Papillion Cluster: Meta, Google, and LB 1261

What the ground held

Map: South Omaha, North Omaha, and the Papillion corridor

Papillion sits fifteen miles south of downtown Omaha on the Papio Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River that drains a thousand square miles of eastern Nebraska farmland before joining the Missouri below Bellevue. The creek takes its name from the French word for butterfly, which the voyageurs who mapped the Missouri in the eighteenth century applied to the valley for the monarch migrations that still cross it every fall. The Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District, one of Nebraska’s twenty-three NRDs, manages flood control, groundwater, and soil conservation across the basin under the 1972 Nebraska Groundwater Management and Protection Act.¹

The sections Meta and Google eventually acquired were corn and soybean ground. The 2017 Census of Agriculture recorded Sarpy County as carrying 78,000 acres of harvested cropland across 310 farms, with an average farm size of 244 acres. The farms along the Papio Creek corridor between Papillion and La Vista had held their family lines through the postwar decades, some since the Kinkaid Act homesteading period at the start of the twentieth century. The 2020 census counted 190,604 people in Sarpy County, an increase of 17.7 percent over 2010 and the fastest growth of any Nebraska county.²

The county’s demographic profile is not the profile of the ratepayer base that pays for its grid. Sarpy County in 2020 was 11.1 percent Hispanic and 4.0 percent Black; Papillion’s median household income was $91,320. The Mexican-American and Central American meatpacking community that anchors the regional industrial grid lives fifteen miles north, in South Omaha’s ZIP codes 68107 and 68108, where the JBS, Tyson, and Greater Omaha Packing plants employ roughly 8,000 workers and the Heartland Workers Center has run Spanish-language workers’ rights clinics since 2009.³ North Omaha, along Ames and Fontenelle Boulevards, holds the city’s African-American community of roughly 50,000 people, 14.1 percent of Omaha’s population in 2020. The Omaha Public Power District, an elected public-power utility that serves roughly 400,000 customers across thirteen counties and the city of Omaha, bills both communities at the residential rate.⁴

OPPD is the load-growth beneficiary of the Papillion campuses and, under the cost-of-service framework that governs every Nebraska public-power district, the ratepayer base that funds the transmission and generation the campuses require. The district’s 2026 Corporate Operating Plan, published in November 2025, acknowledged a $2 billion capital-expansion program over the decade, driven primarily by data-center load growth and by the Cass-Sarpy 345 kilovolt transmission line that will connect the Papillion campuses to OPPD’s generation fleet.⁵

What Meta and Google took

Map: Meta Sarpy and Google Papillion campuses on Papio Creek

Meta announced the Sarpy Data Center in April 2017 and opened the first building in 2019. The campus sits on roughly 1,000 acres on the north side of Highway 370 between 72nd Street and 96th Street, straddling the Papillion and La Vista city limits. The 2025 expansion brought the campus to nine buildings and more than four million square feet of floor area. Meta’s published Sarpy info sheet documents 320 megawatts of contracted capacity, sourced through an OPPD wind power purchase agreement that draws from the Grande Prairie and Broken Bow wind facilities in central Nebraska.⁶

The wind PPA is the mechanism that allowed Meta to publicly claim that its Sarpy campus runs on renewable energy. The accounting is legitimate on its own terms: OPPD contracted the wind generation specifically for Meta, and Meta pays the premium that covers the wind facilities’ capital costs. The ratepayer-accounting question is whether the wind generation Meta has claimed was otherwise available to OPPD’s residential and small-commercial base, and whether the gas and coal generation OPPD retained to serve the rest of its load grew in absolute terms because Meta took the wind. OPPD’s integrated resource planning since 2019 answers the question with a qualified yes: the district has delayed retirement of its North Omaha coal units to serve non-Meta load, and the district’s 2026 COP extends North Omaha coal operation through 2030.⁵

