Tag Archives: local government

Voting against data centers in the 2026 elections

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In the 2026 elections, voters in a number of communities and races also considered what to do about data centers:

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Voters in at least 29 jurisdictions across the country passed bans or restrictions on data centers Tuesday, reflecting the widespread public revulsion to the facilities and adding to the growing pushback on the ambitions of the artificial intelligence industry.

Data center construction also suffered setbacks in several states that are hot spots for the projects, as Democratic candidates promising to curb the rapid proliferation of the compute warehouses won governors’ races…

A voter poll conducted on behalf of major TV networks said early on Wednesday that 56 percent of midterms voters considered AI and data centers to be a major or crucial factor in their vote. That ranked them as the least influential among five issues, far behind government corruption, the war in Iran and the cost of living…

It’s unclear whether local and state restrictions will meaningfully slow the frantic building of AI data centers around the United States. Some industry officials say that a significant portion of the roughly 600 large-scale AI data centers either planned or under construction is unlikely to become operational regardless of public reaction.

Three quick thoughts in response:

  1. With these election results, this does not necessarily mean that data centers cannot or will not be built in some places. Does this mean places and officials open to data centers will build more within their geography? Is this an opportunity for some locations?
  2. I’m curious to see how conversations about AI and its potential line up with conversations about people not wanting to live near them. What is the point where people say data centers are needed because AI is needed for particular uses and so they have to go somewhere near us? Is there any point that this happens if there are always options where data centers can be located elsewhere?
  3. When I read about NIMBY responses to all sorts of land uses, I keep coming back to an idea: why not have municipalities or special government zones where these undesirable land uses could be concentrated? Use the Chicago area as an example: if many residents in the city and suburbs do not want data centers near them, is there a way to put a bunch of data centers in one municipality with no residents nearby? Out of sight and hearing, out of mind?

How the sole resident of a one person Nebraska town keeps the community going

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The community of Monowi, Nebraska has one resident. She fulfills multiple roles:

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Elsie is not simply Monowi’s last resident. She is also its mayor, clerk and treasurer, effectively running a local government in which every official position leads back to the same person.

Each year, she hangs up a notice in Monowi’s only business (her bar) advertising mayoral elections, and then votes for herself.

With no political rivals to threaten her reign, Elsie casts the only ballot at election time, securing a staggering 100 per cent of the vote without so much as knocking on a door.

Elsie is responsible for keeping Monowi’s finances afloat and its official status intact, while navigating the peculiar business of approving the paperwork needed to run her own tavern…

She has also previously explained that she raises around £380 ($500) annually in local taxes to help cover essential services, including the maintenance of three flickering lampposts and water maintenance.

Someone has to keep the lights on. There are taxes to be paid and then used for local infrastructure. Elections need to be held. The one local business needs operating.

Americans tend to like local government so I imagine at least a few other Americans would enjoy being all of the local government in one person. Some might imagine this would be exciting for a larger community. A single mayor or city manager could make all the decisions and make things happen. Other might like having just a one person community.

But, as the article notes, this came about because of the steady decline of Monowi. It was never large but it once had roughly 150 residents. There were multiple businesses and a post office. How many people would want to run the show in a declining town of one where there are abandoned buildings and a loss of residents over time?

It could almost be cast in video game terms: could you grow a community from a population of 1? Trying to attract other residents would take work as would adjusting to change within the community. Would it be possible to try to buy up all of the nearby land and sell a whole town (as has been tried before elsewhere)?

What votes did Pope Leo cast in local suburban political races and questions?

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Pope Leo voted in the 2026 American election cycle in suburban New Lenox, Illinois:

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Records show that the pope is registered under his baptismal name, Robert Francis Prevost, to vote in the Chicago suburb of New Lenox, where his brother John lives. The Chicago-born pontiff has cast ballots in both Republican and Democratic primaries in recent years and cast a vote in the 2024 presidential election….

The pope’s ballot is expected to include votes for the senate and governor race in Illinois, along with house of representative, state and county elections.

