Kids take their chances squeezing through the stationary rail cars that regularly cut this small town in two. Sometimes they brave the high, narrow road bridge leading over the tracks. That gives Bret Glendening, the Osawatomie city manager, worries about how he’ll make things safer. He wonders how the town can afford to fix the once-elegant — now rusty — bridge that spans the Marais des Cygnes River. Or if it’ll ever catch up on basic street maintenance. But the railroad business that helped build Osawatomie is long gone, taking away hundreds of jobs and leaving a hollowed-out tax base that leaves Glendenning struggling to pay for roads and scores of other things to fend off rural decay. Now come plans to build a mid-sized data center flush with cash that would make the long-ago railroad boom look puny. “I mean it’s huge,” Glendening said. “It’s massive.” Yet data centers are wildly unpopular right now for straining electrical grids, drinking oceans of water, generating noise and powering artificial intelligence that’s increasingly seen as a threat to your job — or even your species.
Read more: The Lawrence Times
