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More Than 500 Towns Restrict Builds As Councils Shutter Public Comment
Marshall Mayor Scott Wolfersberger told local news station WWMT that the city's police department contacted him on August 12 about the threat and that the investigation is ongoing. Councilor James Hackworth wrote in a social media post that members had received "a legitimate death threat" and that disagreement, protest, and voting the council out are all part of democracy. It's unclear whether the sender supports or opposes data centers, and no suspect has been identified to date.
Woodbury County is separately challenging the annexation in court. The council met a week late on August 20 and voted 3-2 against the moratorium, with Nelson calling officers into the room as members of the public and councilman Gene Monk objected. "We ask for a cool-down period for a year to research, then we can make an educated decision. We can let the people vote for it after that — do something different," Monk said. "It's too big of a decision for us five people [council members]."
Over in Box Elder County, Utah, Commissioner Lee Perry has said that he and fellow Commissioners Boyd Bingham and Tyler Vincent had received threats after voting through two resolutions for the Stratos project area, with an audience of roughly 500 chanting "shame" at the meeting.
Previous incidents show these are more than idle threats. In April, Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson had 13 rounds fired into his home after backing a rezoning, and Saline Township, Michigan, treasurer Jennifer Zink resigned in May citing threats over the 1.4GW Oracle and OpenAI campus that triggered moratoriums in at least 19 Michigan municipalities. Emporia, Kansas, moved its August 5 and August 19 commission meetings online and dropped public comment after its leaders were threatened.
Recent data published in the Soufan Center's July IntelBrief, which is based on a year of scraping X and Reddit, found hundreds of posts with threat language between July 2025 and July 2026, and a volume surge beginning in April that hasn't receded. Most violent threats in its dataset are targeted towards infrastructure rather than people, with posts naming council members and planning commissions a small minority. Many use memes, emojis, and misspellings to dodge moderation.
The center also found that each new incident now draws far more secondary amplification than it did earlier in the year. Emporia's mayor said the threats to his commission didn't appear to come from locals, and Salix, Emporia, and Marshall have all now canceled, moved, or restricted public meetings because of them, at a point when more than 500 local restrictions on data centers are in place nationwide.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @03:22PM (9 children)
Why do I consider this data center banning hysteria? Because we don't treat any other land use this strictly. It makes sense to compare the externalities of data centers to other uses of the land and regulate in a consistent, proportionate way. Are we going to similarly ban (sometimes indefinitely) agriculture, industrial sites, or even residential and commercial uses, for example?
There's only one drawback to data centers that can't be mitigated - power consumption. Even for that, one can require (large) data centers to provide their own power. You still have environmental impact of the power generation, but it's a much less significant problem than unplanned and unsupported demand on local electricity grids.
For everything else, you have regulation. Data centers too loud or too ugly? Use too much water? Regulation from the start of the project on and you don't have to worry about that.
Let's go through the three actual problems. First, bubble logic. Crudely, it's the idea that the AI market is expanding so rapidly that hasty, poorly thought-out business decisions now are better than thoughtful ones that take a bit longer and cost a bit more. The short term gain from the corner-cut project will by this logic more than pay for its long term costs. The same goes for the many other bad decisions that come out of this. One of the more costly bad decisions is the "epically terrible propaganda". In what other field is it a good idea to brag and exaggerate how dangerous and destructive your product is? How many jobs you'll eliminate? In bubble logic, the power to harm and destroy is the power to make lots of money. In the real world, it becomes one of the primary drivers for public resistance to data centers.
Finally, there's business thrashing. I am convinced that merely implementing sound accounting standards would pop the bubble just by itself: accelerated depreciation for computing assets, revealing liabilities, quid pro quo games (where a net zero exchange is viewed on the books as simultaneous increase in assets on both sides of the exchange), and other book-cooking gimmicks. There's the failing businesses that grasps at AI on their way down.
As I noted before, most of that goes away when the bubble pops. In the resulting recession, we can see what's left and build from that.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @03:50PM
The same people that cause all the bubbles. Government bailouts have made bubble popping a very profitable business for the perpetrators.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @04:03PM (3 children)
What a boob.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @04:26PM (2 children)
I sense you have an opinion? Want to let it out?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @08:39PM (1 child)
Yes, let's milk this for all it's worth.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Monday August 31, @02:27PM
Stealing from children now are we?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 31, @02:04PM (1 child)
LOL no.
It makes building giant shopping malls (future dead malls) look calm cool and collected, LOL.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 01, @02:20AM
Does it? Sure, we're probably looking at a couple orders of magnitude more juice. But they'll probably generate more economic value, have much smaller parking lots, comparable water usage (and less sewage!), less need for government services (traffic infrastructure, law enforcement, emergency services, less trash generation).
And the opposition is based on some pretty nutty assertions. For example, from the "more than 500 local restrictions" we have this:
Reading the linked story:
So it's just CO2 - no consideration of the relative harm of pollutants. That's such a Slashdot argument [slashdot.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01, @02:05PM (1 child)
Another round of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.
Maybe you are unable to see it before the bubble pops. Or maybe you are a beneficiary.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 02, @08:34AM
Did you post the other AC reply [soylentnews.org]?
It remains that we'll get a clearer picture of the economy and what AI infrastructure remains after "the same people" cash out - no matter how much socializing the losses happen. My view is that there's a lot of stuff we simply won't see until the bubble pops. That's been traditional for bubbles and part of why they are bubbles in the first place. After all, if it were easy from inside the herd to see the cliff that the herd is stampeding towards, then it probably wouldn't be a bubble in the first place.