While there is interest in comparing the Pope’s political views versus that of the current US administration, I would be interested to know how he voted regarding local candidates and issues. As noted above, this includes voting for state and local elections. Local choices could include for county boards, forest preserves, local judges, and municipal governments. It might include local referendum issues about property tax increases for school district needs or other specific local questions. Local residents might struggle to keep up with all the local issues and all the names on signs that pop up at each election cycle, let alone someone who is living elsewhere and voting from a distance.

The shorthand the media often uses for state and national issues – it is Democrats vs. Republicans, one party wins and the other loses – do not always hold up in suburban elections. Sometimes they do; elections for county boards and school boards in the Chicago suburbs can now echo national party platforms. But sometimes they do not. There are local election slates. Or particular histories and character in communities that influence local elections. A suburban community may lean more Democratic or Republican in larger political races but the local political activity can be unique.

New Lenox, Illinois is a unique suburban community southwest of Chicago. It has grown rapidly in recent years, increasing from under 3,000 residents in 1970 to over 27,000 in 2020. The suburb is largely white with the 2020 Census finding over 87% were white alone. A 2015 promotional campaign for the community emphasized that it is “home to proud Americans.” How do leaders and residents understand their community’s character, considering past, present, and future, and how does this affect their vote?

After the election concludes, there will be data regarding races – national, state, and local – that New Lenox residents voted in. It sounds like the Pope’s votes will be part of this.

Which residents might benefit if property taxes are reduced or eliminated

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As numerous states in the United States consider eliminating property taxes, which residents would benefit? An argument about what could happen in Florida:

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If retirees on fixed incomes can’t afford their insurance payments and families can’t figure out how to cover their tax bill, maybe. Yet the number of Florida homes and buildings that are delinquent on their property taxes has fallen slightly since 2020. The number of foreclosures has increased a bit, but remains low. The state’s housing market is fraying and distressed sales are increasing, but that’s because of climate change and mortgage rates, not tax assessments. Floridians may not like paying a higher tax bill, and carrying costs might be spurring some of them to downsize. But in general, property taxes are levied on people who can afford them. The typical homeowner earns twice as much as the typical renter, and has 43 times the net worth.

Tenants are “the loser in all this,” Ken Johnson, a professor of finance at the University of Mississippi, told me. Many cities and counties offset lower taxes on owner-occupied properties with higher taxes on commercial residential properties. Landlords pass those costs on to their renters. The policy will also benefit longtime homeowners at the expense of prospective homebuyers. Low property taxes increase home prices, making it harder for people without a lot of money in the bank—such as new parents and just-married couples—to get approved for a mortgage. Then they remain tenants, subject to never-ending rent increases.

In addition to distorting the housing market, Amendment 3 will devastate public finances. Property taxes provide 43 percent of revenue to Florida’s municipal general funds, the bank accounts that cities and counties use to finance day-to-day services. Amendment 3 will cut collections by as much as 30 percent, and will hit hardest in areas with a lot of homes and not a lot of commerce. To cover the $12 billion budget hole, cities and towns will likely raise or impose sales taxes and sin taxes; increase fees at the DMV, permit offices, registrars, and courts; charge more for waste removal and water; and put additional taxes on tourists. The state will trade out a solidly progressive, uniformly applied tax for an obscure, regressive mishmash of charges.

But municipalities aren’t expected to make up all of the lost revenue. They’re expected to cut. Amendment 3 explicitly protects tax financing streams for schools, meaning that cities and counties are contemplating draconian budget reductions for public-safety offices, libraries, after-school programs, summer camp, day care, flood prevention, public transit, roads, parks, senior services, homeless shelters, legal-aid clinics, domestic-violence shelters, and many other things. Austerity will be regressive too, harming the poor more than the wealthy. Rich Floridians aren’t relying on the bus to get to work. They’re not picking up free meals, taking adult-literacy classes at the library, or seeing a dentist at a pop-up clinic in a middle-school gymnasium either.

These predictions suggest an immediate reduction or removal of property taxes could prove popular with homeowners but has longer-term consequences for those who are not homeowners and for communities at large who will have to adjust their tax base.

