David Sparrow, who said he lives near the Greenup-Carter county line, lambasted local officials for signing non-disclosure agreements. (Screenshot)
Boyd County residents packed a raucous public meeting about a proposed data center on Monday night, sometimes yelling and booing over non-disclosure agreements signed by local elected officials and whether the environment and ratepayers would be protected.
Attendees packed the Boyd County Convention and Arts Center just days after the data center developer TeraWulf announced it planned to build a massive, hyperscale data center on a 285-acre site at the EastPark industrial park in Boyd and Greenup counties.
Nearly all of those who spoke at the three-hour town hall livestreamed on Facebook — with local county judge-executives on stage fielding questions about the proposed project — ranged from skepticism of the project’s economic impact to outright opposition to the company TeraWulf locating at the industrial park site, the same location where the state had to claw back a $15 million investment for a failed Braidy Industries aluminum mill.
David Sparrow, one of the town hall speakers who said he lived along the Greenup-Carter county line, told the local elected officials the fact they signed non-disclosure agreements with the data center developer made them untrustworthy. When Sparrow asked who had signed such agreements, a few people standing on stage raised their hands.
“You’re starting it off shady,” Sparrow said. “We can’t trust that. At least that’s the way I feel now.”
Non-disclosure agreements, also known as NDAs, require the signee to not reveal specific information about a project. Tech company officials have used them frequently, saying they protect private negotiations with local elected officials, but critics say they are simply a way to hide information from the public.
“I understand that AI is inevitable, I get that. But why are we doing it in a way that doesn’t let the citizens speak for what they want?” Sparrow said, arguing that the timing of the project announcement didn’t give them time to research it. “I think we should hold the people accountable that signed this NDA that left us in the dark for so long.”
Republican Boyd County Judge-Executive Eric Chaney, who advocated for the project on stage alongside Republican Greenup County Judge-Executive Bobby Hall, apologized for the way the announcement of the project was rolled out last week. He said he’s signed NDAs before over his time as an elected official and that it had “never crossed” his mind that he was doing anything wrong, encouraging those in the audience to file open records requests.
“I don’t want to do anything in my life to be distrustful or to lose that trust from anybody in this room, whether you like me or not,” Chaney said.
Chaney said the EastPark industrial site for most of its existence has been chasing “ghost promises that have stained our community” including the unsuccessful attempt to bring Braidy Industries to the area.
He also acknowledged instances in other parts of the country where data centers have negatively impacted electricity rates or drained a local water supply. But he assured the audience that Kentucky Power’s regulations for large load customers were protective of other ratepayers, along with his understanding that the proposed data center would use a “closed loop” cooling system for water.
The publicly-traded company TeraWulf, which is also seeking to build another hyperscale data center at the site of an idled aluminum mill in Hancock County, said in a press release last week the Boyd data center would use 500 megawatts of electricity by 2028 and up to 1 gigawatt of power by 2030. That amount of electricity can power hundreds of thousands of homes.
“For all of us in this room, whether you support this project or you’re against it, it’s risk. Because risk brings change,” Chaney said. “Eastern Kentucky is in a unique position, because of infrastructure in place that many other areas do not. That infrastructure sits idle, and this one gig data center takes a huge chunk of that lost usage of years past.”
Hall, the Greenup County judge-executive, also defended the project, at times over yelling and jeers from the crowd, saying that “if only one job is created, that’s one more job than we had.”
Not everyone who spoke at the town hall was opposed to data centers. Tony Quillen, the Greenup County Public Valuation Administrator, evoked the Toyota car manufacturing plant in Scott County as an economic development risk that Kentucky took decades ago.
“We took a chance then and look at Georgetown today,” Quillen said, telling local elected officials it’s “not an easy job” they have. “I appreciate your studying and your continued efforts, and my prayers go with all of you up here.”
John Holbrook, the business manager for the Tri-State Building and Construction Trades Council, said TeraWulf would hold a community meeting on June 17. The local judge-executives on stage said TeraWulf would also have as many meetings on the project as the public requested.
Other speakers at the town hall questioned what they viewed as the lack of transparency on environmental protections, including what kind of water usage and the specifics of TeraWulf’s closed loop water cooling system for its Boyd County project, which the company calls its “Muskie” data center campus.
“If the Muskie center development has been so carefully planned out, I’m curious as to why that basic information has not been made available to the public,” said Aggy Vanderpool, an AP environmental science instructor at Lawrence County High School. “Where is the water to initially fill these systems going to come from?”
The last speaker at the town hall evoked the past boom-and-bust nature of the region’s coal industry, wondering if the boom of data center construction would be similar.
“This is Appalachia. We have a very long memory here,” said Rachel Wilson of Boyd County. “Most of that memory is boom and then bust, so you want us to get excited about a boom. We’re all concerned about how much that boom is going to cost us, and when is it going to bust, and who’s going to pay for that bust.”
