The Ad Hoc Committee convened on February 3, 2026, to review the proposed SABI Data Center project in the Montana Connections park. The meeting focused on four primary topics: economic impact (taxes and jobs), infrastructure requirements (water, wastewater, and power), permitting processes, and community comparisons. Representatives from the Butte Local Development Corporation, Butte-Silver Bow, and local educational institutions provided updates on the potential benefits and operational models of the facility, drawing parallels to a similar project in Quincy, Washington.
All right, folks, let's uh like to call the meeting to order, please. It's four o'clock. I'll I'll go and introduce all the team members again for the committee for everybody so they can see who is who. You just raise your hand as I call your name. Um, Brian Sullivan, uh JP Gallagher, Andy Durkin. Paul Babb. Have you all had a chance to read the minutes? Any comments, questions, clarifications? Okay, is there a second? Second. All in favor. Opposed? Okay, thank you. Good evening. My name is Kelly Sullivan. I'm the executive director of the Butte Local Development Corporation. I recently had a conversation. I recently had a conversation with Darcy Klein, who is the controller at the Port of Quincy, and the Port of Quincy is the economic development authority in Quincy, Washington. Ms. Klein is a lifelong resident of Quincy, and so she had a lot of good things to say about the data center landscape there. Quincy has a population of about 8200 people. It is primarily an agricultural community, and is currently home to six data centers, which she says have been a boon to the local economy. There are hundreds of construction jobs that came along with those data centers, as well as the permanent jobs at each center. They've been very beneficial to young people in the community who now stay versus leaving to find work. The data centers have been willing and active community partners, assisting with a lot of different projects there that I'll touch on in just a minute. A company called AHO Construction has built hundreds of homes in recent years to address a previous lack of housing, and I'll show you a little chart on that as well. And people are now choosing to live, work, and raise families in Quincy versus previously commuting 15 to 45 minutes to Efreda and Winatchie. She did admit that there have. Again, these major investments are made by possible possible by increased assessed value. And these projects demonstrate how targeted tax incentive and economic development policies can translate into tangible long-term benefits for the community. So talking a little bit about assessed value, when a big new facility is built, its assessed value gets added to the tax rolls. Before the Quincy Data Center arrived, all the taxable property in the Port of Quincy area combined was about 937 million for tax purposes in 2006. After the data centers were built, that total value grew to 8.47 billion. That means about 7.5 billion dollars in new taxable property value was added, largely from data centers, but also from some related development. And why does this matter to the community? Well, property taxes are calculated like this, and this is a very simplified model. The assessed value multiplied by the tax rate equals your tax revenue. So an assessed value goes up a lot, the community can collect more tax revenue, even if tax rates go down. Schools, fire departments, hospitals, and inner infrastructure get funded, and existing residents may see lower tax rates because the tax base is much larger. So here's some updates from SABI. We're still waiting to hear back from them from their operations team to get some more questions answered. But I spoke with Maria Randazzo, and she talked a little bit about noise. She said that SABI's model of data center is much quieter than that of a crypto mining center. I think some comparisons have been made maybe between Atlas Power in Butte and what this data center could bring, but she said it's very different. We're waiting on more infrastructure information on lighting. And then it's very common for them to do a traffic study later in their process. So the traffic is not constant, but just based on shift work, uh starting in times of shifts. But she did say that a comparison with a retail center, um, that was a finding from the Quincy study, found that the traffic was much less. And then I've put up a little link here, SAIB datacenters.com locations. You can go to on their website, they have some great information there if you want to take the time to look at that.