Episode 86. Pathways to Powering Rural America: Interview with John C. Shepard
Hello, one and all, and welcome back to a brand-new episode of the Rural Impact. I am Michelle Rathman, and as always, I mean it when I say thank you for joining us for another conversation that works hard to connect the dots between policy and rural everything, and by that, I mean rural quality of life.
Okay, before we get into today's topic, I want to extend a great big warm welcome to our partners, the National Association of Rural Health Clinics, or NARHC for short. You're going to be hearing much more about them over the next several episodes, but first, let me tell you why we are once again thrilled to welcome them as a partner.
The National Association of Rural Health Clinics promotes rural health clinics as a means of improving and sustaining the availability of quality, cost-effective healthcare to patients in rural, medically underserved areas. Now, NARHC works with Congress, federal agencies, and rural health allies to expand and protect the interests of rural health clinics.
And with that, we are here to help them spread the word about an upcoming event, and that event is the NARHC Fall Institute. On behalf of the National Association of Rural Health Clinics, consider this your invitation to join them in Louisville, Kentucky, September 28th through October 1st for, as I said, the NARHC Fall Institute, the only national conference designed exclusively for rural health clinics.
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Okay, so for today's conversation, you know that in our last episode, and if you have not listened to that one, we really encourage you to do so.
That was with Joan Alker, and of course, you heard from former US senator from the great state of North Dakota, Heidi Heitkamp, and she touched on the subject of protecting public lands, and land use, and we barely scratched the surface on data centers. But today we're going to go much deeper into this topic, and with that, expand the conversation to explore not just data centers, but also rural energy and the intersection with local policy.
Now, as you're gonna hear me say when I welcome my guest, there is absolutely no escaping the controversy around data centers. I, I read something every day, more than one thing a day on the subject matter, and there is sound reason for the concern. A few examples I wanna share with you come from a commentary written by someone we've had on the show before a few times.
Really appreciate this guy. You likely know the name Tony Pipa. Tony is a Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development at Brookings Center for Sustainable Development, and this commentary was written with colleague Adam Ali, Policy Analyst, Global Economy and Development, also at the Center for Sustainable Development.
Now, in their commentary titled "The Local Implications of Data Centers for Rural Communities in the US," they draw from insights generated by America's Rural Future, Brookings AEI Commission on US Rural Prosperity, and you know, we had an episode with Tony and Brent Orell on this, long time ago, but we'll make sure we put that link so you can make sure that you reference what this commission is all about.
But what they were doing was kind of recapping a symposium that was convened to examine the local implications of AI and data center development for rural communities across the United States. Now, in their piece, the authors explain that participants explored how communities weigh promised economic gains, tax revenue, jobs, and infrastructure investment against incentives, as well as short and long-term costs, including changes in land use, water demand, and the strain on local and regional electrical grids and public services.
They go on to say, "In light of financial incentives, compressed timelines, and confidential negotiations, the symposium emphasized that the central question is not simply whether data centers are good or bad, but how benefits and risks get allocated and what forms of governance, local authority, and planning and transparency can help local leaders maximize the local benefits while protecting community interests."
One more quick excerpt from that commentary. Again, we're gonna make sure we put the link in our show notes on theruralimpact.com, and it's gonna be a really a jumping off point for the conversation that we're going to have today when I introduce you to my guest, and this is one last thing I'll read to you.
"Across these discussions, a broad set of takeaways emerged. Participants repeatedly returned to an underlying tension. Data centers are framed nationally as urgent strategic infrastructure, yet their impacts are experienced locally, where legitimacy, zoning capacity, and public accountability often determine whether projects proceed."
That is a lot to unpack. So that said, let me tell you who is about to join me for this conversation. His name is John C. Shepard, and John is a development professional, active in community and economic development for over 30 years across the Midwest, Great Plains, and Rocky Mountain states, and he currently serves as a board member on the American Planning Association's Small Town and Rural Planning Division.
John is a wealth of information, and he's going to help us achieve our goal here, which is to connect some dots and to enlighten us on what is most definitely not a light subject. All that said, it is now time when I invite you to put yourself in that podcast frame listening of mind.
