In Bowling Green, the debate over local data center regulations didn’t end with a commission vote in June. As Election Day nears, activists say the issue is driving engagement with voters, and incumbents are still facing questions about their votes.
The debate over data center development continues to dominate many voters’ conversations in the lead-up to Election Day. What remains uncertain is how those conversations will play out at the polls.
For some activists, like Cathy Severns with SOKY Indivisible, the debate has been an opportunity to organize residents around concerns about development, public input and local government accountability when it flared early this year.
“We just knew we needed time to learn about it, and that’s what we were asking for,” Severns said.
SOKY Indivisible, a grassroots activism group, has seen a rise in activity since the conversation took over Kentucky and the nation, according to Severns. She said it’s not just progressives, but conservatives and independents joining in as well.
Bowling Green’s approach to data centers has differed from other communities that imposed temporary moratoriums on development. Cave City, Allen County, and Edmonson County all adopted pauses to give local officials time to study the potential effects of the facilities, as did other communities like Louisville, Lexington, and Daviess County.
In Bowling Green, city commissioners rejected a six-month moratorium, choosing instead to adopt zoning regulations governing future development.
All four commissioners — Carlos D'Angelo Bailey, Dana Beasley-Brown, Melinda Hill, and Sue Parrigin — are up for election this November as public fear over data centers continues.
Putting Down Grassroots
The data center debate sparked a new focus of SOKY Indivisible, but it was far from the group’s first time taking to the streets of Bowling Green.
Severns, a retired teacher and principal who serves on the leadership team of SoKY Indivisible, said the group has come a long way from its humble beginning around her kitchen table.
The group is the local chapter of Indivisible, a nationwide progressive grassroots organizing movement founded in 2016 by former congressional staffers. The organization supports locally led activism through training, research and coordinated advocacy, with a stated mission of resisting authoritarianism and promoting progressive policies.
The Bowling Green chapter took shape after the 2024 election. Severns said she and a group of about 10 women had previously worked together through an informal network they called Women with a Purpose, helping with community needs and social justice issues.
Within two weeks of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, they met around Severns’ kitchen table and decided to form a more organized group. They chose Indivisible, filed their chapter paperwork and organized a protest outside U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office in Bowling Green less than 48 hours later.
More than 40 people showed up, despite organizers reaching out only through texts and emails.
“We realized that other people were hungry for this,” Severns said.
The group has since organized protests, public gatherings and other issue-focused events. Severns estimates it now has between 1,200 and 2,000 people on its contact lists. She said Indivisible provided local organizers with a structure for mobilizing around issues alongside similar groups across the country.
That ability to organize quickly became important when the data center debate emerged in Bowling Green.
Severns said the group had little time to prepare when a moratorium failed 3-2 at a commission meeting June 2. Parragin, Hill, and Mayor Todd Alcott all voted against the moratorium.
SOKY Indivisible began contacting local officials, researching the potential effects of the facilities and encouraging residents to attend the next commission meeting to request a temporary pause.
“One of the really good qualities of SOKY Indivisible is we are nimble and can jump on something very quickly,” Severns said. “We can organize on a dime.”
Members of the group traveled to Gallatin, Tennessee, and produced a video highlighting critical accounts from residents living near a Meta hyperscale data center campus as well as local councilman Pascal Jouvence.
“We found no one that felt like they were benefiting from that,” Severns said. “A lot of the work's done remotely, and they hire their security and their maintenance, their cleaning, those kinds of things on contract.”
A Meta spokesperson previously told WKU Public Radio that the Gallatin campus currently supports “approximately 65 operational roles.”
Residents and members of the group took their frustrations back to Bowling Green’s City Hall as officials considered another vote on June 16. Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” played over a speaker while demonstrators urged commissioners to pause data-center development for six months.
The commission rejected the proposed moratorium for a second time, voting 3-2 against it along the same lines as the first vote.