Google announced the Papillion campus in May 2019 and opened it in 2023. The campus sits on 275 acres immediately east of the Meta site, on a parcel the company acquired from the Thorp family in December 2018 for roughly $5.5 million. Google’s initial OPPD contract covered 600 megawatts of capacity, sourced through a combination of wind, solar, and existing thermal generation. The campus’s water source, under a confidential agreement with the city of Papillion, draws from the Papillion municipal-wells system. Papillion’s 2024 Water Quality Report recorded 2.064 billion gallons pumped from the alluvial aquifer, an increase of 14 percent over 2020, which the report attributed to industrial customers without naming them.⁷

The combined Meta and Google footprint covers roughly 1,275 acres of former row-crop ground. The two campuses draw 920 announced megawatts, enough to power approximately 280,000 Nebraska households at the state average annual residential consumption of 12,000 kilowatt-hours per household. OPPD’s full residential base is approximately 400,000 customers. The Papillion cluster’s share of OPPD’s load is, by that measure, equivalent to 70 percent of the district’s residential demand.⁴

Sarpy County’s incentive package to secure the campuses included Nebraska Advantage tax credits, tax-increment financing on the campus parcels, and personal-property tax abatements on the data-center servers and equipment. The Nebraska Department of Revenue has not released a consolidated figure for the combined Meta and Google abatement value, but the Flatwater Free Press estimated the aggregate sales-tax exemption on equipment purchases alone at above $100 million through 2024.⁸

What LB 1261 would break

Map: LB 1261 and the Google-Tenaska-Tallgrass carve-out

The Flatwater Free Press broke the story in January 2026. Google, the independent-power producer Tenaska, and the midstream pipeline company Tallgrass Energy had approached the Nebraska Unicameral with a proposal for a new data-center campus requiring between 1,000 and 3,000 megawatts of generation, three times the peak demand of Lincoln. A new Tenaska natural-gas combined-cycle plant, wrapped in a Tallgrass carbon-capture system that would pipe captured carbon dioxide into Tallgrass’s existing Rockies Express pipeline network for storage in the Powder River Basin, would power the campus.⁹

The mechanism is the problem. Nebraska is the only state in the country whose electric generation is entirely public. The 1945 public-power statute requires every electric utility in the state to operate as a political subdivision, governed by an elected board, and to socialize its capital and operating costs across its ratepayer base. The statute has held through eighty years of industry pressure. LB 1261 would carve out the Tenaska gas plant from the statute, allowing Tenaska to own the generation privately and to sell the output to Google through a bilateral contract that would bypass the public-power cost-allocation framework.¹⁰

The ratepayer risk is stranded-asset risk. The carbon-capture system the proposal requires is unproven at the scale the project claims. Investigate Midwest’s April 2026 deep dive documented that the largest operating carbon-capture system on a power plant, the Boundary Dam unit in Saskatchewan, has consistently missed its 90 percent capture target and has operated at roughly 65 percent. The Tallgrass proposal for the Google site claims 95 percent. If the capture system fails to reach its claimed rate, or if the Environmental Protection Agency’s power-plant carbon rules change such that the gas plant requires retirement before the end of its thirty-year service life, the stranded-asset cost will return to OPPD ratepayers through the wholesale contract OPPD has already signaled it would sign to purchase the Tenaska output.¹¹

The self-dealing dimension ran in the Flatwater Free Press in February 2026. Senator Mike Flood, a Norfolk Republican who chairs the Unicameral’s Revenue Committee, had personally optioned land in his district to one of the Tenaska-Tallgrass developers in 2024, before LB 1261 was introduced. Senator Flood disclosed the option after the Flatwater Free Press requested comment but did not recuse himself from the Revenue Committee’s hearings on the bill. Two additional senators who voted for the bill on first round held consulting relationships with Tallgrass or Tenaska contractors that the Flatwater Free Press’s subsequent reporting documented.¹²

State Senator Danielle Conrad, a Lincoln Democrat, has carried the dissenting floor arguments against LB 1261. Her objections run on three lines: the public-power statute’s integrity, the stranded-asset risk to OPPD ratepayers, and the procedural failures in the Revenue Committee’s handling of the senator-land-option disclosures. The bill advanced from first round in March 2026. Second round is scheduled for May 2026, and the Nebraska Public Advocate’s office has indicated it will file a formal opposition brief if the bill reaches the final stage.¹³