All that background noise is going to be there when our time is up, and I invite you to listen to my conversation with John C. Shepard. Are you ready? I know I am, so let's go.
Michelle Rathman: Hey, John C. Shepherd, it is great to have you with us. Welcome to The Rural Impact. I know it's going to be an awesome dot-connecting conversation because you are here. Welcome.
John C. Shepard: Thank you, Michelle. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and your listeners and viewers, on behalf of the American Planning Association's Small Town and Rural Planning Division that I volunteer for. These are my views, but I'm glad I have the opportunity to speak for our over 2,000 members across the US and around the world.
Michelle Rathman: You know, I'm gonna tell people, we're gonna put it in our show resources. I really... if you have not read John's material on his website, and we're gonna again make sure that when you go to our resource page for this episode, you're gonna see it all, because you write about so many things, but they are all so connected, which is what we do here to connect the dots, because, you know, we do not live in silos. Unfortunately, sometimes we think in silos, and that's what kind of gets us into the trouble that we're in. And right now, one of the key reasons I wanted to have you talk to us today, there are a lot of subjects we could, we could go around on, but let's start with the entire subject of data centers, because there is no way you can escape this topic on data centers.
This morning, I do my morning reading, and I'm thinking you do the same thing, and I read something that came up in my feed about tech giant Oracle. You know, they are a giant. If there was a better word for it, they would be that. They are suing Wisconsin regulators over data center finance requirements, and this struck me specifically. In their June 19th lawsuit, Oracle and We Energies, the utility set to power the company's planned data center in Port Washington, Wisconsin, are asking the Public Service Commission to reconsider credit rating requirements for data center developers that could cost the company, cost the company, million dollars a year.
They, because the state is saying you have to have an A+ credit rating, okay? On June 2nd, the Farm Action policy team wrote, "As data center development accelerates, farmland, water, and energy systems are being reshaped to serve some of the world's largest technology companies with few protections for people who actually live, farm, and pay utility bills in these communities." And then on June 21st, you wrote a piece, and it was inspired by other things that, you know, other connections that you have, called "Powering Rural America: The Full Energy Picture in 2026." And one of the first questions you ask, and you are a question asker, is this: As electric demand climbs from new manufacturing, server farms, and electric vehicles, the question for small towns and counties is no longer whether this infrastructure will arrive, but on whose terms it will be planned, sited, and eventually taken down. So, John, let's start there. Whose terms? Where do you see this right now?
John C. Shepard: You know, frankly, we shouldn't be surprised that community members are concerned about this sea change, because they are seeing change.
That, if we look through the, the history of infrastructure development in America, it's been a combination of public and private. You go back to the original folks who came to this country, and sometimes they got along with the people who were already here, and sometimes they didn't, and sometimes we cooperated to build things, and sometimes it was a public, sometimes it was a private.
I'm a family history buff. My mom's family emigrated to Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1635, but my mom's grandmother emigrated from Sweden around the turn of the 20th century.
That's the story of America. We have these public and private partnerships, and sometimes we get along, and sometimes we don't. The only constant is change, and people get uncomfortable with change. You understand that.
Whether that was from when we were building the national road, when we were building the canals, the Erie Canal, the railroads, or the information superhighway. I cut my teeth in economic development in small-town rural planning when I went back home to North Dakota. I grew up in Fargo. Went back to work in economic development. We were just trying to get a local dial-up. We had to call long distance just to get on the internet. Remember the modems back in the day?
Michelle Rathman: Oh, absolutely.
John C. Shepard: And so, we've had these starts and stops. You know, back in the day, before fiber optics was a thing, the large investors weren't interested in serving small towns and rural America, so we had to do it ourselves.
We went back to the model of the rural power co-ops and the rural telephone co-ops, and the places were successful did their own thing. In my home state of North Dakota, they are now one of the most wired states in the country because they put together those public and private partnerships, and they refused to be told no.
Now, fast-forward through broadband development, through the clean energy stuff, where it was the scrappers, it was the farmers in southwest Minnesota on the Buffalo Ridge who wanted to keep their farm, and the only way to do it was to put up wind turbines and then talk Xcel Energy into allowing them onto the grid.
