We went looking for a way to test whether Project Red Clay is being treated like every other Cloverleaf project, or differently. The company makes that easy to check: it runs a public FAQ page for each site it pursues, at a predictable web address, built from the same template. We read all five.
Four of the five publish something Lowndes County did not get. Frenchtown Township, Michigan got a published county tax-revenue estimate of $14.8 million. Dundee, Michigan got named union partners. Leavenworth County, Kansas and Piedmont, Oklahoma both got a stated jobs floor at or above what Lowndes County was offered. Project Red Clay’s own FAQ page has no local tax figure and names no partner at all.
Cloverleaf has also put commitments in writing to Dundee Township, Michigan, in a document that township now hosts on its own government website: no NDAs, a binding requirement that any buyer honor the same obligations, a promise not to sue if the project is denied, and an enforceable 70-decibel noise limit. None of those specific commitments have been offered to Lowndes County in writing that we have found. If they exist, we would like to see them.
One more thing worth flagging: redclaydatacenter.com has never been captured by the Internet Archive, and the site’s own data shows its FAQ page was quietly edited on July 15, one week after the state issued its stormwater permit, with no public notice. We have started archiving it ourselves.123456