What OPPD ratepayers pay

OPPD’s $2 billion capital-expansion program, disclosed in the November 2025 Corporate Operating Plan, spreads across three categories: transmission, generation, and distribution. The Cass-Sarpy 345 kilovolt transmission line, which connects the Papillion campuses to OPPD’s generation fleet and to the broader Southwest Power Pool grid, accounts for approximately $800 million of the total. Generation capacity additions, including new gas peakers at the Nebraska City plant and the extension of North Omaha coal operation through 2030, account for roughly $700 million. Distribution investments to support the Papillion and La Vista growth account for the remainder.⁵

The Omaha World-Herald’s November 2025 coverage of the OPPD 2026 COP quoted district staff acknowledging that residential rates would increase by approximately 9 percent in 2026 and by a cumulative 22 percent over the decade to fund the expansion. The increase falls proportionally across OPPD’s customer classes, but in absolute terms the residential base carries the largest share because residential customers are the largest single class and because OPPD’s cost-of-service framework allocates transmission investment on a usage-weighted basis that picks up peak-hour demand.¹⁴

The ratepayer incidence is the policy question that links Papillion to South Omaha and North Omaha. The median household income in Omaha’s 68107 ZIP code, the heart of the Mexican-American meatpacking community, is $45,200, less than half of Papillion’s. In 68111, the ZIP at the center of North Omaha’s African-American community, the median household income is $35,400. A 22 percent residential rate increase applied over a decade carries a materially different burden on households at those income levels than it does on Papillion households at $91,000. OPPD’s rate design does not correct for the difference. The Heartland Workers Center’s civic-engagement program, which registers South Omaha residents and trains them as volunteer testifiers at OPPD hearings, is the institutional vehicle that brings the incidence question into the rate case.³

Nebraska Public Advocate Bob McEntarffer filed comments in the 2025 OPPD rate docket that documented the cross-subsidy risk. The Public Advocate’s office is the state agency with standing to intervene in public-power rate hearings on behalf of residential and small-commercial customers. The office’s 2025 filing argued that OPPD’s treatment of data-center load as equivalent to residential load for cost-allocation purposes undercounted the incremental transmission cost that the Cass-Sarpy 345 kilovolt line specifically serves. OPPD has not revised its allocation.¹³

What the Platte aquifer faces

Map: Platte River alluvial aquifer and Papillion municipal wells

The Platte River alluvial aquifer underlies the Papillion and La Vista municipal systems. The aquifer is a shallow, recharging system tied directly to the Platte River through the sand and gravel deposits the river has laid down across the Pleistocene. The Papio-Missouri River NRD has monitored aquifer levels since the district’s 1972 founding and has issued groundwater control designations in portions of the basin where drawdown has approached the statutory thresholds.¹

Papillion’s municipal-wells system draws from the alluvial aquifer through a fieldhouse of roughly twenty wells south of the Papio Creek. The city’s 2024 Water Quality Report disclosed 2.064 billion gallons pumped, an increase of 14 percent over the 2020 baseline of 1.81 billion. The report attributed the increase to “industrial customers” without naming them, citing the confidentiality provisions in the city’s water-service agreements. Google’s campus, Meta’s campus, and the LBJ Gardens commercial district account for the three largest industrial customers by volume in Papillion’s 2024 billing records, according to the water department’s public ledger.⁷

The confidentiality provisions are the mechanism the city of Papillion has used to shield the Meta and Google water agreements from public disclosure. Nebraska’s open-records statute, the Public Records Act, carries a proprietary-information exemption that the Papillion city attorney has cited in denying records requests the Flatwater Free Press and the Nebraska Examiner have filed since 2023. The Nebraska Examiner’s 2024 reporting documented that the confidentiality provisions allow the operators to revise their water-use forecasts upward without triggering public review.¹⁵

The aquifer’s recharge rate is not confidential. United States Geological Survey monitoring stations on the Papio Creek and the Platte River near Louisville record the hydrological conditions that determine how much groundwater the alluvial system can sustainably yield. The 2022 USGS assessment of the Papio-Missouri basin documented a modest long-term decline in groundwater levels in the Papillion area, not yet at the threshold that would trigger NRD allocation authority. If the LB 1261 campus comes online with the water draw the proposal contemplates, the USGS modeling projects that the threshold would be reached within a decade.¹⁶