Now it's Xcel Energy that wants to put that power on the grid. As we've moved from wind and solar, and now battery energy storage systems and data centers, as we've moved from those being small, locally led, we're seeing the out-of-state developers come in. We're seeing the corporate BMs, the investor-owned utilities coming in.
And a lot of people feel like it's outsiders doing things to us. I'm sure you're a student of history in rural America, but remember back to the old days of the, the Nonpartisan League. You were talking to Heidi Heitkamp, comes out of that tradition of that, you know, local control. 160 years ago, after the Civil War, we saw the Minneapolis bankers and railroad barons come across the northern plains.
We saw the Union Pacific coming across Nebraska and the West. You saw the rebuilding railroads in the South after the Civil War of Reconstruction. These were outsiders doing things to us, and people are concerned that wind, solar, battery, and data centers they're outsiders coming in, doing things to us, and they're right to be concerned about this.
And I think the politicians are finally waking up and saying, "Oh, maybe this is not just another economic development deal." You know?
Michelle Rathman: No, and you know, there are, you know, let's talk a little bit about, I think there's a lot that we don't know in that it's not just an economics, it's not just an economic question, but it's also a matter of health and wellbeing, and the land use and so forth. And the controversy that I've been hearing, and there's so much, is let's just talk about the, you've been hearing the buzzing noise, and community members taking videos of what's happening in their community, and they can't sleep.
It's 24/7, and there is water depletion and the demand on water. So, I think it's more than just a kind of a resistance to change. There is a genuine fear about how these data centers are going to impact rural quality of life, and I'm, I'm curious, you know, why this is so, seemingly to me, in what I'm reading, it's not as a big concern to some policymakers as it is to the communities, the constituents they serve
John C. Shepard: And again, we saw a lot of this push and pull through renewable energy, the concerns about wind turbines. When there were just a few of them around, there weren't a lot of people impacted. But, you know, forever we've put our large-scale energy generation and users out in rural areas.
They were colonies for the, for the urban areas. I mean, we do some of that in big cities like Chicago and Detroit, but we built the big coal plants out in rural areas, and then let the smoke fall on, on the farms and ranches and small towns. And that's, that's hard, whether it's the coal mines, the oil and gas wells, the power plants, that, that there is a lot of concern with the wind turbines.
And there are some responsible developers who are good at addressing those issues up front. Then there are the other one in 10 that aren't so good about doing that, and those are the people that get posted on YouTube and in social media and make everybody else look bad. I'm not dismissing the concerns with subsonic noise and other things, that the peer-reviewed science has addressed that.
There are ways to mitigate those things. That we're just now seeing with the data centers, there are enough of them out there, and people are recognizing them. And we also... The first generation of data centers they were figuring it out. And there are some places like, for example, Loudoun County, Virginia, which has the biggest cluster of these.
They're building them right next door to rural subdivisions. Some of those folks don't have any choice about it, but some of them, they, they built them right up against some folks who ha- you know, don't build a noxious use next to a lawyer's house. You just don't do that, whether you're in Virginia or you're up in Big Sky, Montana.
It's y- you know, that's where I worked in, Gallatin County, Montana, and up in the mountains of Colorado. It wasn't a question of were we gonna get sued, it's which side is gonna sue us. But what that does is it makes your decision-makers be very careful about equal protection under the law and making sure that you follow the rule of law.
Some other folks are just figuring that out now.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah. You know, John, the interesting thing to me too is that the data centers, you know, it's very different than the energy needs that we have because these data centers have to be, they need energy to run, to operate. Otherwise, they're just, you know, big, shiny sprawling sprawling buildings on land.
And so, you know, there's a difference between, you know, renewable and clean and wind and solar, and I happened to work for many, many years with an author named Robert Wallace, and he was the CEO at the time of Beth Energy, and they did a lot of renewable energy. And my-- I don't tell folks this very often, but my, my father was with us.
He spent 40 years as an entrepreneur doing un- uninterruptible power supply. So, I mean, we're talking about, you know, these data centers are one thing, and then we're, and when we're talking about wind and solar and clean energy, and I'm struck by how clean energy can be controversial, whereas data centers seemingly are not, when you think about the implications for communities.
