I remember the call. The city manager told me to buckle up. A rezoning for a smelly new potato-salad factory was coming my way. On a street with nothing but houses. My life as a planner flashed before me like the grainy black and white final scene of “Frankenstein” — angry village mobs storming my office with torches and pitchforks to burn it down with me in it.

He wished me godspeed.

Lately, I’ve harkened back to those days watching data center debates rage like Eddie Vedder mosh pits in city council chambers. They’re all lulus.

Just not that sort of lulu.

LULU, planner-speak for “locally unwanted land uses,” is a term first coined by political scientist/city planner Frank Popper in the early 1980s to classify regionally/nationally needed developments objectionable to many people near them.

Among the defining feature of LULUs are negative externalities — imposed social costs on unintended third parties. Highways, landfills, prisons, wastewater treatment, airports, homeless shelters, factories, etc. cause noise, air pollution, odor, visual blight, poor health and reduced property values. Unwanted, they tend to gravitate towards disadvantaged areas with cheaper land and lower political influence.

Today, hyperscale data centers are the quintessential modern version of LULUs. They have national infrastructure needs like highways or transmission lines powering private enterprises. They also spew negative externalities and gravitate to areas of least resistance.

But they’re more complicated than that.

They run e-commerce websites and logistics for beloved online retailers that whacked our beloved malls (who whacked our beloved downtowns). They store files and provide cloud-based services for coveted remote work that gut office buildings and whack downtowns again draining a city’s top revenue source: property taxes. Yet baby boomers are three times likelier to support data centers than 20-year-olds.

Paradoxically, like a toxic romance, we really hate them but keep needing them. About half of America “strongly opposes” data centers AND used a chatbot this summer. Classic LULU externalities — high energy bills, gobbled-up land and water, fear of human worker replacement — are to blame. In Kansas, you could throw a dart and hit a community organizing bans or moratoriums like the citizen-led versions in Ottawa and Emporia.

But it’s also an extraordinary golden goose moment for struggling communities backed into a precarious budget corner wanting better services; many data centers average $20 million-plus in annual property tax revenue.

This is a teachable moment if we want. Like my potato-salad LULU where we had to figure out how to enforce smell intensities to get hundreds of jobs, local officials can use professional planners, engineers, and experts to do the same.

l Energy bill protections — Evergy implemented large-load tariffs to protect consumers and make big data centers (more than 75 megawatts) pay their way.

l Zoning site controls — Residential buffer zones, decibel limits, closed-loop water systems, building aesthetics, emission controls, etc.

l Accountability measures — Certified third party reviews of water/energy/noise studies, surety bonds for performance, annual community reports, developer agreements, etc.

The data center industry was built on an assumption that public opinion is not a critical resource in the same way that land, water and electricity are. That calculus has quickly changed giving local government tremendous leverage as viable sites have diminished. That is the point behind LULUs. They are land use decisions compelling us to figure it out in the open so benefits can still accrue to the community minus the catastrophic costs. Blanket bans are blind to this advantage.

How will your community use this leverage?

— Bill Fiander is a university lecturer in Kansas specializing in public administration, urban planning, and state/local government.