Cities around the country are facing a dilemma — build defenses against sea level rise with taxpayer money, or refuse to build defenses and watch big-name companies go somewhere else.
This is what’s happening in Silicon Valley, where two of the world’s biggest tech companies — Facebook and Google — are expanding their campuses in a flood zone and counting on local municipalities to protect them with a new, multi-billion dollar levee system.
And as most neighboring municipalities are already facing budget shortfalls, many wonder why they are stuck footing the bill.
Carlos Romero, the Mayor of East Palo Alto which borders the Facebook campus, has frequently echoed these sentiments: “There is no reason why the residents or the public should subsidize the benefits that those corporations get . . . All of us are going to have to contribute,” he says. “And I think we should indeed figure out a way where corporations, who are making billions of dollars, contribute to this in a significant way because their very livelihood is challenged.”
And according to NPR, the numbers back up his concerns. While East Palo Alto is contributing 13% of its annual budget ($5.5 million) towards the levee system, Facebook is only contributing 0.009% of last year’s yearly revenue ($7.8 million) — a staggering difference in terms of responsibility.
The bigger issue, however, is that this kind of growing tension between taxpayers and private companies with waterfront property is becoming more and more common as the threat of rising seas intensifies.
And usually, it’s the people who come up empty handed, both financially and physically.
“If you spent billions of dollars to build levees and then behind the levee, the groundwater comes up anyway and people are flooded out any time that it rains, that’s going to be seen as a failure.”
Full Article: Who Will Pay To Protect Tech Giants From Rising Seas by Reporter Lauren Sommer. Originally published on NPR on July 27, 2021.