John C. Shepard: Well, and I think data centers are catching up again just because we're seeing so many of them out there, and people are concerned with how they've been dealt with previously. So, you have a couple of things that the US Energy Information Administration is, is a top-notch source.
They, they continue to... they're part of the federal government, but they continue to put out unassailable data. So, the EIA estimated in 2025 that there was 106,913 qui- quadrillion BTUs, don't ask me to do the math in my head, of energy produced across the country. This is up 16 and a half percent since 2020. Previous to that, energy production was actually declining as we got more efficient.
But now we've seen, since COVID and the growth of the cloud, and we're starting to see those impacts of the data centers. But it's not only that, but it's advanced manufacturing, that you have all sorts of cl- of, of clean energy that we're making, we're making rocket fuel, we're making air fuel out of ag products, value-added agriculture.
We're making green hydrogen and green ammonia. We had a project here in Nebraska. We work with the county. They're on the interstate. They had... They thought they had the resources, but when it came down to it, we had an advanced manufacturing plant that wanted to locate there, but it was gonna take up a whole lot of water and a whole lot of power, and we just, we couldn't get the power to them.
Even if they would've produced on the site, they just couldn't get enough power. The transmission grid needed so much upgraded infrastructure. 'Cause for the last 50 years, we've been static, and we're behind. So, to come back to the data centers, we're just catching up, and you're seeing a lot of people with a lot of concern about all of this change in, in AI and cloud infrastructure, and what's that gonna do to my job and my community?
And you can touch and feel a building, a computer. You can't touch and feel AI. It's... I, I'm agnostic. I use it. I'm not... Garbage in, garbage out, you know.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah, I mean, I I, don't think we even understand where it's used. And right now, where I sit and, you know, I do a lot of focus on rural health because that is my profession by day. You know, right now we're hearing with the Rural Health transformation that there's a big push, for example, to bring AI much more to the forefront, just in terms of helping to diagnose and all sorts of things that are quite controversial, you know, from where I sit.
So, we can't escape it. This is here to stay. I guess I... my question to you would be, as someone who is really focused on smart development, and you can define what that means, where are you seeing where there's balanced conversation where the, the, the communities, the land that's being impacted, the people who are being impacted, are these factors that are going into the decision-making process, the policymaking process?
Because let's just be honest here, all of this is policy, whether it, it, it permits it and promotes it, or whether it stops it at the door and says, "We have to press pause."
John C. Shepard: Yes. No, that it's hard to find good models of where people are having honest conversations. There's so much polarization. We've nationalized our local politics, and it's hard to get things done. I've been at public hearings over the last dozen years where we had to call in sheriff's deputies 'cause people got so concerned about not being heard.
And I'm-- I'd rather have people show up and express their concerns. But we've lost a bit of that, you know, good old-fashioned American Norman Rockwell, stand up at the public meeting and be heard. Some of this goes down to we've had a tradition in economic development where these projects are dealt with confidentially, 'cause that's how you do business, and the data companies expect people to sign confidentiality agreements.
But that's anathema to public process, where you have to shine the light of the free press, and people have a right to know what's going on. We're still working that out. But there are some groups that are working on that, that I've also written about, Michelle Moore's group, Groundswell, that she wrote a book called Rural Renaissance, and it's, it's based on that old rural power co-op and the municipal power model of ground-up development that's empowered by the old REA structure.
And you're seeing that around the country now, National Rural Economic Development Coalition, that’s working to bring small towns up on their own terms, but also give people the tools they need to negotiate with these national, you know, developers.
Michelle Rathman: Mm-hmm.
John C. Shepard: We need to be on a, on a, even playing field. And here's another thing about working in small towns and rural counties.
Professionalism has nothing to do with how large your organization is. I've known a lot of s- small businessmen who are consummate professionals, lawyers, attorneys, the lady running the bakery. I've also had experience with some national, large multinational firms that were just a bunch of amateurs.
It, it-- just because you.
Michelle Rathman: Nice word, John. I know it.
John C. Shepard: Yeah. You know, just because you work in a small town doesn't mean you can't be professional. Sometimes we have to be even more professional because you know the people you're working with. They rely on you to know what you're doing.
