In the northeast corner of Troup County, a 437-acre plot of land on the outskirts of the 3,000-person town of Hogansville has become the center of debate between residents and their city officials as a developer vies to purchase the land and build a data center.
While there is still no publicly announced timeline for a data center, and a piece of land still needs to be zoned for industrial use in order for the data center to be constructed there, a small group of people have already raised objections because they’re concerned the data center would damage property values, eat up energy resources (including significant amounts of water) and raise utility bills.
Some residents also have taken issue with the city keeping the development plans secret for at least 18 months because a non-disclosure agreement was signed by city council and the mayor of Hogansville, according to Councilman Michael Taylor Jr.
“At every city council meeting, (councilmembers) talk about transparency; they use the word over and over again,” Roseanna Prado, Hogansville resident, told the Ledger-Enquirer during a meeting in her living room in November. “I’m not sure what their definition of transparency is, but mine certainly isn’t keeping something like this from the public.”
In October, Roseanna Prado’s husband, Al Prado, sent an open records request to the city of Hogansville requesting all documents about data centers. He did this after learning from anti-data center activist Gage Bailey, from neighboring LaGrange, who is an advocate for getting cities to pass legal restrictions on data centers.
The documents the Prados got back showed that Luis Matta, a developer from Fayetteville who works for Fertile Ground Investments LLC and sits on the Board of Directors for the Fayette County Development Authority, had communicated with the city and the Hogansville Development Authority to agree on a major land acquisition: 437 acres for $12,000 per acre, according to the documents.
Documents provided to the Ledger-Enquirer through an open records request confirmed Matta’s communication with the development authority.
The sale is contingent upon the land being rezoned from residential to industrial property, the records show.
Matta and the Fayette County Development Authority are overseeing development of one of the largest data center campus projects in Georgia.
The documents also showed a power study conducted by MEAG, the municipal electric company group for Hogansville, which assessed how feasible it would be to bring 600 megawatts of electricity online, which is how much energy the data center may need, according to MEAG documents obtained through a open records request.
Residents say that all they know about this proposal is the acreage and the amount of power needed.
“It’s infuriating,” said Paula Darden, a retired nurse who moved to Hogansville in 1967.
Since Prado got ahold of the documents, Burdette, Darden and the two LaGrange anti-data center leaders Cyndie Hutchings and Bailey, met with the city in early November. They say they still haven’t heard much from officials.
“We can’t even find out what the data center is, so that we can ask questions about what electricity type (will be used), (how much) water, how many diesel turbines are you going to have out there? We can’t ask specific questions about what’s going to happen at that data center, because we don’t know,” Darden said in the Prados’ living room.
Hogansville Mayor Jake Ayers said during a re-election debate that “there’s a lot of misinformation” about data centers, and didn’t directly answer a question about whether he supports or opposes them.
While Ayers could not make it to the meeting with Burdette, Darden, Hutchings and Bailey, City Manager Lisa Kelly and Taylor did attend.
When first elected to the city council in 2020, Taylor was 25, the youngest to ever serve in Hogansville’s history. Today, the 29-year-old is the lone councilman who has openly opposed the proposed data center and is open to passing a moratorium, which the group wants Hogansville to do.
“As of right now, I am not for it,” Taylor told the Ledger-Enquirer. “A lot of people have spoken out against it, and I’m big on representing the people who have trust in my leadership.”
Taylor also said the tax revenue from the data center deal with Fertile Grounds would bring about $400,000 per year, but he is concerned about the lack of jobs, people living nearby and emissions created from generators at the data center.
“At the end of the day, it’s only going to bring about 30 to 35 jobs,” he said. “There are people and a zoo across the street from where it would go. What type of emissions is it going to produce from different generators?” he rhetorically posed to the Ledger-Enquirer.
Taylor also said a moratorium makes sense if enough people are concerned about this. In September, LaGrange created a 180-day moratorium following Troup County’s 90-day moratorium.
Taylor’s view aligns with Mary Margaret Ware, another resident who was present at Prado’s living room gathering.
“Whatever development is done, whatever decisions this city council and mayor make, they need to make it for what’s best for the citizens that live here right now,” she said. “What is the best thing you can do to improve their life? Bringing in jobs is not necessarily the best thing for what we need.”
Ware left her hometown of Atlanta decades ago with her husband, who’s from Hogansville, and never looked back.
