As I told you last week, some of our county commissioners have been working under the table with a developer to get a HUGE data center built in our small town. No, not out in a field somewhere. Right on a major highway, near many homes and businesses! Those commissioners had known about this for quite awhile, but they never brought it up in any public meetings!

The cat escaped the bag on Thursday of last week, and the city council members started spreading the word to the community. And, that’s when all HELL broke loose!

Four days later was the scheduled monthly city council meeting. They’d added an item saying they were going to vote on a 180-day moratorium on data centers so they could do more research. We arrived 45 minutes early, and it’s a good thing we did. We had to wait behind other cars just to pull into the parking lot. You can watch the entire meeting ON FACEBOOK.

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED:

They quickly ran out of chairs, and started carrying in more chairs from adjoining offices. Then, it was standing room only in the room. Then, people were packed into the hallway, standing and listening.

The mayor and city council members didn’t learn about the proposed data center until the previous Thursday. Some county commissioners have known about it for MONTHS. There was lots of talk about zoning, ordinances, etc. The county has fewer zoning restrictions. The city has LOTS, and they can create a new ordinance to ban data centers in the city limits. (We later learned that’s not going to help us at all in this case.)

Residents were permitted to speak, and many did, including a little girl whose family owns a farm. She doesn’t want a data center to hurt her animals. 🙁

We later obtained the address of the proposed property. It is outside of the city limits (barely!) so the city can’t stop it. Unfortunately, it’s only about a mile from us (as the crow flies) so we will be able to hear it, and the pollution will affect us as well (along with farms, ranchers, wildlife, insects (bees stop pollinating!), and so much more.

The data center company apparently offered the county $2M (Prepayment on taxes? That wasn’t discussed). That won’t last long (and isn’t worth destroying people’s lives and property over), but county commissioners appear to have dollar signs in their eyes. And a lot of residents here want them recalled!

Construction won’t take long. A guy who used to work building large power lines said they’d have to widen Highway 11 to accommodate all of the trucks that will come in. (Who’s going to have to pay for that?? Someone else mentioned that 11 can’t handle wide loads.) The man also stated that the power poles alone are as wide as a door and HUGE. They come in four pieces. It takes four tractor trailers to bring just one pole into an area. Some of those poles may (and probably will) end up in residential areas. Our neighbor moved away from a data center. She sent me these pictures, which show how large the power poles are:

If your house or property is in the way, the power company can simply use eminent domain, forcing you to move.

When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

Most of the talk was about the noise data centers make, and how Lookout Creek doesn’t have enough water for the people who live here now.

If you’ve never heard the sounds a data center makes 24/7, click on these three Youtube videos:

• This is what living next to a data center sounds like
• Residents suing Hyperscale data center in West Michigan over ‘unreasonable, excessive noise’
• Neighbors voice complaints, health concerns as Dowagiac data center noise lawsuit moves forward

Have you seen what a data center can do to your water? 

• This woman shows such low water pressure that she has to leave a bucket in the bathtub slowly dripping dirty water into it just so she can flush her toilet. Nobody can drink it. Even if they could, they can’t get enough to drink. They have to buy water now.
• A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed — until residents complained about low water pressure
• Four families in Georgia sue Meta over data center contaminating their well water

Is the data center company going to commandeer our water and leave us with nothing? That’s happened in other towns. The folks at the city council meeting also talked about Georgia Power. They clearly have dollar signs in their eyes, too. While the data centers always promise that citizens’ electric and water bills won’t go up, the endless stories on that topic online state otherwise! The power company has to expand, and rapidly, and that is charged to the residents’ power bills. They didn’t get into the effects on insects. There was a bee farmer at the meeting, but he didn’t talk at the podium. He told us that, if the data center goes in, he will have to go out of business. Bees stop pollinating near data centers.

Data centers don’t bring tons of jobs to an area. That’s a WIDESPREAD myth! They typically bring their own people and equipment (hired and purchased elsewhere). After a data center is built, it only needs a handful of people to run it. I’m pretty sure we don’t have any data center technicians, network and systems engineers, nor “logistics associates” (whatever that is) living in this small town. So, the “lots of jobs” promise is a big, fat lie. I don’t trust any verbiage the data center companies spew online.

I asked if the paperwork the council members saw last Thursday had the name of the company that hired the developer to find a place and negotiate a deal. They said no. However, several people online posted a website for a company that has the same name as the developer. IT’S IN SAUDI ARABIA!

Why would we want to destroy our town to enrich a foreign company, or even a company in another state? Why was the company’s name kept secret? Heck, why was ALL of this kept secret from residents for MONTHS?!

Property values will plummet. Nobody will want to move here. A guy on Facebook named Carter McCormick was there. He has filed an open records request and was expecting to get the documents this week. Last night, he reported that he received some, but certainly not all. We were not surprised.

People here are FURIOUS that there has been ZERO transparency about this for months. What incentive did our county commissioners have to continue to push this through in secret? I have my own ideas about that. Please post your thoughts in the comments below.

People were (and still are!) FIRED UP! And, the longer the meeting went, the higher voices were raised. Everyone in that room was anti-data centers. The big question was, how can we stop it? The answer is for everybody to show up for every meeting to show the county commissioners that we will happily kick them out of office given the chance if they don’t do what the citizens want them to.

On Monday, November 23rd, at 5:00 there will be a protest in front of the courthouse. The media will be there. It will be a PEACEFUL PROTEST. They want people to bring their families (including children) and neighbors. At 6:00 p.m., the meeting starts in the largest courtroom (no way will everybody get a seat – not even close). The developer and Georgia Power will be there, trying to convince everybody that a data center is what we all need.

What do I expect to hear? Lies, lies, and more lies.

If this has happened to your town, please share your story in the comments below!!!

RELATED

• 9 Potentially Catastrophic Effects from a Proposed Data Center in Trenton, Dade County, Georgia

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