Michelle Rathman: Mm-hmm.
John C. Shepard: And I've worked with a lot of people in small towns, could have any job they wanted, but they are where they chose to be.
They've chosen their community, not just 'cause they wound up there. That is where they wanna be, and they're vested in their small towns. So, she got Michelle working on this. They're running a conference this November down in Decatur, Alabama, and trying to, to focus though with the people how people deal with the data center infrastructure.
And there's another part of this, community benefits agreements, which, you know, I'm from the North, we don't do a lot of those in small towns. They're a city thing. But people like the Aspen Institute and the Philadelphia Fed and Michelle's group are trying to, to focus on ways that we could bring these to play in areas that haven't used them.
In some states, they frankly wouldn't be legal. They get close to bribery. But there's nothing wrong with corporate giving back to the community.
You can argue with Andrew Carnegie, but he built a lot of libraries that we're still using today.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah.
John C. Shepard: People are trying
Michelle Rathman: It's such a great point because you... I, I wanna shift a little bit here because you also focus on economic development, the two go hand in hand, and I am curious, genuinely curious, what is your, where we stand right now? Where... I, I, I read from the very beginning that Oracle is, you know, filing a lawsuit against Wisconsin regulators. That's not really neighborly.
And so, where are you seeing the economic benefits? What are the benefits to a rural town or a small community opening up the doors, so to speak? Because s- it feels like right now there's a, there's a plow, and you just can't stop it, and we know that there's a lot of, to your point, town halls and community meetings and so forth where people are opposing them, fueled by, to your point, lack of transparency and a lot of fear because of what, what people...
It's more about what they don't know than what they know. And so, where do you see, if there's an economic benefit to a rural community for opening their doors to y- data centers, which is different than, you know, renewable energy sources and so forth, what are they?
John C. Shepard: Yeah. You know, there's a reason that we were giving incentives. You know, the state of Illinois was giving out incentives for data center development and was trying to build that digital infrastructure.
But where we found that the field has grown so much, the key for economic development incentives is supposed to be the w- the, the but for, that this is a project that needs to... a little boost to get over the risk that's there. Too often, it becomes you're just selling used cars, and I don't believe in selling communities like used cars. that build a community places wanna be, and it'll benefit everybody. But you've seen the shift now, a state like Illinois that has gone from incentives to, "Whoa, hold on a minute."
There are definitely assets and liabilities that we have to look at as a whole balance sheet. You have income and expenses, you have assets and liabilities. The assets that are out there, frankly, it's tax base, that, the Philadelphia, Philadelphia Fed, as I mentioned, had a rural economic development summit in Harrisburg, and they were able to stream that, so I was able to, to, to, listen in as a fly on the wall.
And they brought in by Zoom, Professor Michael Hicks from Ball State, who had, has done economic analysis of these types of development. And frankly, he and some of the other commentators, you know, looked at, you know, the jobs. I discount the jobs argument. They, yeah, construction jobs, they come in then, and there's a lot of, of spending, but how much is that local?
People come in, they-- You know, Cheyenne, Wyoming had a, had a proposal to do, to build a man camp for all the people building Microsoft data center, and that went off the rails for a number of reasons. Kimball, Nebraska, was looking at putting up a man camp for a Department of Defense project there.
We were trying to get that to be a long-term benefit, and it just, the deal never came through. So, those construction jobs, yeah, that's nice, but I'm sorry, don't sell me on construction jobs.
It's, it's all about your land value tax and how you tax those, the equipment, because computers are expensive and there's a lot of taxes, and they don't require a lot of services, except. There's a lot of uncertainty between battery energy storage systems, solar, and data centers in terms of what happens in a fire.
That said, the National Fire Code deals with that. They have to have emergency management plans. So, if you put in your zoning, okay, data centers are industrial use. They don't go next to houses. Just don't do it. It's a bad idea. But put them in industrial areas, treat them like an industrial use like anything else, mitigate your impacts, and have an emergency response plan.
