On August 18, 2026, the Central Alabama Community Foundation and Project Red Clay announced the first grants under the community-benefits package that anyone outside the deal can verify. Hope Inspired Ministries received $50,000 to fund a full-time life coach shared between Calhoun School and Central High School, working year-round, offering one-on-one mentoring, financial literacy training, and résumé help. The Organized Community Action Program received $75,000: $50,000 for utility assistance, split evenly between cooling and heating bills, to keep households from having their power cut off, and $25,000 for weatherization, which means repairing broken windows, HVAC units and roofs, and adding insulation.
Both of those things are good. A life coach in two county high schools is good. Keeping a family’s power on through an Alabama August is good, and $25,000 of weatherization will still be doing its work years from now. The two directors quoted in WSFA’s account, John Bowman at Hope Inspired Ministries and Tyrone Barrow at OCAP, run organizations this county is better for having. Nothing in this dispatch is a criticism of either one, and nobody should read it that way. They applied to a fund, they were awarded money, and they will spend it well. Our questions are for the developer and the foundation, and they are the questions we have been asking since May.
Here is what changed on August 18. Until then, the $10 million community-benefits package was a description without a receipt. This site said so in plain words: no signed agreement, no escrow record, and no funding confirmation had been located. That sentence is now out of date. We have updated it rather than leave it standing, because a site that asks other people to correct the record has to correct its own. Money has moved. $125,000 of it, to two named organizations, announced by the foundation and reported by a television station.
What has not changed is the shape of the rest. The developer’s own description of the package, as this county’s newspaper reported it on June 1, is $10 million over the project lifecycle: $1 million upfront and $9 million milestone-gated. Of the gated portion, $4 million depends on an electric-service contract and Public Service Commission approval, and $5 million is payable over five years after construction begins. Read that arithmetic twice. Nine of every ten dollars promised to this county exist only if this project goes forward.
We are not going to tell you what anyone intends by that, because we do not know and the documents do not say it. We will tell you what it does. It means the fund that just paid for a life coach is, by its own published terms, mostly a fund that pays later, if the campus gets built. It means that every organization in this county which applies to the portal now has an interest, whether it wants one or not, in whether Project Red Clay advances. And it means the promise and the project cannot be weighed separately, because the developer wrote them as one instrument.
Then there is where the money went. The state permit puts this project at the southeast corner of U.S. Highway 80 and Alabama Highway 21. The households that would live with the grading, the traffic, the generators and the noise are the ones along that corridor. Calhoun School is in Letohatchee, on the far side of the county toward Interstate 65. Central High School is on Main Street in Hayneville. OCAP is a seven-county agency headquartered in Troy, in Pike County, and its utility assistance reaches eligible families across that whole service area, this county included.
None of that makes any of it wrong. A Lowndes County family near the site can apply for help with a power bill like anyone else, and should. But it does mean the first $125,000 contains nothing addressed to a single impact of the project itself.
No well testing. No property-value protection. No noise monitoring. No fund for the people whose fence lines this campus would sit against.
A developer’s community-benefits money can be spent the way a charitable donation is spent, or it can be spent on the harms the development itself creates. This round was the first kind. That is not a hidden fact or an accusation, it is what the announcement itself describes, and anyone can read it.
So here is what we are asking, and none of it is aimed at the two organizations that received the checks. Who selects the recipients, and against what published criteria? Was any member of the County Commission or the Lowndes County Economic Development Commission involved in choosing them, or consulted about them? Publish the gift agreement between the developer and the foundation, including the administrative-fee percentage, the disbursement schedule, and the milestone definitions. Confirm whether the full $1 million upfront tranche has actually been funded, and say where it is held. And state, in writing, what happens to the fund if this project is denied or withdrawn.
One more thing, because it landed the next morning. On August 19 Inside Climate News published an analysis of more than a dozen data centers proposed across this state and found that if they are built to full capacity they would use more electricity than every home in Alabama combined. That report describes this project as nearly universally opposed by the county’s majority-Black residents. Alabama Power’s answer to people worried about their bills is an advertising campaign promising that costs will not be shifted onto them. The one large-load contract filed with the state that a ratepayer could check that promise against, for a different project in another county, arrived with the contract term, the capacity, the pricing, the financial security and the minimum-bill terms blacked out. So $50,000 from this fund will help Lowndes County families keep the power on this winter, and the question of what everyone’s power costs for the next thirty years sits in a state docket with the numbers removed. Both of those are true at once, and only one of them is being advertised.
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. A foundation check does not name the tenant, publish the water contract, publish the electric-service agreement, or state the dollar value of the abatement. Those asks have not moved. Reply comments in Docket 33709 are due on or before August 21, 2026, and a letter from a resident of this county goes on the state’s record rather than ours.12345678910