I would normally disagree on the equal time rule because they are a private company, but Facebook recently built a data center in my town, took all of our municipal water supply, won't pay taxes for several years, and is only creating 4 jobs. And we allowed it because of some weird obsession our town had with having a data center here. Democracy...yeah!!!
Screw 'em. If they want to play the corporate welfare game, they can abide by the equal time rule.
What utter BS. Facebook has spent probably close to twenty million on building its Altoona data center (only one built recently so will assume that is the one in question). It did not take the municipal water supply, in fact this particular data center is one of the greenest in the world. It did get a tax break on its water usage, like most large municipal customers do, and according to news articles had an additional water main run to the site, but it does not have any particular water requirements that would necessitate any magic source. If you want to look for water savings in Altoona start at Adventureland and the amount of water being wasted there on a daily basis.
As for taxes, what taxes do you think were going to be assessed on this property? It was an empty piece of land before FB arrived so it was not like the city was losing much property tax to begin with. In return Facebook is paying salaries for forty or so people on site and the thousand or so who worked for over two years building the site. Oh, and because tech firms like it when others do the research and general site selection you will notice that Microsoft is dumping tens of millions into a data center in West Des Moines as well. You're welcome.
You "allowed" it because it was a good deal for a city like Altoona that otherwise was not much more than an amusement park and the last place to get gas on I-80 before you hit Des Moines.
Can you expand on this a bit? Do you mean to say when you turn on the tap in the kitchen nothing comes out and that you are no longer able to use the shower or flush the toilet?
Changed water source from local aquifer to local river. Apparently the data center takes the water and dumps it back into ground. The sourcing change cost more so citizen water prices went up. Guess what Facebook gets, you got it, free water. Not a joke.
It is crazy how much money we just give to profitable companies.
Sorry to hear that. Can you link to any news, or other, sources about this? I don't use facebook so I'm glad to not be contributing to this, but maybe there are other data centres in your town I do use, who knows.
Screw 'em. If they want to play the corporate welfare game, they can abide by the equal time rule.