You know, most of the battery energy storage systems now, they come in a box, and if there's a thermal event, they seal them up and, you know, that, that, the local fire department just makes sure that it doesn't catch anything else on fire till somebody comes and picks it up and takes it away. We're learning how to do this, but our zoning, our public process, is struggling to catch up.
You see, a-a-and you know, Michelle, on the-- in terms of, of governance, seeing the media talk about, "Oh, we're gonna ban data centers. We're gonna ban solar. We're gonna ban wind." A lot of those are really just moratoriums where they give staff, like the people I work with all across the Midwest and the Mountain States, give us a chance to figure out what's going on because I'd rather have no zoning than a bad zoning ordinance.
And we gotta learn this stuff. And on the other side of this, you know, there are groups like Strong Towns that talk about you need to build from the bottom up.
They also talk about some things that need state preemption. I am very skeptical of state preemption. There, there's none of these things we're talking about that couldn't happen from the bottom up until somebody like Oracle decides to sue you from the top down, and they've got lawyers by the dozens, and you've got your elected county attorney who has more important things to worry about.
Michelle Rathman: Mm. But this is the mo- this is consu- consuming, all-consuming.
John C. Shepard: It, it is. There are resources out there. National Association of Counties, National, NADO, the National Association of Development Organizations, National Association of Regional Councils. A lot of the economic development districts that cover the nation are right in the trenches on trying to help their jurisdictions, the towns, the villages, the townships, the counties.
Hey, what do you need to do to draft into your zoning? Zoning is one of those things where if it's not specifically allowed, it's prohibited, but so many of our zoning regulations are written so vaguely that you can drive a truck through it, or in this case, a data center.
Depends on how well you've defined things.
Frankly, especially in rural counties, our commissioners want regulations that are that thick, but to do, to follow the rule of law, sometimes they gotta be that thick 'cause you have to treat people equally. That's the rule of law.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah. And we have to think ahead. You know, one of the things, I'm gonna go back to this Oracle story, and they'll probably never be a partner on this podcast, which is fine. At the end of the day, the reason why this credit rating thing is so important is that they wanna make sure, and this is another, you know, pr- very potential disastrous outcome, which is that someone g- they file bankruptcy.
I mean, look at, look at, they just laid off a bunch of people, you know, not too long ago. And so, you know, Meta's laid off people and so forth. So what they're saying is, "Listen, we need a credit rating to prove that you, you have solvency, and if you, if you end up going belly up, that we are not stuck with this so-called infrastructure, what do we do with it then? You're not gonna find a new occupant for it.
John C. Shepard: Yeah. No, no, exactly. And also, a lot of these data centers, like so much commercial development, are inside a nesting doll of corporate LLCs.
Some of that's for insurance purposes, investment, taxes, you know, playing the tax code for all of it. This has been a standard requirement that we've recommended for our clients across Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, when I worked in Minnesota, when I worked out, out west.
We've done it in, in renewable energy, whether it's wind development or solar development, and now we're, we're recommending it for battery energy storage systems. We know these have a defined life, and computer warehouses have a defined life. And at the end of that, we don't want the county to have to, or the city to have to, clean it up.
Gosh, you've seen that in oil wells with the thousands of orphaned oil wells all across the West, the mines across West Virginia, and Appalachia. Take, we take those lessons now, and we apply them to rural energy, and we say, "Hey, you need to have a reclamation plan up front." The state might let you have, might let you have five years to do one for a solar project.
No. We wanna see it when you have the application because we've seen projects start and not finish, and now we've got a half-finished 00 acres of solar panels just sitting there, you know, with weed seed blowing into the next field.
Mi
John C. Shepard: Do this homework, but part of that... This was recommended to me by one of our planning commission members in Thayer County, Nebraska, who's a retired banker.
He said, "Do not take cash. You do not want your county to be a bank. You want a bond from a Class A-rated agency," 'cause a bond is an insurance policy.
You have the cash in, they go into bankruptcy, that's gonna get clawed back. Now, I'm not an attorney. I've done economic development financing classes, but I rely on people like our local bankers, the SBA, the Small Business Development Center, and our economic development districts.
