*Trailer* Not in Our Backyard: Fighting the Servers w/ Jeremy Todzia

This is a trailer the full episode will be released on 8/5!

In this episode, host Carlos Childs is joined by Jeremy Todzia, Chair of the Calvert County Republican Central Committee, to discuss the CCRCC's support for pausing all dat center development, the myth of data centers creating jobs, and how this issue played a crucial role in deciding the 2026 GOP Commissioner primaries. He shares insights on political impacts, transparency issues, environmental concerns, and community responses to local data data center proposals.

Jeremy Todzia:

• Calvert County GOP website
  • Data center statement

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Data centers do not create jobs. They weren't even promising to create jobs. It was a temporary while while we build this, and one of the biggest pushers of the data centers in Caver County were the unions, was we're going to have temporary jobs for one to three years as you do the build out. And then afterwards all those jobs go, you know, 700 jobs is is the number they were throwing out. But again, that that that is a temporary fix for one to three years as they build out these data centers. And, you know, long term, I mean, I I've seen in other places, it's less than 50 jobs at these data centers. So again, what is the trade-off? I mean, you know, we have made decisions in Calvert County to bring in the new plant, to bring in the liquid natural gas plant, and and some of those are controversial, but those also created hundreds of jobs in Calvert County. And again, the risk-benefit ratio on these data centers, again, with with the amount of unknowns, no jobs, no, no clarification on what the revenue and benefits are. I think that's it's another reason why there was such a great push to push a moratorium for Calvert County.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

No, you're definitely right. Um yeah, with you mentioning the risk-benefit as the public, you all assume all the risks and the corporation gets all the benefit of it. It's insane too when you mention jobs, because a lot of times these unions do kind of come in, and as someone who supports unions, they're they're uh great. I think this is one of the uh parts where they're getting it wrong, to where they're they're looking at just that short-term, oh, we get jobs from uh construction. The problem is when you look across the country, a lot of these data centers do not hire locally. A lot of them hire people who uh their own personal uh teams of uh people, ship them in, build the data center, and then ship them back out because they want people who are used to working these uh or uh building these uh specific plants. But then on top of that, they're trying to save as much cost as they can. And they don't care about the community.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

And like there's no guarantee that these were going to be local union members building the thing. Exactly. There there was no, to my knowledge, there was no and I don't even know how you would even get that guarantee into the in into the building of these data centers. But yeah, it could have been crews from Virginia, it it could have been outside, completely outside of the local region. But yeah, there was there was no guarantee that any of our union members in Coward County were gonna get any of this business or working on those job sites.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Exactly. And and then it was crazy because we had a um in Charles County, we had a a kind of a government town hall that they brought out, like like the head of economic development, the hand of the head of like planning and growth. Crazy enough, they did not bring out anyone with like the environment department. They didn't bring anyone who's like supposed to represent uh the actual public facing part of it. And they were talking about, well, it's jobs during the construction, but once it's built, they kept just reiterating, well, we have security jobs for you all. We have jobs and security. I'm thinking, okay, so you can pay someone minimum wage to do security for that. Or what this is most likely gonna be done is they just pay the sheriff's department money and then have off duty sheriffs work there as you see multiple uh restaurants do. So we don't even get the economic benefit. And then in Charles County, uh for that county specifically, a lot of the sheriffs don't even live in the county, they travel from Virginia to come in. So it's the money's not even circulating within the uh community.