A post-church downpour didn’t deter hundreds of people from showing up at Morgan’s Market on a recent Sunday afternoon to sign a petition aimed at giving people in rural Coweta county, Georgia, the chance to vote on a datacenter known as Project Sail and prohibit other datacenters and cryptocurrency mining operations from moving forward.
It was one of about a dozen petition-signing events held in the area in a push that launched several weeks ago. As of Friday, organizers said they had collected about 6,500 signatures; the goal is about 14,000. Located less than an hour south-west of Atlanta, Coweta county has about 160,000 residents. Two-thirds of the county voted for Trump.
If the petition campaign is successful, Coweta county could become only the third county in Georgia history to stage what’s known as a referendum, allowing residents to challenge a county policy or decision – in this case, the county commission’s ordinance allowing Project Sail, a more-than-800-acre datacenter.
It is part of a growing groundswell of grass-roots citizens’ actions against often gigantic datacenters, whose rapid growth across the US, powered by the demand for AI, have raised a host of environmental and other concerns. The move in Coweta county comes just after Monterey Park, California, became the first US city to pass a referendum against datacenters earlier this month. It also comes as recent polling suggests seven in 10 people in the US would oppose a datacenter being built near their homes.
“Our overarching goal is to protect the rural character of Coweta county,” said Melanie Tomlinson, part of a group called Citizens for Rural Coweta and an organizer of the referendum.
Tomlinson hadn’t previously engaged in local politics. “I never thought I would be involved in something like this,” said the 58-year-old and lifetime resident.
She described more than a year of county commission meetings on the issue, during which attendance boomed from less than a dozen to more than a hundred. Finally, in December, the county passed an ordinance that she felt disregarded community concerns regarding issues such as noise, and water and electricity use and cost. “It was like a brick wall,” she said.
Shortly after, the plan to stage a referendum was born. Locals also recently filed a lawsuit seeking to block Project Sail.
The referendum comes after residents of Georgia’s Sapelo Island – home to a community of descendants of enslaved west Africans – successfully staged a countywide vote in January, defeating a proposal to allow larger houses on the island. Before that, a referendum on the Atlanta police training center known as Cop City failed, after the city tied up the effort in courts.
The ability to stage a referendum in Georgia comes from provisions in the state’s constitution. First, a certain percentage of a county’s registered voters must sign a petition indicating they want to vote on a policy passed by elected representatives. The percentage varies based on the county’s population.
Once the threshold of confirmed signatures is reached and a referendum is authorized, it’s a tool that shows “people don’t have to acquiesce to elected leaders – particularly when they don’t have people’s interests at heart”, said Quentin Savwoir, director of programs and strategy at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.
At Morgan’s Market, volunteer Jenn Riggs said she felt the county commission had overlooked its constituents. “I don’t feel like we’re trying to be radical,” she said. “We’re trying to be heard.”
“It’s almost like taxation without representation,” Riggs continued. The 41-year-old graphic designer lives on land that’s been in her husband’s family for generations, about two miles from the Project Sail site.
Like others the Guardian spoke to for this story, she hadn’t attended county commission meetings before. “I began thinking: ‘It’s two miles from our house. I want to be aware of what’s happening,’” she said.
Riggs said she’s “concerned about conservation”, referring to the county’s decision to rezone the 831-acre site planned for Project Sail from “rural conservation” to “industrial”.
“We have bald eagles all year,” she said. “If this [project] impacts our ground water, our ability to see the night sky … it affects the way we’ve lived for generations.”
Chris Manganiello, water policy director for Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, said the “largest threat” from Project Sail to nearby rivers is sediment runoff from construction, which can affect everything from water temperature to fish.
The Guardian queried each of the county’s five commissioners. Spokesperson Cathy Wickey replied with a statement that read in part: “Every perspective contributes to the dialog and we always welcome civic engagement. While attendance at our meetings has increased, we continue to hear from residents across many platforms outside of meetings–sharing concerns as well as support for various topics. Ultimately, our responsibility is to serve the entire community.”
Prologis, the industrial real estate company behind the project, did not reply to a query from the Guardian.
Signers of the petition on a recent Sunday included those who oppose AI in general. John Leseur, a 25-year resident of Newnan, the county’s largest city, said: “I think the whole thing’s a crock.”
“These datacenter people, these billionaires, they prey on small, rural towns, with loose zoning laws. With that-all, that AI stuff, enough’s enough,” he said.
Nearby, residents signing the petition had been following concerns with datacenters elsewhere. José and Fabiola Guerrero had heard of recent reporting on Fayetteville, Georgia, where residents were noticing low water pressure and the utility company discovered it had supplied 30m gallons of water without charge to datacenter developer Quality Technology Services.
Brad Weyant said he had been following environmentalist Erin Brockovich’s work gathering data on thousands of datacenter projects nationwide. “I distrust the whole thing,” he said.
Carla Jackson had come to Coweta county four years ago from Loudoun county, Virginia, known as “Datacenter Alley” due to the density of datacenter construction within its borders.
She wound up moving to rural Georgia in 2022 to escape all that. “When I came here, I said: ‘This is it – paradise. It’s wooded, I see deer every day. If one datacenter comes here, that’s not going to be the end of it,” she said.
At least five datacenters are planned for Coweta county.
When Jackson learned of the petition to put the issue up for a vote, she volunteered to help. She’s trained 38 volunteers and has gathered signatures from her neighbors, her vet, her dentist – “Everywhere I go,” she said.
She also had never been involved in any local organizing. “It being so close makes it much more real,” she said.
Manganiello said he had never seen grassroots opposition as he is seeing with datacenters. “Everything about datacenters in Georgia is unprecedented,” he said, adding that rural counties are also passing moratoria on construction.
“This sentiment is not going away,” he added.
Tomlinson, one of the referendum’s organizers, hopes Coweta county’s efforts can inspire other communities dealing with the issue. “I hope that other places see [what Coweta county is doing] and care as much as we care … I hope it makes them brave, to stand up and do something,” she said.