They're in the middle of all of this every day, and I rely on those resources. But we've had some counties that say, "No, we want cash." They understand cash. I've had people who know cash; they say, "You don't want cash because you can't guarantee it." It's, it's
Michelle Rathman: Yeah, there's no paper trail. You know, John, I, there's, I have a couple more questions I absolutely wanna ask you, and I'm just thinking right now, you make my head, my brain churn here. When... All right, we have county officials who are, as listeners, they write me. I, I know that they're out there listening. All right, someone comes to your county and says, "Have we got a deal for you? We've scouted your community. We think you're the perfect place for us to build a data center," or some other power-related kind of project. What sage advice do you have for county officials, for city planners, when that phone call comes in, the excitement of, "Oh my gosh, this big company wants to come develop."
I mean, what are some of the initial steps that you think are prudent for those individuals in those positions to take to begin with?
John C. Shepard: Yeah. Well, and that's always difficult, especially in a lot of rural communities. This may come up one time in your, in your tenure and election cycles, and nobody wants to, to be the one that shuts down business. But y- I think the best way to do that is you take a team approach. If the call comes into the planner, go talk to your economic developer, that these are confidential.
That's why you talk to people about things. But the first thing the planner needs to know is, "Can you give me enough information that I can review my regulations to know if this is gonna-- what process we need to do?" You don't say, "No." We say, "Okay, my process doesn't, isn't set up for this now, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about amending it."
Maybe the, maybe your comprehensive plan has a different plan for your likely parcel, 'cause some of these data centers might be a city block. Some of them are 800 or 2,000 acres. Project in, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Microsoft's doing is, like, 3,000 acres. The comp plan doesn't consider that now, but they're not telling them no.
They're telling them, "Let's talk about it." There are a lot of people in town who'd like to just say no, because they don't have water. They, they don't have extra water. They got a lot of power there. That's why a lot of these are in Cheyenne. But you see this in other communities, whether it's, it's here in Nebraska or Iowa or Wisconsin or Ohio.
Michelle Rathman: Mm-hmm.
John C. Shepard: Hall County, Nebraska, outside of Grand Island, they have an old Army ammunition depot.
It is one massive brownfield. Nobody can live there 'cause the groundwater is contaminated. But one of the best ways to clean that water is to bring it up, reuse it, clean it up, and reinject it. Hall County was able to accommodate that in their comprehensive plan and in their zoning, and they approved a data center.
They had somebody else wanna do a data center that was on agricultural land right next door to houses. The only thing it had going for it was that it was next to a substation. They told them no, because it didn't fit the neighborhood.
Michelle Rathman: Right
John C. Shepard: I don't think the planners should just say no. It's how it fits, respect the plan.
The plan's a plan.
The folks who are elected are the ones who make those decisions. We need to understand that and be able to give them good recommendations. Yay or nay. Yeah, tax revenue, but these things are loud and noisy and take a lot of water, and they take a lot of electricity. Now, the closed-loop water systems have the promise to reduce the water requirement substantially.
That's the next generation. They're learning
Michelle Rathman: But that's gonna be more expensive.
John C. Shepard: It is, it is
Michelle Rathman: and that's why I would argue, not with you ever, I would argue that that's why a develop- a, a developer would pref- prefer not to. And, and I will just say, John, I think one piece of advice I would give, if I may, is that do not sign that agreement that says we'll keep everything under wraps.
I think the transparency piece has gotten us into a lot of trouble, and not good trouble, where that's concerned.
John C. Shepard: Yeah. And that, and that's also why on these leadership conversations, your municipal attorney, your county attorney needs to be part of your land use regulations. And a lot of those folks are, are overworked and underpaid, and they're just worried about, you know, keeping people safe. But they need to be partners in land use because frankly, you know, it's not if you're gonna get sued, it's which side are you gonna get sued on.
And we need to have those county attorneys and municipal attorneys have a seat at the table. You know, the attorney can't always say no, but a good attorney will find ways to protect their constituents and their elected officials.
It takes everybody working together, and that's one of the things you come back to on your conversations, Michelle, with county officials, with rural health folks, with economic development folks.
You know your part of the world really, really well, but you can't be successful if the rest of your community is successful. My small town here in Butler County, Nebraska, can't be successful if Butler County Medical System is not successful. They're not part of our community. So, we need to talk to them.
