SERVER AND SERVE: Benitez-Thompson Took Data-Center Cash, Backed Tax Breaks, Now Calls Them ‘Sweetheart Deals’

Nevada Democrat congressional candidate Teresa Benitez-Thompson is campaigning as a born-again skeptic of the data-center industry after spending years taking money from interests tied to the industry and voting to help build the lucrative tax-abatement regime she now condemns.

Campaign-finance records reviewed by The Nevada Globe identify at least $45,300 in state and federal contributions to Benitez-Thompson from data-center operators, utilities, telecommunications companies, lobbyists and professional firms with documented connections to major data-center projects. That includes $5,000 directly from Switch, $16,000 from NV Energy and Nevada Power, $4,500 from Cox Communications, and $1,500 from CenturyTel or CenturyLink.

Then came the tax breaks.

Benitez-Thompson voted in 2015 for Senate Bill 170, which established a statewide program offering partial property and sales-tax abatements to qualifying new or expanding data centers. The legislation allowed personal-property tax abatements of up to 75 percent and extended benefits for years to qualifying projects. The Assembly passed it 36-6, with Benitez-Thompson voting with the majority.

Before that vote, Benitez-Thompson had already accepted thousands of dollars from interests connected to the industry, including Switch’s $5,000 contribution in December 2014. She had also voted in 2013 for separate legislation offering qualifying data centers additional property and sales-tax abatements.

The tab that followed was anything but pocket change.

More than a decade after Nevada lawmakers embraced the data-center incentive program, the state has approved a projected $457 million in cumulative abatements for massive projects associated with companies including Google and Apple, according to The Nevada Independent. The outlet also reported that data-center abatements produced a gross reduction of $537 million in local sales and use taxes between fiscal years 2017 and 2025.

Now, with data centers becoming politically radioactive in Northern Nevada over water, power, and growth concerns, Benitez-Thompson has discovered religion.

She told The Nevada Independent this year that she “firmly supports” Reno’s moratorium on data centers and said it was time to end the industry’s “sweetheart deals on abatements.” Even Benitez-Thompson acknowledged the inconvenient history, admitting, “I voted for some of those 10 years ago,” before arguing the companies had since “overperformed.”

That is quite a conversion.

When Nevada was handing out the incentives, Benitez-Thompson voted yes. When data-center-connected money flowed into her political accounts over the years, she took it. Now that Northern Nevada voters are increasingly furious about enormous power demands, scarce water and generous corporate subsidies, the Democrat candidate wants to audition as the woman who discovered the problem.

Benitez-Thompson calls them “sweetheart deals” today.

Nevada voters may reasonably wonder why she helped sweeten them in the first place.

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