Overview
- Hundreds of protesters filled Hermantown City Hall and chanted for hours on Monday night, forcing council leaders to adjourn a meeting and pause votes after police declared an unlawful assembly.
- City officials had planned to resume the vote the next day but canceled a follow-up meeting to avoid interfering with early voting at City Hall, leaving final local approvals unresolved.
- Google’s revised plan calls for a roughly 1.7 million square foot campus with an estimated 500 megawatts of power demand, and the company has dropped a request for up to $80 million in property tax breaks.
- The company has offered mitigation promises including groundwater monitoring, new water supplies for affected wells, a decommissioning plan, and funding for wind turbines and battery storage, while multiple lawsuits challenge the project’s environmental review.
- With local votes stalled, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission must still approve electric-supply arrangements and opponents are pushing to prevent ratepayers from bearing grid upgrade costs, a debate that echoes wider statewide and national fights over large AI-era data centers.