Meta's Louisiana data center sharply increased local school revenue

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 5:24

   Yeah, so it's great to be here. I just think back to my first interaction with Metta. It was in the summer of 2024, and it was at our local community college, and I just remember after the meeting getting in my car, and it's hot in Louisiana, so I turned the air on, and I just sat there, and I said, the game has changed. This is going to give our parish an opportunity to do something that it's never been able to do.

2. 5:56

   So when the groundbreaking ceremony happened in December of 2024, I could immediately start to see the increase in our sales tax collections. There are six taxing entities in our parish. The Richland Parish School Board collects 51% of the taxes for the district. So I was able to see the sales tax collections go from 5%, 10%, which is normal for a school system, to about 60% or 70%. And at that time, the number of workers at the data center site increased.

3. 6:33

   Those collections peaked at about 260%. That's an increase in sales tax collections. and so we have a one cent and a one half cent sales tax that's dedicated to employees salaries and so we're announcing the sales tax increases at our school board meetings and we're educators so people can do the math. They start to figure out this is going to translate into a larger sales tax check which directly goes into our salaries. So in December of 2025 we gave out a one-half cent sales tax check. That check doubled from the previous year so it went from roughly about four thousand dollars to about eight thousand dollars but we hadn't seen a full year of spiked increases in sales tax collections. That happened this past June. So our certified employees received an increase of about $40,000 in their sales tax check.

4. 7:41

   Wow. They got a $40,000 check? They got a $50,000 check. Wow. Wow. Wow. so the check the previous year was $10,000 so if you take that December increase in the June increase it was a net of about $45,000 for our teachers. Did they all, because the reason, Dina and I were talking about this panel, and everyone hates data centers. They poll negative 80 in the United States. And Dina was telling me the story, and I was like, we should tell this story because it is unbelievable.

5. 8:18

   Did the teachers and the community have this negative sentiment about data centers before? Were they all, we hate data centers, we don't want them here? Or was that before this wave happened and the community didn't really kind of pay much attention to it? I think initially there was the unknown. And we are. We are the beginning. We're a starting point. There was no reference for us to access. We couldn't say, okay, well, when was the last time we had a $50 billion capital investment in our schools?

6. 8:50

   So how did we handle that? So, yeah, a few million dollars, that's huge for us. So, there was anxious thoughts. I think META has done an excellent job of informing us and educating us. And that's going to have to continue to happen. Oftentimes, this communication is not about the most informed person in the community. It's about the least informed person in the community. So we're working to make sure that we continue to get that positive message out about the good things that are happening, because there are a lot of good things that are happening in our parish.

7. 9:29

   Yeah, I think to the superintendent's point, Louisiana was a little bit late to the data center game, which has actually worked remarkably well to our benefit in that the meta investment was the first one in the state. And because of the partnership, the way we negotiated the deal, I call it a partnership, not a negotiation, frankly, all along. The community, when we first brought the idea, even prior to you knowing, superintendent, the community wasn't apprehensive because there was a great deal of unknown. Now, keep in mind, this was now about 20 months ago is when we started the conversation there. So the chatter wasn't as much as it is now. But you're talking about a community that was really starved for opportunity. As you saw in the video, we had lost population. The average wages in Richland Parish were roughly $36,000, $38,000 a year

8. 10:23

   prior to this investment. So the data center went to a place in Louisiana, Mississippi Delta Parish that was Mississippi River Delta, obviously. It was longing for this opportunity. And we got ahead of that. And I think we got ahead of that very wisely in the way we addressed both the concerns, the impact on the community, the good impact on the community, and the natural resources and all the things we're hearing, right? In a weird way, then, all of this noise is actually somewhat beneficial in the sense that you may just want to go to Dina and say, we'll just take all your data centers. I think our governor would actually say that. Such a discontinuous change in the earnings potential of normal average Americans. Yeah, the governor just signed an executive of order a few months ago, creating a framework for us under which we will engage with large load

9. 11:18

   users, right? And the privilege that it gives us now is we get to be choosy, right? We have a sales tax exemption, which is critical to be able to land an investment of this size and this scale. But now we get to really court who our partners are going to be. And the governor claims it all the time that meta really was the prototype for us. And it set a very high standard. And that's now the standard we're going to follow. We are not one of those states who is saying no.

10. 11:43

    We are one of those states that are saying yes and. Yeah. So maybe you could help us with,