LISTEN: Over the objections of many residents and the recommendation of its own planning and zoning board, city leaders in a Middle Georgia city approved a rezoning of a swath of timberland for a hyperscale data center. GPB's Grant Blankenship reports.
Over the objections of many residents and the recommendation of its own planning and zoning board, city leaders in the Middle Georgia community of Forsyth approved a special, conditional rezoning of a swath of timberland for a hyperscale data center.
"There's a reason why data centers want to come to the South," said Michael Griffin, who lives near the entrance to the 1,600-acre H& H Timberlands plot, during about an hour and a half of public comment ahead of the vote. "It's cheap land, and it's a sleepy town. What you’re doing, you’re taking money. They’re bribing you.
"You’re trading people’s lives," he said.
In filings with the state, developers of the proposed Forsyth Technology Campus estimate annual tax revenues of $224 million flowing to the city. That’s 19 times the city’s current annual revenue of the city of just under 5,000 people which, according to budget documents, spends every penny of revenue it takes in.
Former newspaper publisher George McCanless said, after talking about the finances of the deal with his neighbors, he was for the development.
"Since 2018, my property taxes have gone up 49%; that is more than double the rate of inflation," McCanless told the city council. "That kind of revenue can ease pressure on homeowners and help fund public services without continually raising property taxes."
County records show McCanless bought his home for just under $200,000 in 2008. Homes in the neighborhood list for around $1 million today.
Fletcher Sams, head of the Altamaha Riverkeeper organization, told city council members the financial windfall would come with environmental consequences, most stemming from Georgia Power’s coal-fired Plant Scherer, about 20 miles away from the data center site.
“You will continue to see fish consumption advisories for mercury in fish tissue for all surrounding water bodies, including Lake Juliette, Lake Tobesofkee, High Falls Lake and the Ocmulgee River,” Sams said, because of emissions from Plant Scherer.
An executive order by President Donald Trump recently exempted Plant Scherer and similar plants from a more stringent Biden-era mercury pollution rule. Georgia Power had been slated to close Plant Scherer before the data center boom. Now it and its sister facility, Plant Bowen in North Georgia, will continue to operate for the foreseeable future.
Sams also warned about new fine particulate pollution, the kind that makes old-fashioned smog — which, in turn, leads to respiratory illness — from the fleet of diesel-powered backup electrical generation currently proposed for the data center.
"Those generators are about the size of what y'all are sitting behind right there," Sams told the council, gesturing to their dais. "About an 18-wheeler size. A thousand of those."
Those generators would be run at least monthly just to ensure they would work should an emergency come.
Tye Hanna is one of the owners of the H&H Timberlands property. He explained why, from his perspective, the land was a good fit for a data center. First, there are the 500-kilovolt power lines running overhead, ripe to be tapped into for power. Then there are the water resources.
"The city of Forsyth is an interesting municipality in that sense," Hanna said. "It produces its own water. It has its own water plant, and it has contracts with surrounding counties to buy water from them as well. So it gets several bites of the apple there."
The city’s water withdrawals, permitted by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, are 4 million gallons per day, or just over half the projected needs for the data center.
Hanna tried to allay residents’ fears by telling them the zoning was only the first regulators’ step among dozens before a data center is built. The contours of those regulatory steps could change if any of a flurry of data center-related bills in the Georgia legislature pass this session.