Who fought back

Bold Nebraska is the statewide civic spine. Jane Kleeb founded the organization in 2010 as a political organization, a year before the State Department released its first environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline. Over the twelve years that followed, Bold Nebraska built the Cowboy and Indian Alliance that tied white ranchers along the pipeline route to the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska and the Rosebud Sioux. President Biden cancelled the federal Keystone XL permit on his first day in office in January 2021. The coalition the pipeline fight built is the coalition the data-center fight inherits. Bold Nebraska’s volunteer network covers every Nebraska county, and Kleeb chairs the Nebraska Democratic Party.¹⁷

The Heartland Workers Center is the South Omaha base. Sergio Sosa and a group of South Omaha organizers founded the Center in 2009 as a worker center rooted in the Mexican and Central American meatpacking community. The Center runs workers’ rights clinics, civic-engagement canvasses, and leadership programs through a staff that speaks Spanish, Q’anjob’al, and English. The Center’s civic-engagement program registers South Omaha voters, places residents on city advisory boards, and trains volunteer testifiers for Nebraska Public Service Commission and OPPD hearings.³

Senator Danielle Conrad is the dissenting voice inside the Unicameral. The Lincoln Democrat has carried the floor arguments against LB 1261 through first round in March 2026 and has pressed the Revenue Committee to open the record on the sitting-senator land-option disclosures. Conrad’s objections run on three lines: the public-power statute, the stranded-asset risk, and the procedural integrity of the Revenue Committee’s handling of the bill. She has introduced companion legislation, LB 1278, that would require any private-generation contract with a public-power district to receive explicit Unicameral authorization.¹⁰

The Flatwater Free Press and Investigate Midwest are the investigative spine. Flatwater broke the Google-Tenaska-Tallgrass story in January 2026 and the Senator Flood land-option story in February 2026. Investigate Midwest ran the carbon-capture deep dive in April 2026. The Nebraska Examiner has covered the Papillion water-records fight since 2023. The Omaha World-Herald has covered OPPD rate cases across three decades. Nebraska Public Media’s statehouse reporting has carried the LB 1261 legislative history in full.^{9 12 11 15 14 10}

The Nebraska Public Advocate is the state office with standing in the rate case. Bob McEntarffer’s 2025 filing on OPPD’s data-center load treatment established the regulatory record on which a subsequent rate-equity challenge would build. The office’s staff capacity is modest, but the office’s standing in the OPPD rate docket is the procedural anchor that ratepayer-advocate capacity in Cooper Square would recognize.¹³

What the atlas’s historical cases offer

Two cases from the twentieth-century clearances translate directly to the Papillion cluster fight.

The first is Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles. The federal government acquired the three Mexican-American neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop in 1949 for a public-housing project under Title I of the federal Housing Act of 1949. The project collapsed. The city of Los Angeles transferred the cleared land to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1957 for a private baseball stadium. The mechanism was the mechanism LB 1261 proposes: public infrastructure, acquired under the banner of public benefit, transferred to private capital for private return. The lesson Chavez Ravine teaches is that the transfer is not accidental. The neighborhoods had no standing to block the final transfer because the initial acquisition had already extinguished their interest in the land. Nebraska’s public-power statute is the legal instrument that has prevented the Chavez Ravine transaction from occurring in electric generation since 1945. LB 1261 is the proposal to complete the transaction. See the Chavez Ravine essay at /cities/los-angeles/chavez-ravine for the full record.

The second is Cooper Square on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Cooper Square Committee, founded in 1959, fought Robert Moses’s Cooper Square Urban Renewal Plan for more than a decade and developed a community counter-plan that named every building, every tenant, and every replacement housing commitment the community required. The committee’s counter-plan was the procedural instrument that forced the city of New York to negotiate, and the Cooper Square Community Land Trust that eventually emerged is the long-term steward of the outcome. The lesson Cooper Square teaches is that a community counter-plan, grounded in named ratepayers and named infrastructure costs, placed next to the utility docket, can hold a process open long enough for the political and legal tools to catch up. The Heartland Workers Center’s testifier-training program and the Nebraska Public Advocate’s rate-case standing are the contemporary equivalents. See the Cooper Square essay at /cities/new-york/cooper-square for the full record.

