The detail that construction equipment was on the site within weeks of the lawsuit, moving under a state permitting path that bypassed the township's vote entirely, is the most important sentence in this piece and it goes by too fast. The question it raises is not whether the data center should be built. It is whether a five-person board's 4-1 vote against a rezoning request means anything at all when a developer can route around it at the state level. That is not a technology question, but a representation question. The people governed by that decision did not get a say in the outcome, and the process that was supposed to give them one turned out to be a formality. That pattern, once established, applies to the next development and the one after that.
And speaking of representation, that is part of Civik's mission, to connect constituents with legislators and make their voices heard, in a non-partisan way.
Adding this update from ChatGPT about China's potential influence: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/10/openai-china-ai-data-centers-report-00957612
https://fortune.com/2026/09/18/ai-data-centers-stranded-assets-silicon-belt/
The above is a side of the issue no one is talking about!
https://sharonlawrence.substack.com/p/issue-insights-artificial-intelligence-cb0
See my 4 part series on AI ... I cover the good, the bad & the ugly
The detail that construction equipment was on the site within weeks of the lawsuit, moving under a state permitting path that bypassed the township's vote entirely, is the most important sentence in this piece and it goes by too fast. The question it raises is not whether the data center should be built. It is whether a five-person board's 4-1 vote against a rezoning request means anything at all when a developer can route around it at the state level. That is not a technology question, but a representation question. The people governed by that decision did not get a say in the outcome, and the process that was supposed to give them one turned out to be a formality. That pattern, once established, applies to the next development and the one after that.
And speaking of representation, that is part of Civik's mission, to connect constituents with legislators and make their voices heard, in a non-partisan way.