Last year, Mason McCallister saw survey markers on a property near his home in a rural community about an hour north of Dallas. He suspected it might be for a new data center he’d heard about from a neighbor.
But information hasn’t come easy. He found no project announcements and saw nothing on county agendas. Several local officials told him they knew nothing of the project.
The 34-year-old realtor searched property records. He knocked on neighbors’ doors to ask what they knew. His wife, also a realtor, asked the surveyors who was buying the land, and his grandma chased a neighbor down at church to ask if he sold his property.
Eventually, McCallister mapped companies contracting with landowners all around him including Black Mountain, an energy and digital infrastructure group based in Fort Worth. He dug up a permit for a power plant from a company with the same address as Black Mountain, indicating the data center could build its own power source.
Then in March, after months of searching for answers, McCallister drove 100 miles to a town hall in the Fort Worth area where he learned Black Mountain’s CEO, Rhett Bennett, would be speaking about a different project.
After the presentation, McCallister confronted the CEO and got his confirmation: Yes, Black Mountain was exploring a data center near his home.
“Deep down I was always hoping that I was wrong,” said McCallister, after getting his answer.
As data center proposals are popping up across Texas, local residents have grown increasingly frustrated by how difficult it can be to get information about the projects that they say threaten to disrupt their communities. Armies of concerned neighbors, such as McCallister, have become their own private detectives in search of signs or confirmation about data center plans in lieu of public disclosures, pestering local officials at meetings or in the grocery store and sharing their findings across Facebook groups with thousands of members.
“Knowledge is power, right?” said McCallister, whose family has owned the property in Bells for roughly 150 years. “Everyone’s being so quiet about it, and everyone’s being so secret about it. If it was so good for the community, they would be screaming it from the rooftops.”
It’s a long story, so read the rest. It’s normal for a lot of businesses to conduct negotiations with local entities in secret, for a lot of reasons, but also for a lot of reasons people really hate it when they find out that a fully locked-in data center is going to be built in their vicinity and it’s too late to do a damn thing about it. Big companies like Meta will hide behind shell companies to throw off suspicion when they appear on local government agendas. Even Greg Abbott’s much ballyhooed proposal to make data center disclose information about water and electricity usage before they can get regulatory approval doesn’t specify (and Abbott won’t say) if those disclosures will be made to the public or just to state agencies. I don’t know what the “best” answer is, but I find it hard to argue against the assertion that the public ought to know more and have more control over these things that so directly affect their lives.