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Marshalltown is having the same conversation a lot of Iowa communities are having right now: whether data centers belong here, and if so, where and on what terms. The city’s pause on new data center approvals runs through late November. Reasonable people disagreed about whether that pause was needed. It’s here now, and the good news is that the time is being put to real use.
Since the pause began, the city has hosted a community roundtable, and the Planning and Zoning Department has taken a data center zoning ordinance through five drafts, along with companion ordinances on noise, water connections and private wells. What’s on the table today is not a rubber stamp. The current draft limits data centers to General Industrial land. It requires generators and cooling equipment to sit at least 600 feet from neighboring homes, and that distance can shrink only if a noise study proves the project still meets city noise standards, and never below 300 feet. It requires a 100-foot landscaped buffer wherever a data center borders a residential neighborhood, and it steps building heights down to 35 feet near homes. The water ordinances would require connection to city water and prohibit private wells, so usage is metered and accountable to Marshalltown Water Works.
That is the right approach. Neighbors deserve to know what a project has to meet before anything gets built. Developers deserve to know the same thing before they spend money on a site. The developers worth having will welcome clear rules. The Chamber’s ask is simple: finish this work, adopt standards that are firm and fair, and then be ready to say yes to projects that meet them.
This is personal for me, too. I’m raising my family in Marshalltown. I own a home here. I get up every day to work on growing and building this community. I have no interest in projects that damage our environment or drain the life out of our town, because I’m invested in Marshalltown’s success just like everyone else who lives here. That’s exactly why I believe the answer is in the middle: strong rules, honest information and room for the right projects to succeed. So let me take the biggest concerns head on.
Water is the concern I hear most, and it deserves a straight answer. For years, Marshalltown didn’t have much spare water capacity, and we shaped our business recruitment around that limit. Marshalltown Water Works is now completing a six-million-gallon-per-day treatment expansion. Every data center prospect we are talking with has proposed closed-loop or alternative cooling, which recirculates the same water instead of evaporating it. Those systems still have to be filled and occasionally topped off, so their use isn’t zero, and those commitments should be verified rather than assumed. But they look nothing like the water-hungry facilities in national headlines.
Power is the next question. Iowa is a regulated utility state, and Iowa Utilities Commission rules keep utilities from pushing the cost of infrastructure built for one large customer onto households and existing businesses. MidAmerican Energy has added some of the largest data center campuses in the country while going more than a decade without asking regulators for a general rate increase. Closer to home, Alliant Energy’s 720-megawatt Bobcat Energy Center is being built right here in Marshall County, an investment in generation and grid reliability that benefits all of us.
The upside is real. The one project that has been formally presented to the City Council is a single building on about 30 acres. It would bring 300 to 400 construction workers over roughly two years, 50 to 60 full-time jobs, and about $3 million a year in new property tax revenue. Incentives are the city’s decision, not the Chamber’s, but we have been clear and upfront with every developer we’ve talked to that incentives are not on the table. Anyone still looking at Marshalltown knows that expectation going in.
We don’t have to guess what this looks like, because other Iowa communities are already living it. Data center properties owned by Apple, Meta and Microsoft in central Iowa paid $30.7 million in property taxes in 2024-25. A single 110-acre Microsoft data center in the Warren County portion of West Des Moines generates more than $10 million a year, including $4.84 million for the Norwalk Community School District and nearly $3 million for the city. West Des Moines has used Microsoft’s property tax revenue to repay roughly $300 million in infrastructure bonds, opening about 4,500 acres to development, and the city has lowered its property tax rate. In Cedar Rapids, the QTS campus is expected to pay about $20 million a year, rising to about $55 million once its incentive ends. That’s roughly ten times what the city’s largest existing commercial taxpayer pays. Statewide, the Iowa League of Cities reports that about 40 percent of data center property taxes go to local schools.
That kind of revenue gives a community real choices. It can pay for new infrastructure. It can ease the property tax burden on homeowners and the businesses already here. Construction brings years of steady work for our deep bench of tradespeople and contractors, and those paychecks get spent at our restaurants, hardware stores, gas stations and hotels, which grows local option sales tax revenue. The Bobcat Energy Center alone is bringing roughly 250 construction workers to town over the next two years. The right project supports local businesses, adds demand for new housing and brings new people to Marshalltown. This is a rising tide that can lift all of our boats.
I’ll also be honest: not every data center proposal is a good one. Over the past five years, the Chamber has fielded more than a dozen data center inquiries, and we screen every one against the water, power and site capacity we actually have. The ones that don’t fit don’t move forward. Clear rules put that same discipline in writing, where everyone can see it.
Saying no to everything isn’t a plan, and neither is saying yes to anything. The right approach is to set a high bar and hold every project to it.
The risk now is that this pause stretches on, or that the final rules become so restrictive they amount to a ban. Communities across Iowa, from Council Bluffs to Altoona to West Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, have hosted these facilities for years, and they are not waiting on us. If Marshalltown signals that it isn’t open for business, the jobs, the tax base and the opportunity will simply land somewhere else.
We don’t have to choose between protecting our community and growing it. We can do both, together. The city is close to having rules that reflect Marshalltown’s values. Let’s finish them, adopt them, and be the kind of town that’s ready when the right project comes along.
John Hall is president and CEO of the Marshalltown Area Chamber of Commerce.