Wrangell is a small town of large and helpful hearts. It also can be a town of quick and not so helpful opinions. Though spoken from the heart, sometimes those opinions spill out a little too fast.

Such as some of the social media commentary about the possibility that the borough might lease an acre or two at the former 6-Mile Mill site for a small-scale data center. The company has applied for the land lease; borough officials and advisory boards are considering the merits; and nothing is decided.

On the plus side, if the private investment goes ahead, Wrangell would see benefits from construction jobs for the 10,000-square-foot facility. Though there would be only a few full-time jobs to run the center, the borough would receive income from the land lease and property taxes, and maybe some sales taxes too.

The municipally owned electric utility could collect an estimated $1 million a year from selling power to the data center, boosting the utility’s revenues by more than 20%. Among the questions is how to manage the large new load for electricity without hurting existing businesses and residences in town.

That the Tyee hydroelectric station is adding a third generator, boosting output capacity by 50%, is an important fact to consider.

That news reports talk about humungous data centers drawing a gigawatt or more of power is not relevant; Greensparc is talking about 0.1% of that load for its Wrangell facility.

That the data center company, Greensparc, is based in California shouldn’t matter. Disneyland is in California, and so are Netflix, Visa and Apple, and that hasn’t hurt Wrangell.

That other data centers around the world exceed a million square feet doesn’t matter; the proposal for Wrangell would be less than 1% of those massive buildings.

That other centers constantly draw on water sources to cool down their data servers isn’t the point; the company’s plan for its baby-size operation in Wrangell is to use a closed-loop system, recirculating the same water over and over for cooling.

As for emissions, Greensparc says it has no plans to install diesel generators at the site. Instead, for those times when the power goes out, it will rely on rechargeable battery packs for an orderly shutdown of its servers until the power comes back on.

This isn’t to say the data center is a good fit for Wrangell, or that Greensparc will follow through on its plans. Or that the borough assembly should approve a land lease. But it is to say that people need to listen and keep an open mind to the facts, and not form premature opinions before getting the facts.