when we zoom it down to just the city of Tucson level, we would be foregoing $62 million of revenue that would come in through the purchase of equipment just in phase one. So it's not like there's no carrots here, and that's why we see so many of these data centers in an area where, collectively, in the state of Arizona, we don't have a ton of free water floating around there to use for these but it's really these incentives that have existed at the state level and have been extended at the state level that are attracting these opportunities here and then as local jurisdictions, we're left with with trying to figure out what to do at this point. Yeah, those
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58:38Michael Bryan
local taxes are a huge part of the incentive for for local governments to actually allow this kind of development, to go forward and encourage it, and foregoing it knocks out a huge portion of logic of actually, you know, building, building facilities like these,
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58:53Joe D Daniszewski
okay, Steven, you've had your hand up. You've been very patient.
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58:59Steven Lesh
Yes, two questions, I've been trying to find the yearly water use of TEP that ought to be public information as well. A lot of it is, like really unnecessary, because they have been so slow in transitioning to solar. There's another point though that I don't believe in made today. You know, water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas than even CO two, and if these data centers are going to be pumping enormous amounts of or cause enormous amounts of water to be vaporized. That's going to make temperatures even hotter. Is there any of how much water vapor has increased?
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59:55Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
I'm focusing about, you know, is there cool and added to happen? Water, some of it will be discharged and where, and some of it will evaporate. What will that look like? So I'm sad, but I unfortunately don't have
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01:00:08Steven Lesh
my concern is the heat effect, and that needs to be done. Yeah,
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01:00:16Joe D Daniszewski
yeah. In fact, you got a response, Steven. So if you want to take a look at your chat, you are getting some feedback,
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01:00:25Jennifer Allen
and Russell's who I would go to to answer that question about TPS, water use. So fortunately, he's
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01:00:31Joe D Daniszewski
okay. Well, Lillian, you have the last question. Okay,
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01:00:37Lillian Fox
I have a couple of things. One is you install electric chargers to meet peak use. So when you look and see county chargers aren't being used, that doesn't mean they're not needed. You don't want to have county vehicles standing in line to get charged when they got work. They got to do other thing is, and this is for Nikki Lee, has the city also been bound by some sort of NDA agreement.
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01:01:02Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
Thank you for that question. I am taking the lead and following the lead of supervisor Allen to bring up the conversation of NDA reform for the city of Tucson as well. Hopefully we can use parallel agreements so that we're all operating under a similar model. But to answer your question, Lillian Yes, our economic incentives or economic initiatives, Director, which is our normal process, which obviously needs to change, signed an NDA on behalf of the entire organization. So that is an umbrella NDA that applies to all of us in the organization. So we are also looking at how we can do better, because changes need to be
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01:01:40Lillian Fox
are you also act asking for an environmental impact statement for the or review for this project?
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01:01:47Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
I personally am going to be following up on all those questions and see what the supervisors come up with in terms of how they want to move forward, and look for those details within the economic development process. Yes, I'm going to see how they how they navigate and how we can closely align to what they're doing. Not to just copy Jen's work, but I think it would be helpful for all of us to be operating in a similar fashion.
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01:02:10Joe D Daniszewski
Well, let's, let's thank our guest speakers today. We had a great program, one of our largest number of participants. You. You really did great, and we appreciate it. And we're going to honor the speakers right now and make sure they can get back to you know their their work. So give them a big round of applause again for Jennifer and Nikki.
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01:02:34Michael Bryan
Thanks for jumping in in the last minute at Jennifer's request. Really appreciate your participation. Sorry
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01:02:40Nikki Lee (City of Tucson)
for passion the party
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01:02:43Joe D Daniszewski
and Joanne, we're glad you're here too. So thank you. Thank you for being here. Thanks to everybody. We've had over 40 participants today. That's the largest number we've had in a while. You all make Democrats a greater Tucson go. Thank you.
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01:03:01Russell & Lhasha
Thank you. Thank you. Alright,
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01:03:04Michael Bryan
anything, anything else with the good of the order before I let everybody go, Joe, no
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01:03:07Joe D Daniszewski
thanks again.
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01:03:09Michael Bryan
Alrighty, just one final note before I let everybody go next week, let me grab the program for next week. It's all available@thedgt.org Of course. as always, but next week we're going to have a congressional candidate from CD six mo Goldman, joining us to talk about his campaign for Congress in 26. So join us for that. Bye everybody, thanks for joining us.
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