Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – The legislative session has adjourned, bills have been passed, and some have not. The downtown expansion project was one of them. Ryan McCrady, CEO of the Springfield Sangamon Growth Alliance stopped by the WTAX Morning Newswatch to discuss these topics at hand.
“It’s really important that we embrace the opportunity in our economy locally economy for tourism. And what happens when you embrace tourism is the tourist bring us great stuff that we get to enjoy when they’re not here, which is actually most of the time. So hopefully things can get worked out. We believe the growth alliances is a very important project expansion of the BOS center, the new Conference Center Hotel downtown to be able to handle the conventions. We’ll try to figure out what in the heck is going on throughout the rest of the day. Like I said, after everybody kind of catches up on what happened and the flurry of activity last night.”
The new data center that is coming into Sangamon County, is bringing some misinformation from others within the community. McCrady wanted to get the facts right.
“One of the problems we’re having particularly about the project in Sangamon County is that there’s continuing to be spread misinformation. You hear people say it’s going to use millions of gallons of water a day, and we know factually, it’s going to use 1,100 gallons of water a day. Think about that, a swimming pool and someone’s backyard is multiple times that much water in a given day. People have strong opinions about data centers.”
McCrady also went on to mention the worries about the power grid.
“There are no new hyper scale data centers operating in our miso region right now. None. But they are getting all the blame for power prices going up. So that’s a fact to keep in mind, what’s driving power prices up right now is decreasing supply we have in the region. Now, the effect on the grid has to be studied by this miso, which is the grid operator. They have to render an opinion on both its’s okay to put that much load on there because there’s always these changes going on.”
