Guest Column
Utah Lands New Spy Center; Idaho Doesn’t Come Close to Needed Infrastructure
Idaho still has nowhere near the backbone capacity to attract a huge datacenter project.By Chris Blanchard, Guest Writer, 7-02-09
Fueled by $180 million in federal stimulus money, the National Security Agency will build a one-million square foot data center outside of Salt Lake City. According to the Salt Lake Tribune:
Hoping to protect its top-secret operations by decentralizing its massive computer hubs, the National Security Agency will build a 1-million-square-foot data center at Utah’s Camp Williams.
The years-in-the-making project, which may cost billions over time, got a $181 million start last week when President Obama signed a war spending bill in which Congress agreed to pay for primary construction, power access and security infrastructure. The enormous building, which will have a footprint about three times the size of the Utah State Capitol building, will be constructed on a 200-acre site near the Utah National Guard facility’s runway.
Congressional records show that initial construction — which may begin this year — will include tens of millions in electrical work and utility construction, a $9.3 million vehicle inspection facility, and $6.8 million in perimeter security fencing. The budget also allots $6.5 million for the relocation of an existing access road, communications building and training area.
Officials familiar with the project say it may bring as many as 1,200 high-tech jobs to Camp Williams, which borders Salt Lake, Utah and Tooele counties.
It will also require at least 65 megawatts of power — about the same amount used by every home in Salt Lake City combined. A separate power substation will have to be built at Camp Williams to sustain that demand, said Col. Scott Olson, the Utah National Guard’s legislative liaison.
There are few places in the U.S. that could house a data center like this, and Utah has spent years laying the groundwork to make sure that it could accommodate this kind of facility (or a Google data center, etc.). Utah did not look much different from the rest of the intermountain west region in 1997, but made a concerted effort to beef up its Internet Backbone connections. By 1999, the Wasatch Front area had one of the nation’s fastest growing Internet networks. So what does that network look like after another 10 years?
Today, the Salt Lake City area has more internet backbone capacity relative to demand, than anywhere in the United States. And regional competition if you are sitting in Boise, ID, is pretty tough:
Last October, Idaho, led by INL, and the state’s universities and hospitals connected to the IRON GigaPop network (Idaho Regional Optical Network) which is a great leap forward for our research institutions. The network allows institutions to connect at speeds allowing an entire CD to be downloaded in seconds, or an entire library in minutes. However, Idaho still has nowhere near the backbone capacity to attract a Google or NSA like datacenter. Congrats to our neighbors to the south for making an investment in infrastructure that is paying off by attracting billions of dollars in spending and lots, and lots, of high paying technical jobs.
Idaho, are you listening?
Chris Blanchard, an urban scholar and technology entrepreneur, teaches in the College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs at Boise State University. He is the founder and CEO of Pronetos, an online social community for scholars, and the founder and CEO of Open Access Press, a company that helps humanities and social science publishers bring their print publications online.
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Then there is the Consolidated High School, of our town and the neighboring town of equal size. The bond issue floated a year ago had the contractors lined up the day school let out, and that $40 Million project is booming. The city manager said the bids were coming in for the new city hall and civic center, millions under estimate. That, too, is bonded indebtedness and urban renewal money. Home grown stimulus. Small town business as usual. No home building going on, and enough foreclosures to make the weekly paper enjoy prosperity from the mandated disclosures in the "legal" section, 5 pages this week, of mortgage foreclosures and legal notices. People in the restaurant business were closed or on short days all winter, but now that daylight is longer, and summer weather is here, they are staying open longer, and having some success. Retirees with homes and a hanger at the airport development are a steady source of sales for goods and services. The rental properties are all full, and none being built. The house next door was financed on a liar loan, and the buyers packed up one night and the next day it was an empty house. I chased the mortgage holder through the court house and internet, and never found who had lost at the game of musical mortgage, did not find a chair on which to sit. One day a "we buy homes" sign appeared, and a crew tore out dog piss rugs and gave it a scrubbing, and two weeks after that a real estate saleswoman showed up to claim the house she had bought. The house had been sold for half the mortgage price to someone with cash who flipped it for a cool $40,000 gain in two weeks. The real estate woman is living in a house she paid 60% of the value it held for the liar loan. The wonderful thing for me is that I will have comparatives to lower my assessment for the tax man. That house is one of three that have sold on my block, and all at lower prices than the tax man shows on his last assessment. But we will still be on the hook for the bonds to build the high school and the city hall-civic center, for maybe a few more years. But there are jobs here, and no Federal or State stimulus, unless the State highway Dept. overlay job on some bad pothole sections of the local highway count as "stimulus." I thought we got that through the gas tax. Silly me.
The old saying about throwing some cow pie at the wall and see what sticks is a pretty good definition of stimulus administration and who gets what. "Shovel ready" means that no permits or planning are needed to start the job. Those projects were planned, and vetted, and ready to go, and that is what got money from ObamaNation. Having a ranking congressman on the right committee helped some states. One would think all that Democrat zeal shown last fall would have expressed itself as more than ordinary stimulus for the Obama Red States of America. And maybe that is how is has panned out. All I know is that I can deduct my taxes, including bond payments, from the Federal income tax. Add that to the windows we put in last week that earned us a $1500 tax credit, and ObamaNation is not going to get much from me next April 15.
Overall, local stimulus is working, and the Federal plan is not. Better the money had been doled out to States on a per capita basis, to be distributed to towns and cities on the same basis. They have to balance their budgets, and would spend the money because they have need and a process to oversee the spending. Except, I would suppose, in Chicago, Detroit, and other notorious fiefdoms of feudal governance. Ask me if I care. As long as my city gets their share, I don't care which councilman or woman, mayor or police chief, in some corrupt urban center grafts off a piece of the pie. Collateral damage in America. The difference between shoveling money down the rat holes of urban America is no different than sending it to Iraq or Afghanistan. The few will skim the most of the money, and we won't do a thing about it. Except ask the Chinese to buy more Treasury notes. ha ha ha ha. (that is Mandarin for ha ha ha ha, the Geitner applause received when he spoke to MBA candidates in China).