However, commissioners unanimously approved zoning restrictions for potential projects, including a 1,500-foot buffer from residential areas, limits on noise and emissions, and requirements for closed-loop cooling systems and payment for necessary utility upgrades.
No specific data-center project was under consideration in the city at the time.
Lingering Fears
At a Bowling Green-Warren County NAACP forum on Oct. 19, candidates for city commission quickly faced questions about the vote earlier this year. Parrigin was the sole incumbent who did not intend.
Hill, the only candidate present who voted against the moratorium, was quick to push back against claims that she did not listen to residents’ concerns.
“I listened to both sides. I listened to the professionals, and I based my decision on the other side and not the side of everyone that supported a moratorium,” Hill said. “But think how many data centers are looking to come here — none.”
Hill added the regulations that ultimately passed have bipartisan support, arguing they protect residents without infringing on businesses.
“The city commission voted 5-0 with the strictest restrictions for data centers. We've already put those in place,” Hill said. “They are so good, Gov. Beshear contacted (Warren County Judge-Executive Doug Gorman) and our mayor, and he wanted to use them for the entire state. We are an example, not only for Kentucky, but the entire nation.”
She said the only location in Warren County that could feasibly host a data center is the Kentucky Transpark. Even then, she said, such a project would require a public hearing to account for property setback regulations.
Bailey and Beasley-Brown, who supported a moratorium and are calling to further restrict data centers, touted their votes before the forum. Both raised concerns over the impact of data centers on the local environment, noise pollution, impacts on water and electricity bills, and nearby sinkholes.
Beasely-Brown called the current regulations “bare minimum,” adding they don’t go far enough to address issues like environmental risks and noise pollution.
Candidates challenging incumbent commissioners also honed in on the data center controversy.
Tom Morris, a local businessman and founder of real-estate investment company Sustainnovators LLC, is calling for greater public input on data-center decisions.
His platform largely aligns with Bailey and Beasley-Brown, and all three have been endorsed by the local Democratic Party. Morris is running on the slogan, “Leaders listen, THEN decide.”
Morris said he would have voted in favor of a moratorium and called the regulations currently in place “necessary, but not sufficient.”
“We need to realize all of the negatives, and not just the positives — that we get a lot of tax money or whatever,” Morris said. “There is a bubble in the data center industry that's being forecast, and we don't want to be stuck with a data center that's on our back door.”
Morris’s concern reflects a real risk: the Financial Times reported in August that data center financing faces mounting challenges, including construction delays and uncertainty over future AI demand. The report warned that if AI demand weakens or efficiency gains reduce the need for computing capacity, some facilities could be abandoned.
Bloomberg reported in May that technology companies had borrowed more than $300 billion from U.S. investors to fund AI spending since the start of 2025. The outlet highlighted a separate Bank of America survey that found 34% of global fund managers identified AI hyperscaler capital spending as the likeliest source of a future serious financial disruption.
Those risks, however, do not make an industry-wide crash inevitable.
Severns said the election could determine whether Bowling Green revisits the proposed moratorium. Asked whether SOKY Indivisible would renew the push if the commission’s makeup changed, she said, “Absolutely.”
“We have a great opportunity in this election to change the balance of the city commission,” she said.
A Debate Beyond Borders
The Warren County Republican and Democratic parties' messaging offers stark contrasts around the data center debate.
Between October 1-26, the Warren County KY Democratic Party Facebook page made 18 posts as Election Day nears. Of those, 10 directly refer to the commission’s data center decision, urging voters to reject Parragin and Hill for denying a moratorium.
The issue has also featured in broader Democratic Party messaging. In June, the Kentucky Democratic Party urged residents to attend Bowling Green’s final vote on a proposed moratorium, declaring that “Data Centers are not welcome in Bowling Green/Warren County” and calling for accountability and transparency in development decisions.
