On July 28, 2026, The Lowndes Signal published a letter from William Davis, a Lowndes County resident, urging the county to embrace Project Red Clay. He is a neighbor making an argument in public, which is exactly how this is supposed to work. What follows answers the letter, not the man.
We agree with his opening, and we would say it more bluntly than he did. Roughly 30 percent of this county lives below the poverty line, against about 12.5 percent nationally. Median household income is around $37,000. The population is among the three smallest of Alabama’s 67 counties and it is still falling. Schools are closing. Children who grow up here leave to find work, as his did. None of that is in dispute. No one at Protect Lowndes County has ever argued that this county does not need investment, jobs, and a tax base. We are not arguing against prosperity. We are arguing about one specific deal whose documents nobody here has been allowed to read.
The disagreement starts at the jobs paragraph. The letter says that after construction, hundreds of long-term positions will be created that pay well. The developer’s own website says at least 50. Four different permanent-job figures have come from the project and its advocates: at least 50 on the website, 50 to 100 from Chairman Charlie King via WSFA in April, 50 to 200 in a June coalition summary, and 200 to 300 in Cloverleaf’s own June interview with WSFA. The letter takes the largest of the four. We keep all four, each with its date, rather than picking the convenient one. Reconciling them is Cloverleaf’s job, and it has not been done.
There is also the question of whose jobs they are. Dr. Regina Moorer, in her own letter to this same newspaper in April, estimated that at current capture rates roughly nine of those permanent positions would go to Lowndes County residents. If that estimate is wrong, the developer can retire it in an afternoon by publishing a hiring commitment. There is no such commitment in public.
The construction figure is the one number everyone agrees on: more than 1,000 jobs over three or more years. What no one has said is how many of them are Lowndes County jobs. It is worth being specific about what those trades actually are.
A member of this organization photographed this truck at a QuikTrip pump on the morning of July 29. PurgeRite is a Texas company. Its work is mechanical flushing, purging, and filtration: getting the closed cooling loops inside a data center clean enough to run. Vertiv bought the company in December 2025 for about a billion dollars, which is a fair measure of how specialized that narrow scope has become.
We publish the photograph because it shows what a data-center trade looks like when it travels, and these trades travel. Flushing and purging, medium-voltage electrical, controls, commissioning: in a market this new, those scopes arrive as national crews with their own trucks, from wherever the last job was, and they leave when the job is finished.
So the honest version of the jobs question is not whether a thousand people will work here. It is which thousand, for how long, and what is written down. A local-hire commitment is a document. It contains a percentage, a definition of local, and a consequence if the number is missed. If Lowndes County has been offered one, it has not been published. Until it is, a thousand construction jobs is a description of a workforce, not a promise to this county.
The rest of the letter runs into the same wall. It proposes to spend the tax revenue on roads, on schools, and on treatment for residents struggling with substance use disorder. We would take all three. The figure behind that spending is $75 million a year in projected revenue, and the assumptions under it have never been published. It is also a gross figure. What the county would actually keep after a thirty-year abatement has never been shown, because the dollar value of that abatement has never been disclosed. Chairman Charlie King committed three times at the May 26 meeting not to vote for a thirty-year abatement. You cannot resurface a road with revenue you abated.
The $10 million through the Central Alabama Community Foundation is real, and it is structured. One million is upfront. Of the remaining nine, four is contingent on an electric-service contract and Public Service Commission approval, and five is paid over five years after construction begins. The gift agreement itself is not public, so no resident can say today who controls the money, what becomes of it if the project changes hands, or whether anyone in this county could enforce the promise.
On water, the letter says usage will be kept to a minimum. The company’s own figure is up to 100,000 gallons a day, described as a one-time fill. Peak makeup water in an Alabama August, blowdown, fire flow, construction demand, and the volume and destination of the wastewater are all undisclosed. On power, the letter says the developer covers the upgrades. The electric-service agreement and the cost-allocation study that would demonstrate that are not public either. The Alabama Public Service Commission opened Docket 33709 on July 8 to review exactly this question for large-load contracts. The initial comment window has since closed, and reply comments are due on or before August 21, 2026. Any resident of this county can still put the question on the state’s record in that window.
One line deserves a direct answer. The letter challenges opponents to put down their phones and pay only in cash. Nobody here has asked for data centers to be abolished. The question has never been whether these buildings should exist. It is whether this one, at more than a thousand acres and about 3 million square feet, on this parcel, beside the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, with 251 homes and roughly 750 people inside two miles, on terms nobody outside the room has read, is a good deal for Lowndes County. A person can carry a phone and still ask to see the contract.
We would rather not spend the summer arguing with our neighbors about estimates. Cloverleaf’s own development principal wrote, about a different community, that "Cloverleaf will not work in communities where this type of development is unwelcome or the development does not match the existing use for the land. That is a decision we will make ten times out of ten." Publish the electric-service agreement, the water model, the site plan, the gift agreement, and the value of the abatement, and this argument gets a great deal shorter. Anything above that the record contradicts, we will correct in public, with the date on it.123456789101112131415161718