GUEST COLUMN.

Earlier this year, Mayor David Holt of Oklahoma City observed that if you had asked him about data centers just five months earlier, he would have responded, “What’s a data center?” That candid admission captures the speed of the times. In barely a year, data centers have gone from an obscure line item in economic development plans to the single most explosive land-use question in American local government.

The numbers behind that shift are staggering. More than $64 billion in data center projects were delayed or canceled between mid-2024 and early 2025 because of organized local opposition, and the pace has only accelerated since. In 2025, legislators in all fifty states considered 238 data center-related bills, enacting more than forty of them. No infrastructure debate in my four decades of local government service has moved this fast.

My home state of Florida offers a fair sample of turbulence. Okeechobee County scrapped a project after three thousand residents signed a petition. “Project Tango” in Palm Beach County drew more than eight thousand opposition signatures and a unanimous village council resolution against it. Florida’s Nassau County advanced a twelve-month moratorium. And the Governor signed statewide legislation regulating these projects.

The same story is playing out nationwide. When I moderated a panel on this subject at the Florida City and County Management Association conference this spring — alongside Mesa, Arizona City Manager Scott Butler and Sarasota County Administrator Jonathan Lewis — the room was standing-room only. Every manager in it was either living this issue or bracing for it.

Why the controversy?

Four forces have converged to make data centers uniquely combustible.

The first is scale: a single hyperscale AI campus can occupy thousands of acres, draw hundreds of megawatts, and consume more water in a day than a small town uses in a month. The footprint has simply outgrown the regulatory frameworks most communities wrote for it.

The second is speed. Tech developers move on quarterly timelines; local government moves on comprehensive-plan timelines. When a developer wants a site rezoned in ninety days and your community plan was last updated decades ago, friction is inevitable.

The third is secrecy — the non-disclosure agreements, code names, and shell LLCs that mean residents often read about a project in the newspaper before their own elected officials can confirm who the end user is. In a high-trust environment, that might be tolerable. We are not in a high-trust environment.

The fourth force is artificial intelligence itself. Data centers are no longer perceived as neutral utility infrastructure; they are the physical backbone of AI. When residents oppose a data center, they are often expressing something larger — about technology, about jobs, about the pace of change.

What residents actually think.

Amid all this heat, local leaders have had surprisingly little light. That is why Zencity, a platform built for local governments and public safety organizations to monitor community sentiment, analyze public feedback, and run representative resident surveys fielded a national survey of roughly 1,900 Americans this spring to understand how residents actually view data centers. Several findings should change how every city and county leader approaches the next proposal that lands on their desk.

First, the country is genuinely split — and one in three Americans is undecided.  What Zencity found is that 35% of Americans support building more data centers, 30% oppose, and a full third neither support nor oppose. That last number is the most important one for local leaders. The people who fill council chambers and organize the petition drives are not a third of your community. There is a large, persuadable middle public leaders are not hearing from — and their job is to find out what that middle thinks before the loudest voices define the issue for everyone.

Second, support collapses when projects move close to home. Nationally, support edges out opposition. But ask residents about a data center in their own community and the numbers flip, with opponents outnumbering supporters. People support the digital economy in the abstract; they have hard questions about it next to their neighborhood.

Third, this is a water and electricity story, not just a jobs story. 86% of residents say water impact is important to them, and 85% say the same about electricity rates — compared to 65% for job creation and 61% for tax revenue.

Fourth, credibility cannot be outsourced. When asked whom they trust for information about data center impacts, residents put independent environmental organizations at the top and developers near the bottom — 57% versus 14%. The lesson is not that developers are untrustworthy; it is that a city cannot expect a developer to solve the city’s own credibility problem. That trust has to be built by the local government itself, through independent, transparent information residents can verify.

Finally, the concessions that move opponents are not the ones typically offered. Among residents inclined to oppose a project, renewable energy commitments and enforceable water protections outperform tax incentives as levers that could earn their support.

The process is the product

For practitioners, all this means that the outcome of a data center proposal — approval, denial, or something negotiated in between — may matter less to community trust than the process used to get there. Managers who measure sentiment across the whole community rather than just the public-comment podium, who lead with honest answers on water and power before touting jobs, who insist on transparency over non-disclosure agreements, and who negotiate for the protections residents actually prioritize will make better decisions and preserve public trust while doing it.

Data centers are not going away; the demand curve guarantees that. The question for every city and county is whether the decision gets made with the community or to it. The communities that get this right will be the ones that treat resident insight not as a box to check after the deal is struck, but as the starting point for the deal itself.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

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