The Republican Party of Warren County KY has focused less on the issue. A Facebook post from Oct. 14 features Parrigin explaining her vote against the moratorium, rebuking so-called “fear-mongering.” It’s the only post from the group in October mentioning the issue of data centers.
“A pause invites litigation and potential unnecessary legal costs for citizens,” Parrigin said. “I voted for the rules, and against a six-month pause, and I did not want the city to freeze a sector of the economy and take on that legal risk.”
Still, the message is framed around stopping data centers, with Parrigin beginning with “A pause does not stop a data center. A rule does.”
WKU Public Radio reached out to the local Republican Party leadership for comment and was directed to individual candidates.
Patti Minter, chair of the Warren County Democratic Party and a former state representative, said the debate has brought an influx of first-time volunteers to the party who may not have signed up otherwise. Among them, she says, are Republicans and Independents who feel they haven't been told the full truth about data centers by those in charge.
She compared public frustration over data centers to the attitudes surrounding the 2018 midterm election, when public employees and educators raised issues with former Gov. Matt Bevin's Medicaid and teacher pension policies, as well as abrasive comments toward opponents.
"Statewide, the election in 2018 brought a lot of people together over their anger at Governor Matt Bevin when he tried to cut teacher pensions, and he was insulting and condescending, very similar to what we see right here," Minter said. "There were a lot of people who crossed party lines and voted for the candidates that they knew would stand up and show up for them."
Voter turnout in 2018 rose sharply compared to previous years, though the "Blue Wave" some had predicted did not manifest and Republicans maintained their supermajority. Democrats did succeed nationally by flipping the U.S. House blue that election.
Minter, however, said few issues have crossed party lines as much as fears over data centers. She characterized moratorium opponents like Parrigin, Hill, and Alcott as "out of touch."
"I've never seen anything like what we're seeing now with so many cities and towns and county governments rushing these data center moratoriums through," Minter said. "Some of (those moratoriums) are a year long in places that are solidly, solidly red. It really isn't a partisan issue."
She and others are confident in the slate of progressive commission candidates running with Democratic endorsements. A moratorium has become a pillar of each candidate's campaign, with Minter calling this "The Data Center Election."
"Commissioner Dana Beasley-Brown, Commissioner Carlos Bailey and Challenger Tom Morris have already said that they would propose and pass a data center moratorium in the first 30 days that they were all in office," Minter said. "I think people can absolutely count on that."
It remains unclear how exactly the issue will influence voters in Bowling Green. National polling shows broader public concern, but it doesn't reveal how many voters in the commonwealth consider data centers a deciding factor in local elections.
A September survey from the University of Massachusetts Amherst surveyed 1,000 adults nationwide and found that 65% opposed construction of an artificial-intelligence data center in their community, while 11% supported it.
Opposition crossed party lines: 52% of Republicans surveyed opposed local construction, compared with 76% of Democrats.
In Kentucky, Cave City and Daviess County adopted temporary moratoriums on data-center development earlier this year, while a proposed facility in Simpson County has prompted legal challenges and disputes over local land-use rules.
For SOKY Indivisible, the issue has become one part of a broader effort to encourage civic participation.
Severns said the group has shifted much of its focus toward encouraging early voting as Election Day approaches. SOKY Indivisible organized an early-voting visibility rally at Nashville Road and Campbell Lane on Oct. 17, and Severns said the group plans a march to the polls early on Oct. 31 following a “Singing for Democracy” event at Mount Zion Baptist Church.
“People who feel vulnerable feel safer going in a march, and it will be a joyful march,” she said.
The march is intended to be nonpartisan, with participants walking from the church to Sugar Maple Square, one of Warren County’s early voting locations.
Severns said organizers are also asking volunteers to distribute flyers and share voting information with friends and neighbors, extending the group's reach beyond its core of regular attendees.
“We hope to have historic numbers of early voting across the nation, because it sends out the message that our voting rights are that important to us,” Severns said.
