The Town will be hosting a community open house next week to provide some information and answer questions from the public about the proposed data centre projects in Olds.
There will be two separate times for the drop-in event on Wednesday, February 4th at the Olds Sportsplex in the foyer with one from 11am until 1pm and another from 5pm until 7 o’clock. It will be the first of several open houses the Town of Olds will hold as the projects move through their review processes.
Sandra Blyth, Economic Development Manager with Invest Olds, welcomed in this week’s $10 billion private-sector investment by Synapse Data Center Inc. to construct Canada’s largest data centre in north east Olds along Highways 27 and 2-A. Blyth says “from a tax assessment perspective as well as off-site levies and so forth, the return to us is going to be in the millions of dollars. The tax impact is going to be huge for our community and that will share in that from a revenue perspective where the taxpayer has less on them as far as achieving our needs for roads, infrastructure, and all of the other things that the community requires. This is certainly going to help us with that.”
She adds, there are other development opportunities in Olds as well. Blyth notes that, obviously, data centres are the thing right now but Olds has other opportunities as well. She says “when you look from a commercial perspective and things like that. We want to look at all different types of developments that could be possible here and, of course, housing. Now these new opportunities are going to require that we have a lot more housing in the community – in addition to the housing needs that we had before. I’m estimating probably around another 300 to 500 units of housing depending on the number of jobs that are filled immediately.”
Blyth is hopeful by this spring that the Town of Olds will be able to start releasing the names of some of the tech companies that will be filling up the ten buildings in the proposed Synapse Data Centre Inc. project.
Town officials point out that the community open house on February 4th is separate from a developer-led session that will be held the next day. The Town of Olds is not affiliated with the Synapse Data Center Inc. community information session on Thursday, February 5th on the Olds College campus which will run that evening from 6 o’clock until 8 in Lecture Hall 316 in Building #2 of the Werklund Agriculture and Technology Center.
Listen to 96.5 The Ranch’s Community Hotline conversation with Sandra Blyth.
