In Lenox Township, Michigan, a rural community 40 miles north of Detroit, elected officials publicly denied that anyone had applied to build a proposed data center campus when a website promoting the project went live in May. Open records requests revealed the denials were false: developers had been in direct contact with the township supervisor and deputy supervisor, explicitly seeking their backing.
The pattern has become a documented trend across the United States. Between May and June alone, voters in California, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, Oregon and Texas initiated recall efforts against officials based on their data center decisions. During the first quarter of 2026, at least 75 data center projects worth roughly $130 billion were blocked or delayed, matching the total opposition encountered throughout all of 2025, according to Data Center Watch.
In Festus, Missouri, developer CRG Clayco pursued approval for a $6 billion data center agreement without publicly identifying which technology firm would operate the facility. The city council approved it anyway, including a five-year property tax abatement. Residents gathered enough signatures to force a recall election, but the city council rejected the petition. A legal challenge is now pending.
Michael Bommarito, author of "How to Fight a Data Center," documented the strategy plainly: "The company usually goes public only after the decisive votes have been taken."
In Lenox, residents packed public meetings stretching beyond four hours. One resident spoke to the core complaint at a June board meeting: "The community still has questions that aren't being answered and the public deserves to have transparency." The board submitted their names to a recall petition regardless.
The underlying grievances are substantial. The United States operates more than 4,400 data centers. A single facility consumes as much electricity as 2,000 homes, according to University of Michigan research. A typical data center requires 300,000 gallons of water daily — equivalent to the needs of roughly 1,000 households. Large facilities can demand 5 million gallons per day, matching the usage patterns of towns with 10,000 to 50,000 residents, per the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
Neighbors report constant humming from cooling systems, degraded air quality and fluctuating property values.
Yet what makes the accountability challenge acute is deliberate obscurity surrounding project ownership. Researchers studying 31 Virginia localities found that 80 percent had signed non-disclosure agreements with companies behind data center projects, according to the Virginia Mercury. The secrecy persists until approval is secured.
Dennis McDonald, a Festus resident who teaches U.S. history at a local college and ran as a Democratic candidate for the Missouri statehouse in 2018, framed the issue with clarity: "If the community says: 'Hey, we want to be involved and know what is going on here,' and you just don't involve them at every turn, it ends up building into where we are at now." He filed a legal challenge to his city council's rejection of the recall petition.
The legal terrain is murky. Judges have determined that sufficient signatures exist in some cases to trigger recall elections. City councils have rejected those petitions anyway, claiming procedural defects or other grounds.
Evan Sutton, a Seattle resident working in strategic communications who has voluntarily assisted data center opponents in ten states, characterized the phenomenon bluntly: "People feel like this technology is being shoved down our throats." Sutton's involvement across state lines suggests that opposition is increasingly networked.
The political alignment is unusual. Democrats express concern about energy consumption and the revival of coal-fired power plants to meet data center demand. Republicans worry about economic consequences, particularly rising electricity costs. Some officials in both parties support the projects on grounds of economic development and tax revenue. Others in both parties oppose them on environmental and fiscal grounds.
But what unites the opposition across party lines and geographies is anger at the process itself. Residents want information before decisions are made. They want genuine input, not performative hearings scheduled after outcomes are predetermined. They want elected officials to answer for approving multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects on terms that favor corporate secrecy over public disclosure.
The recall petitions represent one mechanism for enforcing accountability after the fact. Legal challenges represent another. Whether either will succeed depends partly on how courts interpret municipal procedures and partly on whether enough voters choose to participate in the electoral process.
