google

When you're running for governor in the Party of Greed and you're not a multimillionaire like Bill Graham and Fred Smith, it's gotta be rough. Which might explain why Judge Bob Orr is having such a hard time cutting the strings that connect him to Art Pope. After years of toiling in the Pope's employ, Orr appears reluctant to bid the Puppetmaster farewell and strike out on his own.

A vocal critic of incentives used to attract businesses is preparing to sue because of tax breaks worth millions that the state recently promised Google. Bob Orr, executive director of the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law in Raleigh, said Monday that the group's directors have authorized the institute to "move forward in its research and preparation of a legal challenge."

Part of the deal with Google to locate in Lenoir involved secret negotiations between Duke Power and Google for land controlled by Duke Power and electricity to be supplied by Duke Power. These dealings were blessed with exemptions for sales tax on the purchase of that electricity. One legacy of Lenoir's declining manufacturing activity is a robust electric distribution system yet, as Duke's applications for new generating capacity demonstrate, electricity supply is constrained.

Google has released very little information about plans for the new server farm but some assumptions can be made about electricity demands. Server farms and data centers require substantially more power per square foot than a typical office building. Other than normal electric loads like lighting, the demand for electricity in server farms comes from the servers themselves and the air conditioning required to deal with the heat generated.

Most of us have used Google Maps, either to find out how to get from point "A" to point "B", or just to take a look at a place we've never been. It seems that some how, the post-Katrina satellite pictures of New Orleans have been replaced with pre-Katrina pictures.

Brad Miller,NC-13, chair of the sub-committee on investigations for the House Committee for Science and Techology wants to know why.

"Google's use of old imagery appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history," subcommittee chairman Brad Miller, D-North Carolina, wrote in a letter to Schmidt.(chair and CEO of Google, Inc.)

Good morning. A real winter skyline looking north toward the university.

Googled
You might think that the rest of the country is looking askance at all the bristling over Google's incentives package, but as Ed Cone points out in his Sunday News & Record column the way the company twisted arms among legislators runs a little counter to the whole "don't be evil" thing. A good read with lots of links and comments at Ed's site. All in all, it's not been a good week for the media giant.

As mentioned, Senate Pro Tem Marc Basnight and roomie and finance chair Sen. David Hoyle say they'll take a hard look at incentives. N&O and Char-O on this story. From the Char-O story about the non-profit the company and Caldwell County set up:

Doesn't anyone in State Government know how to "use" Google, or are they only able to be "used" by Google? Are the people who negotiate our trade deals in Raleigh asleep at their posts? Does anyone surf the net using Google to figure out if the Google deal is really good for North Carolina?

Why are we giving highly profitable companies massive long-term tax breaks to locate here in the first place? When we do that, we dump the costs of infrastructure improvements on the rest of the county and state who may or many not do well in the deal? And why do we do it in secret so the companies can play one state against the other. If VA was only willing to pay $30 million for Dell, why was it worth another $210 million for us? What did we get for that extra $210 million over and above what Virginia was supposed to get?

Via the Ex Files:

Is Lenoir feeling lucky? Google tax breaks around $100 million. N&O:

Google, which has not committed to a site in Lenoir, could bring $600 million in new investment, equal to half the city's tax base and more than 10 percent of Caldwell County's.

The interesting thing about this to me is that what Google is setting up a server farm and needs a site with a good power infrastructure. Lenoir's lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate has hovered around 9 percent for a year and has been among the highest in the state for almost a decade. But the power grid that supplied the factories is still there.

Meanwhile,