With Labor Day behind us the political season begins for the all important midterm elections.  

Democrats are running on strengthening democracy, raising wages and lowering costs, empowering women’s rights, workers rights, climate justice, stopping official assaults on Black and Brown people in vulnerable communities…. And the Republicans are running on the status quo.  Beyond that, President Trump is determined to make the election about himself.

Trump will make this election about him.  That is the last thing most Republican candidates want with his poll numbers less than 40%, the lowest approval rating he’s ever had.

Both here in the Eastern Panhandle and Jefferson County and across West Virginia the issue that overwhelms any other issue and any ideology or other considerations is data centers.

Everyone, it seems, is opposed to data centers in West Virginia for several good reasons:

1) They use huge amounts of electricity and ground water forcing up costs for already rising utility rates and threatening wells and the aquifer.

2) After President Trump promised the high tech industry all the data centers they could use, West Virginia Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey made his first legislative priority an opening for data centers across our state. To rub salt in the wound, the legislation also prohibits towns, counties, cities or any local jurisdiction from regulating the data centers and prohibiting local protective regulations. The growing realization that the elites are behind  the data centers just grinds the teeth of folks who voted for Trump and the GOP because they thought they were for regular, everyday people. 

3) The  24/7 noise that never lets up at a minimum disrupts the peace of community, at worst is destructive and dangerous. 

4) The return to or for the people who pay for the costs and suffer the consequences get nothing, nothing back. It is a straight up sell out that will cost real money for real people including Republicans.

Data centers are the unexpected, unforeseen issue that symbolizes the priorities for the Republicans and Democrats.

Data centers are exploitative and resource extraction like coal that invests nothing in the communities nor the people who live near them.

Both Jefferson and Berkeley Counties are facing planned data centers.

Because the data center legislation, HB 2014, was passed by the Republican legislators without any Democratic support, this issue is a defining issue, a single issue which will decide many votes angry about high tech data centers.

Data centers came up again inside Charles Town communities when door-knocking for Lanae Johnson for the Jefferson County Commission.

One young woman in a working class, very diverse neighborhood only had one question for Lanae: “Does she support data centers?”  I happily responded absolutely no.

Lanae Johnson is a powerful leader, learning leadership in the United States Army where she served 23 years including deployment in the Mideast. She retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. Her life is settled. She is fulfilled and happy, but with the strong impulse to continue service. 

Lanae Johnson is running to serve on the Jefferson County Commission which is dealing with lots of quality of life issues for all of us:

—Stopping the GOP data centers

— Overdevelopment eating up farm fields and wild woods

— Clean water preservation

— No suburbanization

The all Republican majority of the Jefferson County Commission is turning our precious piece of paradise into plastic tract lots where a pond once watered the cattle and the deer and fox in a pasture. 

They’ve taken the side of developers and industrial machinery leading to the hated data centers.

The next few weeks will be frenzied in our county with the Republican status quo trying to stop a rising crop of wonderful young women running as Democrats and fighting for us.

…

This piece originally ran in the Spirit of Jefferson