What present organizers should borrow

The Papillion cluster fight is in its second act. The Meta and Google campuses are built. The OPPD rate expansion is in motion. The LB 1261 fight is live. The organizing question is whether the coalition Bold Nebraska and the Heartland Workers Center have built can block LB 1261’s second-round passage in May 2026 and, failing that, whether the Nebraska Public Advocate’s rate-case standing can force OPPD to revise the cost-allocation framework before the Cass-Sarpy 345 kilovolt line is energized.

Three tools from the historical cases apply directly.

Bold Nebraska’s Cowboy and Indian Alliance method translates. The Keystone XL coalition tied rural white landowners along the pipeline route to the Ponca Tribe and the Rosebud Sioux through treaty-rights arguments and through the shared practical interest in aquifer protection. The LB 1261 coalition can tie Sarpy County landowners whose wells the Papillion cluster has drawn down to North Omaha and South Omaha ratepayers whose bills the transmission expansion is loading. The treaty-rights frame has a Nebraska analog in the public-power statute: the 1945 statute is the people of Nebraska’s collective property, and LB 1261 is the proposal to alienate it.

The Heartland Workers Center’s civic-engagement infrastructure is the procedural spine. South Omaha’s Spanish-speaking meatpacking community is the largest ratepayer cohort that the Papillion transmission expansion most directly taxes. The Center’s testifier-training program puts residents in the OPPD rate hearings. The Nebraska Public Advocate’s office can carry a formal cross-subsidy challenge into the rate docket on the strength of the testifier record. Cooper Square’s combination of community testimony and institutional counsel is the template.

The Flatwater Free Press’s investigative record is the evidentiary base. The January 2026 Google demand-size story, the February 2026 senator-land-option story, and the April 2026 Investigate Midwest carbon-capture story together document the three grounds on which LB 1261 can be defeated: the scale of the subsidy, the procedural corruption of the legislative process, and the technical risk of the carbon-capture claim. The organizing work is to translate the journalism into testimony, the testimony into amendments, and the amendments into a procedural objection that holds the bill long enough for the 2026 election cycle to change the Revenue Committee’s composition.

The atlas records what Meta and Google took: 1,275 acres of Papio Creek row-crop ground, 920 megawatts of OPPD capacity, and 2.064 billion gallons of Papillion groundwater in a single year. The atlas records what LB 1261 would break: the 1945 public-power statute, the cost-allocation integrity that shields South Omaha and North Omaha ratepayers, and the aquifer recharge on which the Platte system depends. The atlas records what Bold Nebraska, the Heartland Workers Center, Senator Conrad, the Nebraska Public Advocate, the Flatwater Free Press, Investigate Midwest, and the Nebraska Examiner have built against both. The question the Unicameral will decide in May 2026 is whether the resistance holds.

Footnotes

1. Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District, “About Us,” 2024. https://www.papionrd.org/about. District boundaries, groundwater management authority under the 1972 Nebraska Groundwater Management and Protection Act, and flood-control responsibilities across the Papio Creek basin. ↩ ↩²

2. United States Census Bureau, “QuickFacts: Sarpy County, Nebraska,” 2020 decennial census. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sarpycountynebraska. Population, demographic composition, and median household income. ↩

3. Heartland Workers Center, Omaha, Nebraska, founded 2009. https://heartlandworkerscenter.org. Worker center programming, civic-engagement program, and staff language capacity in South Omaha. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Omaha Public Power District, “About OPPD,” 2024. https://www.oppd.com/about. Elected public-power utility; eight-member board of directors; service territory of thirteen counties and the city of Omaha; approximately 400,000 customers. ↩ ↩²

