On August 2, the panel on The Voice of Alabama Politics spent a segment on Project Red Clay, the hyperscale data center proposed in this county, and put its own title on the segment: Sacred Ground. The panel was not against data centers, and said so. What it was against was this location, and the reason it gave was the price of the land: "I'm all for data centers because I use a lot of data. But, Josh, this is sacred ground, and this is not where we should be building because the land is cheap."
We agree that the land is cheap. This dispatch is about why it is cheap, and about who has been listening to the people who live on it.
In March 1965, U.S. Highway 80 carried the Selma to Montgomery march through Lowndes County. The SNCC Digital Gateway records that roughly 80 percent of the county was African American and that there was one Black registered voter.
The marchers needed fields to sleep in, and the fields open to them belonged to Black farmers who paid for opening them. The Rosie Steele property was Campsite 2, and the National Park Service records that afterward local vendors refused to supply her store. The Robert Gardner farm was Campsite 3. The Park Service's account of that ground says White residents opposed to the march tried to bribe the family, that neighbors "threatened the family with violence, and phone and power lines to the property were cut," and that a National Guardsman patrolling the area found a White neighbor with a scoped rifle pointed at the farm and told him he would be the prime suspect if anything happened to the family. The Gardners let the marchers stay. That farm is half a mile from the proposed site, down Highway 80, by al.com's reporting.
On March 25, 1965, the last day of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five who had driven down from Detroit, was shot and killed on this highway while driving a civil rights worker back toward Montgomery. The Park Service gives her place of death as Lowndes County.
Then came the reprisals. In 1966 Tent City went up in this county, and the Park Service records that it "provided shelter for black families evicted from their homes by white landowners in retaliation for attempting to register to vote," and that it "faced regular harassment from 'night riders,' hostile White vigilantes who would drive through, firing shots into the camp multiple times a week." Out of that organizing came the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the independent Black political party local people built with SNCC. Bob Mants helped build it, and in 2022 the county's stretch of Highway 80 was renamed the Robert Mants Memorial Highway.
That is the reason the land is cheap. Land is cheap where people were kept poor, and in this county that was done deliberately, on this road, within living memory. In 2015 the Park Service's own foundation document for the trail listed among its planning issues "increasing concerns about viewshed encroachment from incompatible development along US Highway 80." That is not a finding about this project, which did not exist then, and it creates no federal review nexus. It is the federal government noticing, eleven years ago, what this road is.
Now the project. The construction stormwater permit the state issued on July 8, 2026 puts the property at 1,043.91 acres, and al.com reported on August 9 that the project has grown to 1,050. The plan describes about 3.01 million square feet of buildings. The end user has not been named. The water contract, the electric-service agreement, and the cost-allocation study are not public, and the dollar value of the abatement has never been stated. Neighbors of the site learned the project existed through reporting rather than through notice. At the June 3 open house, 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.
Cloverleaf has told other communities what it does when it is not wanted. In an email released under Michigan's Freedom of Information Act, Development Principal Michael Evans wrote of a site the company walked away from: "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." The company kept that standard in Greenleaf, Wisconsin, where it withdrew the day the village board was to discuss the proposal. It kept it in Dundee, Michigan, where it dropped the plan after the council moved to block village water. Troy, Illinois rejected its preferred site and then wrote a moratorium.
Lowndes County has loudly said no, with over 1,000 residents, better than one in ten people in the county, having signed the petition. Residents filled the Charles Smith Building to standing room in April. Yet the project is still here. The company's policy was applied in Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois. It has not been applied to the Robert Mants Memorial Highway, and the company has not explained the difference.
The county's own answer is thinner still. In May, residents formally requested the records of the Lowndes County Economic Development Commission, the body that recruited the project, and the county's own newspaper reported those requests went unanswered under the headline "Commission resists transparency amid growing data center opposition." The LCEDC has no written conflict-of-interest policy. Its chairman also sits on the board of the water authority that would serve the site, its vice chairman is the chairman of the county commission itself, and its secretary is an Alabama Power employee. Residents asked both men to recuse themselves from any vote on the project.
At the May 26 meeting Chairman Charlie King Jr. said three times, on the public recording, that he would not vote for a 30-year abatement: "I would not vote to give no 30-year tax evasion." Minutes later Vice Chairman Dickson Farrior moved to deny any abatement to the project, and the county attorney said on the record that there is nothing inherently illegal about denying it. The motion failed two to two with one abstention. Chairman King voted no. A vote of no on a motion to deny decides nothing; it leaves the abatement available to be granted later. The promise and the roll call are the same meeting, minutes apart, and this county was given both.