In Prado’s living room, a storied web of deeply rooted connections were shared, emblematic of the 3,000-person town. In just a few sentences of exchanges, history going back decades reveal just how small Hogansville is:
“Your father delivered my husband,” Ware joked to Darden.
“Paula’s mother-in-law was my second-grade teacher,” Burdette said. “My folks met here in 1956, and my mom taught Ellen (Davis) in high school for a year.”
“My dad and mother built the house two doors up, that’s where I was born,” Davis said. “These are where my roots are.”
“My dad and mother built that white house over there,” Darden said, as she pointed out Al Prado’s window. Al Prado and his wife Roseanna are the newest residents of the group, with just an 8-year tenure in their 1902 home on Main Avenue in Hogansville.
Hogansville has an annual Hummingbird Festival that attracts artisans and craftspeople, raising millions of dollars for the city, which is satisfactory to this group as far as development goes.
“All (the city government) thinks about is new rooftops and development without any thought about infrastructure, about planning, about roads,” Prado lamented. “On Hightower Road, there are generations of families out there.”
The homes and properties that surround the proposed data center site on Hightower Road are within Troup County, not the city of Hogansville.
“It is absolutely immoral to put a 500-acre data center in the middle of a rural residential area,” Darden said. “ … They don’t have a voice.”
Resident Tina Payton quickly formed an opinion on the data center after word got around about the documents Prado received from an open records request, and social media posts circulated about the project.
Payton’s property borders one of the two plots that comprise the 435-acre Hogansville land on Hightower Road, but she is a Troup County resident.
Her son and daughter live across the street and run a 30-acre zoo that attracts school children during field trips and people from all over the state who come to see their unique animals from all over the world.
Payton attended a city council meeting in early November after finding out about the possible data center development.
Payton and her husband moved in 2007 to escape industry and have a beef farm and contracting business, they said.
“I got a beautiful hill up there with a beautiful view,” Payton said, pointing to her property. “My thing is that, it’s not ever gonna be quiet or dark (if a data center comes).”
The land on Hightower Road that borders Payton was home to a land application system, also called a spray field, that sprayed treated city wastewater onto the field to help encourage a healthy sod farm, which according to Kelly, “did not work out.”
In 2020, the treated wastewater stopped spraying because the city created a new waste water treatment plant that gets discharged into Yellow Jacket Creek.
But for four years, the city hasn’t made a decision about what to do with the land.
“They don’t need to do anything with it,” Roseanna Prado said.
If any development happened on the land it would need to be decommissioned, according to Kelly. That would cost anywhere from $1 to $1.5 million dollars.
Kelly told the Ledger-Enquirer they did have an engineer come out and make suggestions about what could be done. One option was to build a solar farm.
The MEAG transmission power study for the data center concluded that there is currently no generation for 600 MW of power, according to Kelly. The city uses about 25 MW annually. But with the terms they have with MEAG they own 36 MW.
The study from MEAG indicates Hogansville would pay $300 million for this data center, with a customer bearing $153.75 million, and the facility would go into service four to five years after funding was secured.
Al Prado is concerned the infrastructure costs would be passed on to the power bills for people of Hogansville.
“Part of our concern is (the city) needs more help,” Burdette said.
All of the women present in Prado’s living room were at the council meeting the next day with petitions in hand, asking people who came to the council meeting to sign the petition that says no to the data center.
Bailey, at the forefront of the anti-data center movement in LaGrange, spoke at the Hogansville City Council meeting.
“I think that despite the NDAs and the trade secrets, there’s got to be a balance (of transparency),” he said. “There’s got to be a way to notify citizens as early as possible when something as big as this is being proposed, because that’s the right thing to do. How could you sit there and tell people from Hightower Road and look them in the eye and say they’re not going to lose their properties?”
Taylor told the Ledger-Enquirer that the city council and development authority got “out of” the NDA just before the election in an effort to be transparent.
“These people want to be here in Hogansville, and we need to make sure that leadership is not just about physical growth,” Bailey said. “It’s about preserving the integrity and the culture of what’s already been built, and to make sure that the legacy of Hogansville remains intact. And I ask all of you, what do you want Hogansville’s legacy to be?”
Ayers told Bailey he appreciated his input, and told the crowd that citizens of Hogansville could email feedback@cityofhogansville.org to share their comments and concerns. He also announced a town hall to discuss the data center on Dec. 2 at 7 p.m., after a council meeting, to express concerns.
The council has not put a zoning change on any upcoming agenda, which would need to be done before the data center could proceed.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.