We're fortunate we've got a really good local system, but they survive on partnerships. It, it doesn't always work, but the places that survive will continue to do that.
Michelle Rathman: Absolutely. All right, John, before we let you go, my gosh, there are so many other things we could talk about, which means you have to come back and be one of our phone-a-friends. You wrote a piece, I think I saw it originally last year, but it came back up on April 13th this year, "Good Governance and Trust in Rural America." And I'm gonna just pull out one excerpt, and you have to talk about that on the other side. You say, "At its core, public policy is about making things work, and when things work, most people don't notice. The town just runs, the lights stay on," how appropriate, "and kids get to school. Lately, though, a lot of people feel like the system isn't working well. The good news is rural America still has tools that bigger places sometimes forget. Our local governments are usually people we know, our neighbors. Our problems may be tough, but our people are tougher. Let's take a closer look at that."
So as we-- this podcast episode is dropping just before the 4th of July. The 250 is the, you know, all the buzz. Talk about the good news for rural America, still having the tools. What are those tools? And let's remind ourselves what they are.
John C. Shepard: This is an idea that, that was imparted to me by a mentor, Lou Higgs from Albuquerque, and also Phil Burgess, who had founded the Center for the New West in Denver, the Annapolis Institute in Maryland, that when we're looking at asset-based development, the glass is half full. Some folks like to focus on what's empty, what's missing.
I try to focus on what's full and how we can protect the water, but also grow the amount of water in that glass. What can we do to invest in our future? Do what we can. Nobody's gonna save you. Nobody's gonna save your small town. That we need to build from within, whether that's small business, startups, retention, or expansion of what we have.
You build a community for the people who are there, and if other people like it as visitors or amenity migrants, hey, that's awesome. But build for the people who are here. As Ben Winchester at the University of Minnesota talks about, it's not always your kids coming home, but it's the people starting young families who wanna live someplace like where they grew up.
Build what you're good at. Don't try to be something you're not. Be honest and do the best you can with what you've got. That's a message from Becky McCray and Deb Brown from Save Your Town, and as a planner, I try to internalize that. I'm not-- This is not the government coming and telling you what to do.
This is the community telling the government what they need to do to build a better community.
John C. Shepard: That's, that's all we can do, ask better questions.
Michelle Rathman: Yeah. Ask better questions and demand honest answers, I think more, more than anything, and I do recognize that there is so much, as you said, you know, the polarization and, and, and federal policy, you know, kind of dictating local policy, and there's a lot to be said about, you know, why that ha- has happened, and, that doesn't mean this is where we have to stay. And so I really appreciate your perspectives on that. Thank you.
John C. Shepard: Thank you
Michelle Rathman: Yeah. Great. All right. Well, listen, don't go away. I've got some closing thoughts for this great dot-connecting conversation. John, it's great to have you here. Again, as I said, come back, and for the rest of you, sit tight. I will be right back with some closing thoughts.
My thanks to John C. Shepherd for joining us to kind of help unpack this very not light subject, as we said earlier. It is a conversation that we are going to continue to have because there are so many more dots to connect. So, really appreciate John, and we'll be bringing others to talk to us, sharing their insights, including talking with some county officials who are grappling with the yes or no on the data center question.
Again, I also want to make sure that I say a very big thank you to the National Association of Rural Health Clinics. We are so thrilled to have you once again as a partner, and if you are interested in expanding your rural reach and sharing your rural impact, we invite you to visit theruralimpact.com and check out our partner page, and perhaps you'll be interested in joining us as well.
And while you're on our website, make sure that you go to that merch store, get yourself a T-shirt, and a reusable shopping bag. Every single purchase helps us to continue to bring you this really important, we think, dot-connecting content where rural is concerned. I want to just make sure I give a really big thanks to Brea Corsaro and Sarah Garvin for all their hard work behind the scenes.
And as we head into this July 4th holiday weekend, another reminder that until we are together again, to take the best possible care of yourself and to the best of your ability, all those around you. Once again, I'm Michelle Rathman, and we will see you again on a brand-new episode coming at you soon of "The Rural Impact."