Is this then similar to the mortgage-interest deduction that tends to benefit people who are already financially okay? Is there a way to reduce property taxes for all residences?

Thinking more broadly, is there any way that Americans who live in or own different property types could work together to address their concerns about property taxes and local revenues? While homeowners might be fed up with rising property taxes, how does this intersect with concerns about tax breaks given to data centers or whatever is the latest development rage? Or the work of business owners to limit their local taxes when local schools and other amenities benefit from such monies? Or local government bodies raising rates in order to have the revenues they say they need to provide local services?

If the different actors are trying to find a good advantage for themselves, their actions could impact others. Perhaps it is time more communities have conversations about taxes and services. What are their priorities? What do they need? What issues do they each face? They might not agree and communities or states might take different approaches but they might find some common ground or new approaches.

400+ focus groups of voters shows human nature of voters?

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After conducting hundreds of focus groups with voters in the United States, one commentator describes the participants:

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Since that moment, I’ve conducted more than 400 focus groups with thousands of voters across the political spectrum. To my knowledge, this is the largest and most consistent qualitative study of voter sentiment during the Trump era. Here’s what I’ve learned: People are wild. They are full of contradictions. They lament our deep political divisions while raging about their political enemies. They believe in grace but cut their Trumpy brother out of their life forever. They’re married to an immigrant but voted for the guy who wants to deport millions of people who have the same immigration status as their wife. They hate the government and want to lower the national debt, but they also want the government to spend more to help them and their communities. They call themselves pro-life but believe in a woman’s right to choose. I could go on.

This suggests voters have multiple motivations and opinions. They are not necessarily consistent in their principles and actions. They react to both what is immediately around them and broader social forces and changes.

In other words, the voters are people. They are doing their best to make sense of the world around them. Translating those beliefs and responses into neatly packaged political party platforms or bundles of issues that candidates consistently talk about is not easy.

With all that said, listening to voters can be helpful:

Listening to voters is a cheat code for understanding politics—democracy, after all, is the collective will of the voters—yet few people in politics do it. If you’re running a campaign, you might do a series of focus groups with voters in your district or state. If you’re a politician, you might go on “listening tours,” chat with people at the state fair, or host campaign events. But rarely do politicians and campaigns take the time to talk in-depth about why people feel the way they do.

The reality is, the closer you get to institutional politics, the further you are from the people whom politics and government are supposed to serve. Washington is less a swamp than a bubble, inside of which the rest of America becomes an abstraction.

Where is there room to find common ground or interests? Are there ways to connect with what people are experiencing or care about beyond providing talking points and political tactics?

This could also be linked to the reasons Americans often like local politics and government: these are potential neighbors who have more of a stake and interest in day-to-day community life. Go up to the regional or state or national level and it can be hard to connect to all the experiences and concerns voters have.

Chicago suburbs to compete with Chicago to supply municipal water needs with Lake Michigan water

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Earlier this week, a group of Chicago suburbs announced plans to pump and distribute Lake Michigan water. This would put them in competition with the water supplied by the city of Chicago:

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The DuPage commission alone is paying Chicago’s Department of Water Management $130 million this year, commission Chair Jim Zay told the Tribune Publishing-owned Daily Herald. The DuPage consortium is Chicago’s single largest wholesale customer, accounting for 15% of the city water system’s annual operating revenue, according to Fitch Ratings.

The threat to Chicago is several years away; the DuPage commission is contracted to buy water from the city until 2041. But that’s how long it would take to secure approvals, financing and build the competing system anyway.

The backers of the suburban plan complain that Chicago in the past has raised its rates suddenly and exorbitantly and that more recently the city’s service hasn’t been sufficiently reliable. “They don’t put anything back into the system; that’s the problem,” the Herald quoted Zay as saying. “This year we’ll pay them $130 million, and they put nothing in for infrastructure.”…

And if these suburban officials conclude that the risk of continuing to do business with Chicago for generations to come is greater than executing this complex and expansive infrastructure project, that’s their prerogative. To our minds, it’s not an easy call.

