Let’s see if we can count up the cost of Dorchester County wooing Google’s latest server farm. In return for cut-rate, fixed fees (in lieu of significantly higher property taxes, which would rise whenever everybody else’s taxes rise) and maybe a few jobs — the incentive agreement doesn’t require a single new job — the Dorchester County Council agreed to:
• Sell the company a 231-acre site along U.S. Highway 17A west of Summerville for $5.84 million, or about half the price the county advertised it for on its economic development website
• Sell Google some massive amount of water every month for an undisclosed amount of money.
• Give away taxpayers’ right to know any additional details about the water deal or anything else Google doesn’t want us to know.
There’s nothing new about a South Carolina government giving away public resources and even property in order to lure some new industrial recruit that might or might not be worth the cost. And there’s nothing surprising about such a decision from a County Council whose members would tell taxpayers (as they did Monday night) that they didn’t bother to get an appraisal of the property they sold for half price because they didn’t have to, and besides that was more than they paid for it.
And there’s certainly nothing new or surprising about a county hiding such details from the public. But as The Post and Courier’s David Wren reports, the information usually is available after the economic prospect signs on the dotted line. Indeed, the S.C. Freedom of Information Act is quite clear on that point.
Of course, the FOI law is also quite clear on a lot of other points that public officials routinely ignore. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Dorchester officials lined up and said “yes sir” when a Google representative told them that how much water the company purchases from the county is a “trade secret” and therefore may not be revealed to the public that owns the water.
Think about that for a moment: Water is an increasingly limited commodity, the county created a water system to serve the public, and now it has allowed a California company to keep secret how fast it’s depleting that limited natural resource.
Mr. Wren reports that legal experts dispute the idea that water consumption could even be considered a trade secret under state law, along with this interesting detail: Google admitted in an Oregon lawsuit in 2022 that its trade secret argument doesn’t hold water.
Oregon’s law isn’t the same as South Carolina’s, but even if you believe that the amount of water the company uses to cool its computers is a trade secret — or that Google has competitors from whom it needs to protect said secrets — the Oregon agreement means the cat’s out of the bag: Anyone who wants to know how much water the company uses can easily extract it using public records from Oregon. Which makes any secret … not.
To add insult to injury, Dorchester County promised that it would tell Google when anybody files a Freedom of Information Act request for information on anything related to the many benefits the county is bestowing upon the company, and that Google would “be provided at least ten (10) calendar days to respond to the public records request or seek other remedy prior to the County’s statutory compliance with the public records request.”
The county is following the ignoble lead of Berkeley County and, in essence, allowing a private business to tell it whether it may comply with state law — not just whether the county will be allowed to provide the information to the public but also whether the county can comply with the 10-day statutory deadline to provide an answer.
Yes, the “confidential/trade secret information” agreement acknowledges that Google can’t prevent the county from complying with the FOI law — but it says this in the very same document in which the county agrees that the amount of the public’s water it sells to Google is a secret.
It’s reminiscent of the time the S.C. Commerce Department allowed a tire manufacturer to tell it that the name of its contact person was confidential, along with the names of company officials who submitted applications for taxpayer-subsidized incentives, and the person who witnessed the signatures, and the names of the lawyers representing the company. Not to belabor the point, but the company also convinced Commerce that it couldn’t tell the public the value of any state and federal incentives it was receiving.
One of the first things Harry Lightsey did when he took over as Commerce secretary in 2021 was to enter into an agreement to prevent such outrageous abuses of the law henceforth.
Unfortunately, that agreement doesn’t cover the county governments that often give away more incentives — and keep secret more public information — than the state ever could. The only way to get them to comply with the law is either to start filing lawsuits or else insist that our elected officials refuse to give in to companies’ privacy demands — and hold them accountable if they don’t.
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