Kokomo's Mayor Turned Down a Tax Break to Land a Data Center. OpenAI and the Electricians' Union Are Betting the Deal Travels.

Tyler Moore didn't ask Digital Realty for a tax abatement, and more to the point, he turned one down before anyone could offer it. Kokomo's mayor says the three-building, three-million-square-foot data center campus Digital Realty wants to build on 476 acres of the city's old industrial park will get no property tax break at all, and every contractor on the job will come from the local building trades. "There will be no abatement on this project," Moore said when he laid out the deal in early October. The numbers behind that line are real: $1.3 to $1.7 billion in new taxable assessed value, and $44 to $55 million a year in property tax revenue once the campus is finished, which the city is projecting for 2033.

Indiana's wave of moratoriums

Moore's timing isn't an accident. Indiana has become one of the harder places in the country to build a data center without a fight. At least 24 of the state's counties have passed moratoriums this year and three have banned the projects outright, according to an August count from Indiana University's Environmental Resilience Institute. Kokomo's own city council felt the same pressure even while the mayor was promoting the Digital Realty deal: through August and September it advanced its own zoning ordinance — 200-foot setbacks from residential districts, 300 feet from any single home, a new decommissioning-plan requirement for high-industrial sites — and voted down a push to just pause everything with a moratorium. The ordinance's first reading passed 6-2; Republican Jeff Plough and Democrat Bob Stephenson voted no, siding with the roughly dozen residents who testified that the new rules still said nothing about noise, water use, or how much electricity the project would actually draw.

The local electricians' union likes what it's seeing regardless. "Spot on" is how Mike Young, business manager of IBEW Local 873, described Moore's approach, telling reporters the union is ready to put members to work building it. That reaction is the reason Kokomo matters past Howard County. Moore's deal looks a lot like the model a much bigger, brand-new coalition is now trying to turn into policy across six other states.

A seven-state pitch

On September 28th, Axios broke the news that Blackstone, OpenAI, QTS, and SoftBank Group had joined forces with five building-trades unions — including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Iron Workers, and the plumbers' and pipefitters' union — to launch something called the American Infrastructure Alliance. The pitch: stop arguing over whether data centers get built at all, and start setting enforceable rules for how they get built instead. The alliance wants large energy users to pay for their own grid infrastructure rather than spreading that cost across every other ratepayer, plus binding local agreements on construction noise, lighting, and how far a building has to sit from a house. A spokesperson described it to the Daily Caller News Foundation as a "high eight-figure" campaign, running first in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and South Carolina, with a goal of real, adopted standards by 2027.

Responsible growth requires clear expectations for everyone involved.Tag Greason, co-CEO, QTS

Blanket bans on necessary infrastructure projects would set back our economy and threaten good middle-class jobs.Kenneth Cooper, International President, IBEW

I think the honest read is that this is an industry and a set of unions with a shared financial interest in the moratoriums stopping, dressed up as a civic good. That doesn't make every item on the list wrong — a developer paying its own grid costs instead of billing them to everyone else's rate base is a specific, checkable commitment, not just a talking point — but the alliance's own research cuts against its messaging. A survey it commissioned and released in August found 74% of Indiana residents opposed new data center construction, against 19% in favor. Residents at Kokomo's public hearings weren't shy about why: traffic, water, noise, and a sense that the city rezoned 476 acres without ever committing, in public, to who the tenant actually was. Local Democrats have pressed Moore on that exact point.

A pledge is not a tariff

The alliance's core ask — that large loads pay their own infrastructure costs instead of socializing them onto everyone else's bill — is the same principle sitting underneath every large-load tariff we've covered on this blog, including our own guide to how those tariffs actually work. The difference is that a tariff is a filed document with a docket number and an effective date. A seven-state alliance's promise to get there by 2027 is not. That's the evidence-ladder gap the Kill Test is built to catch: a multi-state pledge and a signed Kokomo zoning ordinance are not the same kind of fact, even when they're both pointed at the same outcome.

Kokomo is the test case either way. Moore has the deal he wanted — no abatement, union labor, a tax base he can show voters. What he doesn't have yet is a confirmed tenant on record, a signed power agreement, or proof that the council's new setbacks satisfy the residents who showed up this fall to say they weren't satisfied. If the American Infrastructure Alliance's bet is right, Kokomo becomes the template other cities point to instead of a ban. If it's wrong, it becomes one more example of a mayor who took the deal before the fight was actually over.