Not Everyone In Tucson Has Fallen For Project Blue Propaganda

UCWAZ, CWA Local 7065 Treasurer Miranda Lopez, Acting President Marcos Esparza, and member Alec Peeples put together the below op-ed for the Arizona Daily Star. Their piece reflects that not everyone in Tucson has fallen for the wide-spread Project Blue propaganda.

It is not surprising that University of Arizona Vice President of Research Tomás Díaz de la Rubia would openly support the construction of Project Blue: a convoluted and morally bankrupt data center proposal designed to increase corporate profits by literally draining our local water and electricity supplies. 

UA administrators operate in a similar manner by pursuing profit by any means necessary, even at the expense of university workers and students. Díaz de la Rubia’s letter uses all the correct buzzwords like “innovation” and “investment” to support his claims, but we know that decision-makers with power use these terms to justify and/or minimize the consequences of corporatizing public goods. Since 2020, United Campus Workers Arizona (UCW-AZ) has organized university workers to stand up against the UA administration’s anti-worker policies it shapes and promotes. Like the shadowy profiteers behind Project Blue, the university’s business model makes empty promises and holds itself accountable only to its shareholders. 

We have already heard President Garimella express how the UA is fully on board with Project Blue despite the lack of input from the public. Díaz de la Rubia claims this is because the UA is in urgent need of data infrastructure, but what our university community actually needs are resources and material support for our higher education workers and students. We need our cultural resource centers reinstated for current and future students who have no other places of refuge on campus; we need our decades-old Writing Program to be restored for our incoming fall semester students; we need contingent faculty to have greater job security with multi-year contracts; we need to make the UA a sanctuary campus and ban ICE from working with UAPD; we need the UA administration to stop surveilling student activists both on campus and online; we need administrators to allow student, faculty, and staff voices to be heard, even when in dissent of university decisions.; we need UA to stop withholding state allocated funds meant for rural communities through Cooperative Extension.

Having attended the first in-person community meeting at Mica High School last week, we felt the anger and frustration throughout the room. Concerns about the data center’s environmental impact were brushed aside as though water supply problems could be easily solved with enough money. Even carpenter and construction union workers who showed up in support of the project were not given a straight answer when asked about how to secure jobs for local residents and not outsourcing labor. It was a similar experience for those of us who attended the last Arizona Board of Regents meeting to confront the board and President Garimella about the “consolidation” of our cultural resource centers: our concerns were “heard” but the higher ups had clearly made up their minds and were only humoring us with a public comment session.

Beale, the development company leading Project Blue, has refused to admit to the fact that this center will provide only 75 permanent jobs once completed and 500 construction jobs each year over the next 10 years. Compared to the hundreds of millions of gallons of water and the use of half of the city’s current electricity capacity, any “economic benefits” would be negligible in the face of increased drought, polluted water supplies and increased heat output. We have seen what happens from places like Georgia and Texas, when giant tech companies take advantage of a lack of oversight to build giant datacenters, leaving long-time residents without clean, running water. In the current contract draft, Project Blue is guaranteed a percentage of Tucson’s potable (i.e. drinkable) water supply for the first two years of construction. Facts about this project’s water use are generally difficult to find; for example, the Chamber of Southern Arizona posted and took down this fact sheet that still shows up on search engines. We are not water or environmental experts, but after working to unionize higher education workers, we can tell you that we know exactly when we are being lied to by people in positions of power. We know the propaganda by heart and we encourage Tucson residents to consider the financial and political motivations for why Amazon would choose to hide such a supposedly mutually beneficial plan from the public. 

Plans for this data center have been made in secret, it would have long-term adverse effects on our environment and community, and the profits from the data center would go directly to fund the union-busting corporate giant, Amazon. University administrators in support of Project Blue are focused entirely on “innovation” and wanting to get ahead, but they are not thinking about those students and workers who would be left behind without resources for the sake of progress. As members of the UA Chapter of United Campus Workers Arizona, representing students, staff, and faculty at the University of Arizona, we urge the Tucson city council to deny the annexation of land in next Wednesday’s meeting to Jeff Bezos's shell company Beale and to uphold the values of social justice, economic equality and worker solidarity.