This reminds me of two features of American suburbs:

  1. One leading reason suburban communities stopped approving annexation of their community into big cities in the late 1800s had to do with utilities. Once costs of supplying electricity, water, gas, and other needed resources decreased, suburbs developed their own systems rather than join the city to enjoy the benefits of their systems.
  2. Suburbs and their residents like local government. Even as the competing suburban water system would be administered by suburban officials, they would prefer that local control rather than having the big city control the water. This does not mean all the suburbs will agree about how to go about the water business but they probably believe they would rather have decisions in the hands of suburbanites rather than city people.

In other words, this move to have suburbs supply Lake Michigan water is part of longstanding patterns. Yes, it involves a lot of money and effort. But the suburbs think it is worthwhile compared to relying on the big city.

One reason Illinois has so many local governments: old rules limited how much debt governments could take on

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Illinois has thousands of local government bodies. Here is one reason for the large number:

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Illinois was not unique in its decentralized, generous incorporation and annexation terms or in witnessing the end of the city’s physical expansion in the early twentieth century, phenomena that collectively encouraged fragmented jurisdictions in many metropolitan areas. Relatively unique, however, was Illinois’s strict constitutional limit on local debt, which prompted many suburbanites to create new governments rather than expand the charge of existing ones when new needs arose. Until amended in 1970, the Illinois Constitution restricted local borrowing to less than 5 percent of assessed valuation. This restriction made it difficult to finance big projects, especially for governments in small or rapidly growing places where property assessment increases often lagged years behind the need for services and infrastructure. Residents created new school districts to build high schools, for example, rather than extend elementary school districts’ responsibility into the upper grades (as in most other states). They also created a wide array of special-purpose governments to perform specific functions (like fire protection, building and managing parks, and managing sanitation) rather than expanding municipal functions. By 1970 there were 1,239 local governments in the six-county Chicago region: 280 incorporated municipalities, 121 township districts (with responsibility over unincorporated territory), 384 school districts and 449 special-purpose districts.”

On the one hand, you would not want small government bodies amassing large debts. How would they pay it off? How might servicing the debt affect their ability to provide local services?

On the other hand, this paragraph describes the downside of the debt limits. Have new needs or need more resources? Form a new government body in order to take on debt and pursue your goal.

Once these government bodies are established and raise money, they take on a life of their own. They live out their mandate. They provide local services. They gather resources and build their capacity. They have defenders. For ones formed before 1970, they have over half a century of inertia and history.

Even with changed rules, the number of Illinois local governments remains high. It will take a major sustained effort to reduce the number.

What Chicago suburbs could do in response to “unprecedented” storms and large number of tornadoes

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The Chicago area has experienced a lot of severe weather this summer. This includes a large number of storms:

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The damaging storms that rolled through the suburbs Tuesday marked the 329th time the National Weather Service office in Romeoville has issued a severe weather warning this year.

That’s more severe weather warnings than issued in all of 2025, and far past the previous record of 273 set in 2006. The warnings are issued for storms that have the potential to produce tornadoes, winds 58 mph or greater, and quarter-size or larger hail.

“It really is pretty unprecedented,” said Gino Izzi, senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service.

And Illinois has had a lot of tornadoes:

Snyder said Illinois will likely pass 200 confirmed tornadoes after Tuesday’s storms, far and away the most tornadoes of any state in the country for 2026, according to the National Weather Service.

If Illinois continues this stormy trend, it may not only add to its state record but perhaps break a nationwide record for the total number of tornadoes in one state in any single year — 232 tornados in Texas in 2015 and 1967.

How could suburbs respond to this (beyond doing nothing and/or hoping this was an unusual year)? Some ideas:

  1. More personnel and effort for clean-up. Storms and tornadoes bring damage. Communities could budget more resources to deal with the aftermath of storms. Roads need to be cleaned. Downed trees and branches need to be cleaned up. Storm sewers need to be clear. Suburbanites expect a certain level of local services and providing more after storms could become more common.
  2. Updating building codes so that structures can better weather storms. This might add to costs – whether in updates or in new construction – but could pay off in the long run.
  3. Changing development plans to stay away from potentially dangerous areas. It is hard to predict the exact paths of storms or tornadoes. It is easier to look at where flooding might occur. Water can cause a lot of damage.
  4. More severe weather centers where people can shelter and/or seek help. This might require centrally located buildings that are relatively safe in storms.

