Last week, Maysville’s planning commission hosted a public hearing on a proposal that would redesignate farmland near town to build a massive, hyperscale data center.
Non-disclosure agreements signed by town leaders involved in discussions have left residents with little information about the project, including who’s behind it and its impact on the environment. Local officials say the center is backed by a Fortune 100 company and a leader in the tech industry.
The secrecy of the project concerns residents, including Max Moran, who was among dozens of Mason County locals that spoke at the hearing.
“We've been told they want to be a good neighbor and they'll follow zoning rules and everything,” Moran said. “Well, if they want to say all this, then let's see who they are, so we can, as the community, make sure they actually are a good neighbor.”
Moran is the director of We Are Mason County, Ky., a grassroots organization addressing citizens’ concerns. Since plans for the center surfaced, he’s been keeping his neighbors informed through social media and door-to-door campaigns.
Local officials are touting the center as an engine for economic growth. They say it would create hundreds of jobs and invest millions of dollars into new water infrastructure for Maysville.
Tyler McHugh, the executive director of the town’s Industrial Development Authority, says he views the project as a way to reverse multiple decades of population decline, and to bring jobs closer to home instead of having residents commute elsewhere.
“Over the past at least 15, maybe even more than 20 years, we've seen a sharp decline in our overall population, and a lot of that has to do with the amount of jobs we're able to bring to the area,” McHugh said.
McHugh said he’s tried to disclose all he can about the project without breaking his non-disclosure agreement. He says these agreements are common in the tech industry as the company evaluates sites to develop across the nation, calling it a “competitive process.”
“I could have done this project from the very beginning without informing any of our city or county commissioners, but I felt that we should work on this as a team,” McHugh said.
But the secrecy behind the project, like others across the country, has made national headlines. Tim Grosser is a farmer from Maysville and was recently profiled by NBC News. He was approached by the town, and representatives from the data center, asking to buy out his land.
“The latest offer was $35,000 an acre. But then they said, ‘You can name your price,’ but I told them we're not interested,” Grosser said.
Environmental concerns
Local farmers, advocacy organizations and students were among those who spoke at the meeting about the potential environmental impacts of the proposal. Data centers often require massive amounts of water and electricity to keep them running, and can cause constant noise pollution.
“It's farmers like us who are going to have to deal with it and the consequences, and we're going to have to deal with the lack of water, the inundated power grid,” said Reese Burton, another local farmer who spoke at the hearing on behalf of her family.
At the federal level, 230 environmental groups have asked members of Congress to place a nationwide moratorium on data center construction, specifically on centers meant to power artificial intelligence.
The East Kentucky Power Cooperative, which operates the nearby coal-fired power plant, supports the project and has filed plans to increase its load by 2.2 gigawatts to power the data center. That would be significantly more energy than the entire town uses.
EKPC says the data center would be responsible for paying all of its energy and infrastructure costs to keep residents off the hook for higher electricity bills.
Large data centers can also consume “up to 5 million gallons” of water per day, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Representatives of the proposal say they plan to use alternative, non-liquid cooling methods to mitigate that problem.
Elisa Owen of the environmental group Sierra Club wants to see those agreements in writing. They’re among the groups pushing for specific guarantees to benefit the community.
“If those contracts are proprietary — secret — then there's no way they can be verified by outside people who take this stuff seriously and want to look at it,” Owen said.
The Sierra Club is among the groups pushing for stricter local regulations as the zoning process continues. That includes requiring specific guarantees on how the company would benefit the community, and a study on how it would impact the environment.
“If we don't get those agreements in place and people are not willing to introduce themselves in communities, then you run the risk that we're going to have just a data center as an extractive industry that uses a community's resources and doesn't give anything back,” Owen said.
Both town and company officials say they want to address locals’ concerns. McHugh says he’s hopeful the project can be finalized by June.
Maysville says the company behind the data center will remain undisclosed until the development is approved and the company decides to move in.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR.
