That's an utterly ridiculous assertion (at least in the US). All one needs to do is claim "job creation" and "increase the tax base" and there will be thousands of small/mid sized town desperately courting your investment dollars, even if you're up front about "this will probably poison your town for centuries and turn your kids into zombies".
If that were enough, I think we'd have a lot more nuclear plants in construction.
The problem with this theory is it takes too long between the step where the boosters sell the town with job creation and when the plant can't be cancelled. If you get a city on board today, chances are you won't have a permit in 10 years, and you need to keep them on board the whole time until the permit is issued or they'll derail the permit. It's better to keep them on board at least until the reactor is fueled... but once it's fueled, the jobs engine will probably sustain itself.
My dad was a civil engineer with a specialty in hazardous waste handling. 10 years was not at unreasonable to get a landfill permitted, built and operational, and there's little new technology involved (unlike hypothetical micro-reactors). And yet, they always had a line of small towns lined up hoping to get one. I think you underestimate how long it takes getting anything substantial and potentially hazardous built in a municipal context.
Giga datacenters plopped down in unincorporated areas and small towns will bribe local officials, suck up all the water, raise local electricity rates, pollute the air with on-site natural gas generators, and given the opportunity, play Russian roulette with SMRs.
Actually, these datacenters are much, much worse in different ways if you'd consider they are much bigger, louder, and resource-intensive. While hypermarts put local business out of business and take up comparatively less land including parking lots (while still being huge), their effects are bad but in different ways, especially given they abuse low wage workers who require government subsidies (indirect corporate welfare) and when they leave suddenly they create food deserts.
I was thinking more of how Wallmart also has a history of 'influencing' local officials to overlook the damage being done, as well as getting small towns to take on huge debt loads for 'required' infrastructure upgrades, all in the hopes that there will be a windfall when they set up shop. But sure, they suck in other ways and if you need some relative shittyness metric then ok I guess.
