Data center opposition is forging unlikely bipartisan alliances in Alabama

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Before this year, Thatcher Rotenberry and Rachael Schaffer wouldn’t have been a likely team.

Rotenberry is a University of Alabama student from Brookwood, a town of about 2,500 people roughly 20 miles west of Tuscaloosa. He also works for a Democratic congressional campaign.

“I get along with the people around here. We don't disagree, because we're the same. We just see a different legislative fix,” he said.

Rachael Schaffer lives in Cottondale, about 10 miles downstream from where Rotenberry grew up. She said she’s pretty conservative. Her ballot this year probably doesn’t match his, but they agree wholeheartedly on one issue.

As many as three data centers may be coming to Brookwood. Schaffer, Rotenberry, and their allies don’t want them.

“Are we really going to risk all of our environmental magical places so that we can play harder on our phones?” Schaffer said.

Opposition to data centers is not a partisan issue. Poll after poll show that majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans don’t want them in their own local communities. While that opposition has led to statewide restrictions in Texas, Oregon, and New York, in most of the country, the fight is playing out in those local communities.

Rotenberry is worried that a data center could make the surrounding air temperature as much as four degrees hotter, as the Yale Environmental Law Review reported.

“The noise, the heat pollution, the air pollution, the water pollution — I mean, it's right by the middle school that I went to middle school in,” he said.

Schaffer has an almost spiritual connection to the creek running behind her house. She doesn’t want to see data center runoff harm it.

“I have a beautiful blue heron that has my morning coffee with me every morning, that stands on one leg, and we don't want to give that up. I mean, it's just a magical place,” she said.

Schaffer and Rotenberry said that the overwhelming majority of their neighbors agree with them. Nick Phillips disagreed. He works for Applied Digital — the developer of a $3.2 billion project that’s closest to starting construction.

“We want to go where we're wanted,” Phillips said. “We've gotten to spend some time with folks around the county a little bit, and it's been very positive.”

Phillips went to a Brookwood town hall meeting to answer questions. He said the site won’t be too loud or bright, thanks to lots of forested buffer. He also said it won’t raise utility rates, and toxic wastewater won’t flow into the creek behind Schaffer’s house.

“If we do need to remove some of our coolant, we truck that off site,” he said.

The developer announced a new data center campus at an undisclosed location in June. Then, in September, the city council voted to rezone a residential area, but wouldn’t say why.

“The mayor signed a non-disclosure agreement, showed up to the first meeting, said you would be cut off from speaking if you said the words data center,” Rotenberry said. “He said, ‘This is not about data centers, this is about rezoning.’ And we were all sitting there like, ‘Rezoning for what, Joe? What are we rezoning for?’”

Brookwood Mayor Joe Barger said the answer to that question didn’t come until September, on the day of the rezoning approval. After that, the city passed a $314.5 million tax break for data center construction. He also said there are not three Brookwood data center projects in the works, as opponents claim; there’s only one.

“People don't know what they're talking about, and they get their information from incorrect sources, and they think they know everything, and they're ignorant,” he said.

A second parcel of land has already been rezoned for a company tied to data center development. And the owner of a third parcel of land has an address tied to a company called “Provident Data Centers.”

As for the non-disclosure agreement — Barger said that just prevents him from leaking info to other data center developers and that his constituents need to trust their local leaders.

“They trusted us and elected us to be in these positions,” he said. “We're as transparent when the time is right that we can be.”

Applied Digital, the developer, said it’s waiting for permit approval before it can start construction.

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Schaffer said. “We hope it just doesn’t destroy everything.”