Bryan Marsh was booed by the crowd as he approached the podium in Monterey Park’s City Hall. Things weren’t going as planned.
In front of a wall of people holding “No Data Center” placards, he outlined how his company, Australia’s HMC StratCap, invested tens of millions of dollars and became the city’s largest landowner after years of negotiations, clearances and hearings.
City officials had previously welcomed its plans to build a sprawling, new data center and the jobs and tax revenue that would follow, he said, but then things suddenly changed…