Local opinion: Supervisors Heinz, Scott, and Christy are betraying us

The bulldozers arrived last week at 290 acres of living desert north of the Pima County Fairgrounds. They are here to make way for Project Blue, a data center complex rejected by residents and the Tucson City Council but negotiated in secrecy and approved by three politicians on the county Board of Supervisors: Steve Christy, Rex Scott, and Matt Heinz.

Around the country, high-density data centers like Project Blue are evaporating billions of gallons of water while driving a fossil-fuel boom, causing heat waves and poisoning the air we breathe. They give utilities like Tucson Electric Power an excuse to profit from new generators paid for by raising our bills, and they enable the surveillance and targeting programs that ICE uses to tear families apart.

Three members of our Board of Supervisors chose to ignore these human costs. What drives an elected official to betray their constituents this deeply?

Steve Christy's support for Project Blue was no surprise. A former car dealer, Supervisor Christy has long supported the interests of his wealthy friends, and they support him in return. His campaign donations file is thin compared to those of his colleagues on the Board, but when you're bankrolled by the richest people in town, you can afford to make fewer calls to fund your campaigns.

Rex Scott's reasons for supporting Project Blue include the expected construction jobs and tax revenue. Supervisor Scott acted as though these unfortunately unsustainable benefits existed in a vacuum, ignoring constituents' warnings that large data centers raise bills and provide relatively few jobs for how much land, water, and power they consume. Assessments available to the Board before their approval of the project showed that a data center complex would provide the fewest permanent jobs of all industrial development options available for the site, but this did not sway Supervisor Scott or even motivate him to delay the vote so the public could get more information. When a member of the No Desert Data Center Coalition later asked him if another project like this comes to town, "what would you do differently, now that you know what you know?" Supervisor Scott could not answer, calling the question a hypothetical. Here's another hypothetical question for Supervisor Scott: If you were invited to dinner with a lawyer for a company that your county administrators were in negotiations with, would you go to that dinner?

Dr. Matt Heinz cast the pivotal vote for Project Blue, and his motivations are clear. Despite marketing himself as a progressive, Supervisor Heinz accepted over $5,500 in campaign donations from Southwest Gas PAC and developers supporting Project Blue in 2024, while the County was negotiating with those developers. Despite his medical background, Supervisor Heinz voted to ignore the Pima County Board of Health's unanimous recommendation for an impact review of the project. In defense of his votes, he said "We have to participate in the new economy", either not understanding or not caring that this new economy is failing everyone who isn't already rich. He and Supervisor Scott then took a trip to DC with local business leaders — including the CEO of TEP — to discuss data centers and water policy with the Trump administration. Supervisor Heinz appears to be impressed by prestige, painfully isolated from his constituents, and managed by powerful people around him.

This isn't about large data centers, but about their role in wealth concentration and the erosion of democracy enabled by our own elected officials. These facilities are an excuse for the transfer of public land into private hands holding bulldozer keys. They turn water and electricity into profit for their shareholders while leaving us with higher bills. Large data centers give ICE more tools to track and disappear our friends, neighbors, and families, and they enable the "artificial intelligence" that harms cognitive development by separating us from sources of information and from each other.

Supervisors Christy, Scott, and Heinz are betraying us by handing over the riches of Pima County to big tech and the fossil fuel industry, and we can expect them to continue this until they are removed from office. Let's choose politicians who prioritize people over wealth-extracting machines.