Options such as these might require that suburban residents ask for them. Americans like suburbs in part because they provide encounters with nature. Storms and tornadoes, however, might be parts of nature that are too threatening to the suburban way of life and residents could come to expect suburban governments to provide more help.

How much elected suburban leaders make, 2026 North Shore edition

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What is the salary for elected suburban leaders in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs?

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Voters may be surprised to learn that in Evanston, the position to oversee a $400 million-plus municipal government and a city of about 76,000 people comes with an annual salary of a little over $25,000…

“I don’t think anybody expects somebody in Evanston to support a family on this salary, so whether they have other employment or other wealth or, as in my case, right now they have a spouse who works full-time, I think certainly the expectation is there’s some other reason that they’re able to stay afloat.”…

Evanston is not unique in this regard. Municipalities across the North Shore tend to offer modest compensation for mayoral and other top elected offices, begging similar questions about who can afford to serve…

And Hansen said research suggests that low-pay and unpaid municipal positions tend to have less competition and therefore are more conducive to a higher rate of diversity among elected leaders who come from a wider range of backgrounds.

Historically, however, even “poorly paid positions still tend to be primarily held by white-collar professionals for reasons that aren’t directly related to the salary offered by the office,” like professionals being able to more easily raise campaign money or because they have “greater autonomy over their time, both to campaign for office and to serve if they win,” Hansen said.

Local elected officials have important roles in their suburban communities. They help make decisions in communities, they are at events in the community, and they serve as figureheads for the community.

Hinted at but not stated explicitly in the article is that there are local government staff that do a lot of day to day work. They are not typically elected.

You can see some of this dynamic at local meetings. Say there is a new development proposed for the community. Elected officials have roles and government staff have roles.

It would be interesting to put the question to local voters: should local government staff and/or local officials have higher salaries? Present the argument to the voters, including the effects on who might run or how this might affect local services and decision-making.

Communities preparing for possible property tax reductions in Florida

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With the possibility that Florida residents will soon vote to significantly lower property taxes, communities in the states are trying to get ready:

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The proposal is spurring urgent responses from local governments faced with the prospect of plummeting tax revenue. Cities and counties are scrambling to prepare for a potential overhaul of how they pay for all sorts of services, from policing to pothole repairs.

Local officials across the state say the issue is dominating discussion in commission meetings and budget workshops. Among the measures they have taken so far: freezing hiring and capital projects, planning possible service cuts and floating proposals to increase other fees and taxes to offset the shortfall…

In the 2027-28 fiscal year, the Florida changes would reduce property-tax revenue in the state overall by nearly $5 billion, according to the Office of Economic and Demographic Research, a research arm of the legislature. That would increase to $8.8 billion in 2028-29 and $10.8 billion in 2030-31.

The amounts would vary widely for individual counties, with a large one like Miami-Dade projected to lose $304 million in the first year and a small one like Okeechobee expected to lose $3.7 million, according to an analysis by the Florida Association of Counties. Suburban counties with high proportions of homestead properties would face the sharpest exposure, and economically distressed small counties would be the least equipped to respond, the study said.

Americans generally do not like the idea of high property taxes. They like the idea of homeownership but do not always like the idea they should pay more taxes on something they own.

At the same time, this tax helps fund many of the local amenities and services Americans benefit from and participate in. When looking at amenities about communities when making choices about where to live or when discussing local features and amenities they like, property taxes likely contribute. This includes schools, parks, and police and fire departments.

The tradeoffs I wonder if Americans are willing to make: either or both (1) lower levels of local amenities and services and (2) less local control over local services and amenities for lower property taxes. Immediate financial benefits for property owners but a loss of quality of life? How this plays out in Florida might help