Former New York City mayor Eric Adams found himself at the center of a hostile crowd in Wisconsin Rapids, where he co-led a public meeting on behalf of a developer behind a proposed data center in the city.
Adams, alongside PNK Group’s chief development officer Anton Voronkin, was met with boos, heckling, and chants throughout the two-hour session as audience members challenged the Donald Trump-aligned former mayor for working with the developer and over the past corruption and bribery allegations against him, reported the Wisconsin Rapids Tribune.
“You belong in prison!” one attendee shouted, according to Hellgate. “You’re here to steal our water!” another yelled
“I just want to share one story with you,” Adams said, sharing an anecdote about a friend who helped identify her breast cancer diagnosis using artificial intelligence.
“Is this story true?” an audience member shouted.
The meeting, originally scheduled for Saturday in an 80-person room at McMillan Memorial Library, had to be relocated to the library’s 248-person Fine Arts Center after seats filled 30 minutes before it even began. By 11 a.m., the room was standing-room-only. Outside, more than 50 residents gathered with protest signs, including messages reading “PNK GO AWAY” and warning that data centers threaten local wildlife and fuel climate change.
Adams defended his involvement by arguing that data centers are coming to the country regardless, and that he pushed PNK to design a facility addressing concerns he’d heard nationwide about water use, heat, and noise from similar projects elsewhere.
Residents pressed both men for two hours on concerns ranging from the facility’s water use and potential impact on the Wisconsin River and local wells, to increased electrical costs, noise from diesel generators, and discharge into the city’s sewer system.
When Voronkin acknowledged that PNK Group had never built a similar facility before, one attendee pointed out that a lack of any successful precedent was fueling the community’s distrust.
A woman in the crowd responded sharply to Adams’ framing that the community feared new technology: “We aren’t afraid of technology… We just love our community.”
The Department of Justice, early in Trump’s second term, ordered the acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York to drop the case against Adams for allegedly accepting bribes and illegal campaign contributions from foreign sources.
Adams, a former police officer who was elected as a Democrat, came to be seen as a Trump ally and at one point considered becoming a Republican before ultimately bowing out of his re-election campaign.
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