On July 27 the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council, on behalf of the Alabama Rivers Alliance and Protect Lowndes County, filed a records request with the Commission covering ten categories of documents, including any confidentiality agreements and the minutes of every meeting where the project was discussed. That same evening, after residents spoke against the project, the Commission entered executive session and returned only to adjourn. It should not take two national legal organizations to ask a county commission for its own minutes.
Alabama Power is not a bystander here. Its employee holds the secretary's seat on the development body that recruited the project, and the project is reported to have asked the company for roughly 1,500 megawatts. Residents have been assured their bills are safe. The document that would let a ratepayer test that assurance is not one they can read: in the one large-load data center contract Alabama Power has filed with the Public Service Commission, for a different project in Jefferson County, the public version withholds the contract term, the customer's contract capacity, the pricing, the required financial security, the load-buildup period, the annual energy thresholds, and the minimum-bill terms. The company says that contract recovers all incremental costs and puts downward pressure on rates. Every figure that would let anyone check that sentence is redacted from it.
So residents are asked to take an assurance on faith, and a reader deciding how much faith to extend is entitled to the company's public record. In 2018 a federal jury convicted a partner at the law firm Balch & Bingham and a Drummond Company executive of bribing a state legislator to oppose an EPA cleanup in majority-Black neighborhoods of North Birmingham; the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog citing court records, reported that Alabama Power contributed at least $30,000 in 2015 to the group through which that legislator was paid. Alabama Power was not charged in the case and prosecutors accused it of nothing. That same year the state environmental agency fined the company $1.25 million over groundwater contamination at coal ash sites beside five of its plants, based on the company's own testing. In 2024 the EPA denied Alabama's coal ash permit program, the first state program it had ever denied. And the NAACP's 2012 report Coal Blooded gave failing environmental-justice grades to two Alabama Power plants and graded the parent Southern Company an F, eleventh worst in the nation.
On rates, Inside Climate News reported in December that the Public Service Commission approved the formula that sets Alabama Power's rates in 1982, and that "that was the last time Alabama Power held a formal rate case that nearly all other states require." The same reporting found the company's customers "shouldered the highest total electric bills in the country last year."
Tommy Tuberville wants to be governor of the state this county sits in. On July 14, at a conference in Opelika, he dismissed concerns that data centers harm the climate, saying "It makes too much noise. It's going to ruin the climate, bull crap," and said opposition to data centers was coming from China. This county's own newspaper answered him in print and reported that he did not address Lowndes County's situation directly.
Adrian Johnson, a local judge who lives near the proposed site, gave al.com the answer to that on August 9: "We're told if you don't get behind this development, you're in league with a Chinese communist. Well, I haven't seen any communists in Lowndes County, and I haven't seen Tommy Tuberville either."
Here is who the opposition actually is. It is John Urquhart, who bought 230 acres here to leave to his grandchildren and who told al.com he has voted Republican for a long time: "This property was going to be my legacy to them, and now there's this monstrosity that could be going up a hundred yards away." It is the family of Bob Mants, who wrote to the Commission in May that this land is not disposable. It is Charles Steele Jr., the former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who wrote "Build it. Just not there." It is more than 1,000 petition signers in a county of about 9,300 people. Not one of them is China.
The NAACP has not taken a position on this project. It has spoken about the pattern, in this state, within the year. Opposing a data center in Bessemer last September, Benard Simelton, president of the NAACP Alabama State Conference, wrote: "The pattern of targeting Black communities for environmentally hazardous projects must end, and it must end here."
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.
The specific asks have not changed. Name the tenant before any vote. Publish the executed water contract. Publish the electric-service agreement and the cost-allocation study. State the dollar value of the abatement. Answer the records request in writing, as the law requires. The initial comment window in Docket 33709 has closed, but reply comments 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.
And we are asking the Lowndes County Commission to say so 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. What it carries is a signal, and this company has already put in writing what it does with one. Greenleaf never took a vote. Residents organized, the company spoke with village leadership, and it announced 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. Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois each put something on the record. Lowndes County has put nothing.
Sixty-one years ago people walked this road, slept in these fields, and one of them was killed on this asphalt, to establish that the people who live on cheap land are not cheap. Rosie Steele knew the price of saying yes to the marchers and paid it in her own store. This Commission has not yet said the price of the abatement.
The land is cheap. The road is not.12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849