Apple’s Waukee Data Center Talk A 10 Year Walk In Park?

Maybe it's not the Solyndra Scandal that left taxpayers liable for $535M in fed guarantees, yet Iowans are asking why local pols gave Apple $200M to help create 50 jobs in a stalled hi tech project for a Des Moines suburb. “It’s just more corporate welfare”?

As Fox News recounts, “Apple reached an agreement with state and local officials in 2017 that gave the tech giant $213M in public subsidies in exchange for 50 permanent jobs at a data center it would build in [suburban] Waukee.” Still waiting 5 years later to see the promised job and economic development gravy, one Waukee resident said: “I just don’t think it’s right … The small businesses in Waukee should get that type of break and not the super huge conglomerates.” For its part, the $3T Silicon Valley had expected to have opened the new data center in 2020, but now talks in terms of a 2027 completion date. (That’s TEN years from ground zero.) It points to $5.5M it’s contributed to local projects like a new park & a promise to donate up to $100M to the burb’s improvement fund; it also insists the data center’s construction would add “hundreds” of construction jobs after ground is broken “in the coming months.”

Meanwhile, the Des Moines Register notes the deal between Waukee & Apple was and continues to be shrouded in secrecy, although it’s known that Apple got a 71% reduction in its property tax bill for 20 years, a $188M value, and even as the city & state agreed to pay for the data center’s water & sewer infrastructure. Almost lost in the Waukee talkee: How could the original $200M subsidy be justified by a promise to create only 50 permanent new jobs that will now take a decade or more to materialize?

Davd Soul