Sarpy County

Sarpy County sits south of the Platte River at the southern edge of the Omaha metropolitan area. Papillion and La Vista, the county’s two largest cities, grew through the postwar decades on corn and soybean ground that the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District still maps as row-crop sections. The county’s 2020 census recorded roughly 190,000 residents, 11.1 percent of them Hispanic and 4.0 percent Black. The Mexican-American and African-American communities whose rate base funds the grid Sarpy County is consuming live a few miles north, in South Omaha’s ZIP codes 68107 and 68108 and in North Omaha along Ames and Fontenelle Boulevards.

Meta opened the Sarpy Data Center campus in Papillion in 2019 on roughly 1,000 acres of former row-crop land along the Papio Creek corridor. The 2025 expansion brought the campus to nine buildings and more than four million square feet. Google opened its 275-acre Papillion campus in 2023, a mile to the east on the same corridor. The two campuses together draw 920 announced megawatts from the Omaha Public Power District, a public-power generation and transmission utility whose residential and small-commercial ratepayers carry the capital costs of the Cass-Sarpy 345 kilovolt transmission upgrade and the broader $2 billion grid expansion OPPD disclosed in its 2026 Corporate Operating Plan.

The Google-Tenaska-Tallgrass carve-out that the Nebraska Unicameral is considering as LB 1261 would push the pattern further. The Flatwater Free Press broke the story in January 2026. The three companies are proposing a 1,000 to 3,000 megawatt data-center campus powered by a new Tenaska natural-gas plant wrapped in a Tallgrass carbon-capture system that pipes carbon dioxide into the Powder River Basin for storage. LB 1261 would exempt the gas plant from Nebraska’s public-power statute, the longest-standing public-power regime in the United States, which requires every electric utility in the state to operate as a political subdivision rather than as an investor-owned company. A sitting Nebraska state senator optioned land to one of the developers. The Investigate Midwest carbon-capture deep dive in April 2026 documented the technical risk that the carbon-capture equipment will fail to reach its claimed 95 percent capture rate, and that stranded-asset costs will return to OPPD ratepayers through wholesale contracts the utility has already signaled it would sign.

The affected community is not the county that hosts the campuses. Papillion’s median household income in the 2020 American Community Survey was above $91,000, the census tracts around the Meta and Google sites were 82 percent white, and the tax-increment financing that attached to the land acquisitions flows to the Papillion and La Vista municipal budgets. The affected community is the Mexican-American and Central American meatpacking workforce in South Omaha, anchored by the Heartland Workers Center and the JBS, Tyson, and Greater Omaha Packing plants, and the African-American community in North Omaha, anchored by the Omaha NAACP and the Urban League of Nebraska. Those households pay the OPPD residential rate the Papillion campuses’ transmission is loading.

The organizing capacity Nebraska built in the Keystone XL fight now covers the data-center fight. Bold Nebraska, the state political organization Jane Kleeb founded in 2010, carried the Cowboy and Indian Alliance through twelve years of pipeline opposition and now tracks LB 1261, the OPPD rate hearings, and the Cass-Sarpy transmission corridor. The Heartland Workers Center runs the civic-engagement program that puts South Omaha Spanish-speaking residents in the rate hearings. Senator Danielle Conrad, a Lincoln Democrat who serves on the Revenue Committee, has carried the dissenting floor arguments against LB 1261. The Flatwater Free Press, the Nebraska Examiner, Investigate Midwest, Nebraska Public Media, and the Omaha World-Herald are the named press that has built the documentary record on which the organizing now rests.

The atlas carries Sarpy County into the record because the case joins two transfers that the historical urban-renewal cases already document. Chavez Ravine shows what happens when a community loses public infrastructure to private capital under the banner of progress; LB 1261 would privatize generation in the only state whose constitution requires the opposite. Cooper Square shows what wins when a community builds a counter-plan and places ratepayer-advocate capacity next to the docket; Bold Nebraska and the Heartland Workers Center are the contemporary equivalents, and the Nebraska Public Advocate is the state office with standing in the rate case. The Sarpy County essay documents the destruction Meta and Google have already completed, the destruction LB 1261 would compound, and the resistance Nebraska’s public-power tradition and its civic organizations have marshaled against it.