On August 11, 2026, the Village of Wrightstown, Wisconsin put one question on the ballot: whether the village should support or facilitate municipal utility infrastructure for a large-scale data center development. The result was 1,033 against and 151 in favor, out of 1,184 votes cast. That is a little over 87 percent.
Two things about that vote should be said before anything else, because they are the two things a reader ought to check us on. It was advisory, and it does not bind the village board to do anything. And no company was named anywhere on the ballot. There was never a formal data center proposal in front of Wrightstown to begin with. The village board president said so repeatedly, and the company confirmed only that it was scouting land nearby. Wrightstown did not vote down an application. It voted on whether to be the kind of place that hosts one.
The company scouting that land is Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which is the company behind Project Red Clay here. Emails obtained under Wisconsin’s open records law show the village administrator was in contact with Cloverleaf beginning January 9, 2026. Residents learned of it in May, after they raised questions at a board meeting and the records came out. In July, after a petition gathered more than 300 signatures, village trustees unanimously adopted a one-year moratorium on data center projects. The referendum followed a month later.
Wrightstown is the sixth local government in four states to deny, pause, or decline to advance a Cloverleaf project since October of last year. In Dundee, Michigan, the company pulled its own pre-development agreement in early October 2025, and the village council then voted to deny the project access to village water. In Troy, Illinois, city officials rejected the company’s preferred site in February 2026 after resident opposition, and the council followed with a six-month moratorium on a 6 to 0 vote in March. By June, officials there said the rewritten ordinance would cap data centers at 30 megawatts, a ceiling no hyperscale campus fits under. Frenchtown Township, Michigan adopted a six-month moratorium 6 to 0 on April 21. Manitowoc County, Wisconsin adopted an 18-month moratorium unanimously on April 29, after Cloverleaf approached landowners in three townships with purchase offers. And in Piedmont, Oklahoma, the planning commission declined to advance a 633-acre rezoning in June, and on July 27 the city council sent the land-use amendment back for further study. Piedmont is unresolved. It returns to that council on August 24.
Four of those six recorded a vote count we can verify, and every one of the four was unanimous or 6 to 0. A city council, a charter township board, a county board, and a village board, in three different states, and not one of them split.
One more community belongs in this account, counted separately because no government there ever voted on anything. On January 13, 2026, Cloverleaf withdrew from Greenleaf, Wisconsin, the same day the village board was scheduled to discuss the proposal. A Facebook group opposing the project had been created six days earlier and had nearly 3,000 members by then, in a village of just over 900 people. Chief Development Officer Aaron Bilyeu told Spectrum News 1 that after speaking to leadership at the Village of Greenleaf and the Town of Wrightstown, "Cloverleaf will not be pursuing datacenters in those jurisdictions." The Town of Wrightstown and the Village of Wrightstown are separate municipalities. The August 11 referendum was the village’s.
In every one of those places, a local governing body took an action in public and put its name on it. A vote to deny water. A vote to pause. A vote to send a proposal back for study. A vote to ask residents directly. Anyone living in those communities can look up how each member voted, on what date, and raise it at the next election.
Lowndes County has had none of that. There has been no moratorium, no ordinance, no referendum, and no vote of any kind on Project Red Clay. On July 27, residents spoke against the project during public comment at the Commission’s regular meeting. No commissioner voted on it, answered the questions put to them substantively, or committed to anything. The Commission then entered executive session and returned only to adjourn.
There has been one public event about this project, and it belonged to the developer. Cloverleaf held a come-and-go open house at Hayneville Middle School on June 3, with staff at informational tables and no formal presentation. At that same event, the company’s Vice President of Community Engagement acknowledged, answering a resident’s question, that Cloverleaf had already held private meetings with the County Commission and the Lowndes County Economic Development Commission. An open house hosted by the company is not the same thing as a county board taking a recorded vote, and it should not be allowed to stand in for one.
Protect Lowndes County has never been against economic development. We are for the responsible kind: a named operator, contracts the public can read, and decisions made in the open before they are made at all. Everything above is the record of a project that does not meet that standard, and that is why we oppose it as it stands. We are asking the Lowndes County Commission to say the same thing on the record, in a resolution, in public, with every commissioner’s name recorded beside their vote.
A resolution would not stop this project, and we are not going to pretend it would. It carries no legal force. What it carries is a signal, and this company has already put in writing what it does with one. In an email released under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, Cloverleaf Development Principal Michael Evans wrote of a site the company walked away from: "We made the decision not to pursue it, because 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." Greenleaf never took a vote on the project. Residents organized, the company spoke with village leadership, and on January 13 Cloverleaf announced that after those conversations it would not be pursuing data centers there. That is the mechanism, and it is the company’s own standard, not our theory about it. Every one of the six governments above put something on the record. Lowndes County has put nothing.1234567891011121314151617181920