The gavel came down. The room did not back down.

At least 150 Lowndes County residents filled the courthouse on Monday evening, August 24, many in white NO DATA CENTER shirts, for the Commission’s regular fourth-Monday meeting. The Alabama Reflector counted the room; WSFA described a packed and tense night. It was the largest turnout this project has drawn since the coalition announcement in July, and nothing about it looked like a community losing interest. John Urquhart, who lives on 230 acres beside the planned site, stood and read Protect Lowndes County’s petition to the commissioners, about 350 names behind him: comply with the July 27 records request, name every entity involved, disclose the infrastructure impacts, and put the documents where the public can see them.

Chairman Charlie King Jr. went down the line, asking each commissioner and the county attorney in turn whether they had anything to share about the data center. "We do not have any information that we’re holding back," King said. From the benches, residents shouted "Boo! Liar!" Hold that exchange up against the calendar. People in this county have been asking since April. In the five months since, a state construction permit was issued, copies of purchase options covering roughly 1,050 acres were handed to the commissioners at their own meeting, and the first community-benefit checks were presented for photographs. All of that moved. The answers did not. "We’ve asked for answers since April," Urquhart told the Alabama Reflector. "Our commissioners have given us absolutely nothing."

Resident after resident said the same thing in their own words. "We’re asking for transparency," Marvenita Scott told the commissioners. "Stop ignoring the people because the people are who you’re supposed to be representing. Stop looking through us and look at us." Felicia Williams asked the commission to pass a local ordinance regulating noise and to require an independent environmental study of the project’s pollution, water and energy impacts, and put a question to the dais: "Do you all live within the radius of this proposed data center?" Then she said the part that needs no study at all. "We do not want a data center in Lowndes County."

Ryan Anderson, a staff attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, stood at the lectern to remind the commission what the law requires of it. The county has acknowledged the records request, she said, but SELC has "not received any substantive documents." She did not get to finish. King was enforcing a two-minute limit with the gavel that night, cutting off several speakers and raising his voice: "Your time is up!" The room booed. Vice Chair Dickson Farrior moved to let Anderson continue, the commission voted, and she went back to the lectern to applause and cheers.

It took a motion and a vote of his own board before the chairman would let a lawyer finish reminding the commission of its legal obligations, in front of a courtroom full of the people those obligations protect. That is the record, and it does not need decoration. The record also shows King is the official who first put a price on this project: "This project is $1.5 billion," he told the May 26 meeting, back when the developer’s own website said over $1 billion. Monday’s developer statement made it "at least $1.5 billion" in the development stage alone. Three figures, three dates, and the documents that would reconcile them are precisely the ones the county says it does not have to give. The county attorney told this same commission on August 10 that a records-request response would come before the thirty-day window closed. That window closes August 26.

The developer, for its part, said more Monday than it has said in public before, in a statement that evening. Sandstone Cliffs DevCo, the LLC on the state construction permit, was created by the developers to run the project’s beginning phases, and Cloverleaf owns it and is responsible for it. This site has carried that entity since the permit named it on July 8; Monday the company said out loud what the paper trail already showed. What it still refuses to say is who this data center is for: the statement declined to name the operator because "an agreement has not been finalized." Cloverleaf’s chief development officer, Aaron Bilyeu, has told al.com the company is "committed to being open and transparent about their concerns and listening to their concerns." Five months on, the people living beside the site still cannot be told who is moving in next door. Put that next to the company’s own words elsewhere. In Michigan, Cloverleaf dropped its plans after the Dundee council voted to block the water supply, acknowledging it "should have done more public communication and listening." In Wisconsin, after speaking to local leadership, it announced it would not pursue data centers there. And its own development principal wrote, in an email released under Michigan’s public records law, that Cloverleaf "will not work in communities where this type of development is unwelcome," calling that "a decision we will make ten times out of ten." National reporting describes this project as nearly universally opposed by the county’s majority-Black residents. Ten times out of ten was the company’s own number. Lowndes County is still waiting to be counted as one of the ten.

Negatha Holt, another resident, used her time at the podium to speak to her neighbors as much as to the dais, urging them to resist apathy. "The power of the people is greater than the people in power," she said. Monday was that sentence in practice. The gavel came down, and the speaker finished anyway. The petition went into the record with about 350 names on it, and it is still gathering more. This community has shown up through five months of non-answers, and it filled the courthouse again, in matching shirts, with its children along to see how showing up is done. Protect Lowndes County is not backing down. The next evening meeting is September 28 at 6 p.m. Come be counted. Bring a neighbor.¹​²​³​⁴​⁵​⁶​⁷​⁸​⁹​¹⁰​¹¹​¹²​¹³​¹⁴​¹⁵​¹⁶​¹⁷​¹⁸​¹⁹​²⁰​²¹​²²​