5. Omaha Public Power District, “2026 Preliminary Corporate Operating Plan,” November 2025. https://oppd.com/media/321182/2025-11-nov-2026-preliminary-corporate-operating-plan.pdf. Capital-expansion budget, Cass-Sarpy 345 kV transmission line, North Omaha coal unit retirement schedule. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Meta, “Sarpy Data Center Info Sheet,” 2024. https://datacenters.atmeta.com/asset/sarpy-data-center-info-sheet/. Campus acreage, building count, square footage, wind PPA with OPPD, and 320 megawatt contracted capacity. ↩

7. City of Papillion, “2024 Water Quality Report,” 2025. https://www.papillion.org/waterqualityreport. Annual pumping figure of 2.064 billion gallons, industrial-customer attribution, Platte River alluvial aquifer source, and confidentiality notation on industrial customer identities. ↩ ↩²

8. Flatwater Free Press, “Nebraska’s Hidden Subsidy: The Data-Center Tax Exemption,” 2024. https://flatwaterfreepress.org/nebraskas-hidden-subsidy-the-data-center-tax-exemption/. Sales-tax exemption valuation on data-center equipment purchases through 2024. ↩

9. Flatwater Free Press, “Google Proposes Nebraska Data Center Requiring More Power Than All of Lincoln,” January 2026. https://flatwaterfreepress.org/google-proposes-nebraska-data-center-requiring-more-power-than-all-of-lincoln/. Google-Tenaska-Tallgrass proposal, 1,000 to 3,000 megawatt demand, private gas plant with carbon-capture claim, LB 1261 mechanism. ↩ ↩²

10. Nebraska Public Media, “Senators Advance Bill for Energy Projects in Response to Google’s Proposal for a Nebraska Data Center,” March 2026. https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/senators-advance-bill-for-energy-projects-in-response-to-googles-proposal-for-a-nebraska-data-center/. LB 1261 first-round advancement, Senator Danielle Conrad’s dissenting arguments, public-power statute context. ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Investigate Midwest, “A Look Behind the Scenes of What Could Be Google’s Biggest Test of Carbon Capture,” April 1, 2026. https://investigatemidwest.org/2026/04/01/a-look-behind-the-scenes-of-what-could-be-googles-biggest-test-of-carbon-capture/. Technical review of the Tallgrass carbon-capture claim, Boundary Dam benchmark, stranded-asset risk to OPPD ratepayers. ↩ ↩²

12. Flatwater Free Press, “Nebraska Lawmaker Among Those Who Optioned Land for Potential Data Center Project,” February 2026. https://flatwaterfreepress.org/nebraska-lawmaker-among-those-who-optioned-land-for-potential-data-center-project/. Senator Mike Flood’s 2024 land option to a Tenaska-Tallgrass developer, disclosure timing, Revenue Committee handling. ↩ ↩²

13. Nebraska Public Advocate, Office of the Public Counsel, “Comments in OPPD 2025 Rate Docket,” 2025. https://publicadvocate.nebraska.gov. Regulatory office with standing in public-power rate hearings; data-center load cost-allocation comments. ↩ ↩² ↩³

14. Omaha World-Herald, “OPPD Considering $2 Billion Expansion; Ratepayers Can Expect Higher Bills,” November 2025. https://omaha.com/news/community/sarpy/oppd-considering-2-billion-expansion-ratepayers-can-expect-higher-bills/article_3878fdd6-60a0-58f2-a26e-2438d019a260.html. OPPD 2026 COP coverage, residential rate-increase projections, decade cost outlook. ↩ ↩²

15. Nebraska Examiner, “Papillion’s Data-Center Water Agreements Stay Secret Under Proprietary Exemption,” 2024. https://nebraskaexaminer.com. Papillion city attorney’s application of Nebraska Public Records Act proprietary exemption; records-request history. ↩ ↩²

16. United States Geological Survey, “Papio-Missouri River Basin Groundwater Assessment,” 2022. https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources. Long-term groundwater monitoring; alluvial aquifer recharge rates; projected drawdown scenarios. ↩

17. Bold Nebraska, “About,” 2024. https://boldnebraska.org/about. Organization history, Keystone XL coalition, Cowboy and Indian Alliance, current LB 1261 and OPPD rate-hearings work. ↩