When a company invests billions, pays little or nothing in tax for decades, and the cost of the power lines and water mains to serve it gets spread onto everyone else's bill, the community carries the cost and the company keeps the benefit. That's not the free market. That's the government picking a winner and mailing you the invoice.

When a utility builds new plants and lines to serve one of these facilities, that cost lands on every ratepayer, including you, unless the state requires the data center to cover it. Right now Indiana mostly doesn't. Last session, the bills that would have protected ratepayers never even got a hearing, while a bill letting data centers build on certain farmland without a public hearing passed the House before the Senate stopped it.

My standard is a condition of admission, not a punishment. Before a data center plugs in, it brings online more new power than it will ever draw, available around the clock, and it pays for its own wires and backup instead of billing the neighbors. The big tech companies have already promised to "build, bring, or buy" their own power. I would make that promise the law.

The same rule applies to water and land. Closed-loop cooling, water use metered and capped to what the aquifer can sustain, and farms and existing wells come first. No incentive deal without an independent, public showing that the county comes out ahead after every tax break and every service cost. Indiana already signs sales tax exemptions that can run 50 years. Nobody should give away two generations of tax base without proof.

None of this is abstract in District 48. Indiana residential electric bills jumped 17.5% in a single year, and CenterPoint, which serves most of this district, now charges among the highest residential bills in the state. After regulators approved an $80 million annual increase, average bills rose about $44 a month. Adding massive new loads to that system without protections would pour gasoline on the fire.

Three of the nation’s largest coal plants sit in our district: Gibson, Rockport in Spencer County, and Petersburg in Pike County. The workers there deserve a real transition plan, and the ratepayers deserve honest oversight: real scrutiny in every rate case, disclosure of executive compensation, and protection from paying for dead investments.