A note from the author: what follows is an article on how to keep a data center from being built in your community, after that you’ll find a one-page leave-behind you can print, fold, and hand to any elected official you meet with, or your neighbors, or any organization you want to inform on the subject, and a set of links to additional Existentialist Republic resources at the bottom.

Helen Messer found out a few weeks before the vote, when a developer announced plans to drop a 350,000-square-foot data center onto a 22-acre lot in Chesapeake, Virginia, a couple of hundred feet from her back yard on the other side of a small retention pond. The project would have been the first major data center in Hampton Roads, and Messer and her neighbors did not have a lobbyist, but they had each other and a church social hall where they met to organize within days of learning about the proposal.

They turned up at the planning commission, which voted six to one against the project after hearing nearly fifty residents testify against it, and then they turned up again at the city council, where the vote was seven to zero to reject the rezoning on June 17, 2025.

When the board lit up showing the unanimous vote, the chamber erupted, and Messer walked out and told a reporter she would sleep better than she had in a month. The model works, and this article explains how to do it where you live.

A data center is a warehouse full of computers that swallows millions of gallons of fresh water a day, burns through electricity at the rate of a mid-sized city, and dumps the heat, the noise, and the diesel exhaust onto whatever neighborhood happens to sit next door.

One facility can consume up to five million gallons of water every day, pulled straight from the same drinking water reservoirs that serve the surrounding towns, in a country where the Colorado River is running dry and entire counties are rationing what comes out of the tap.

The power demand is worse, because data centers are now the single fastest-growing source of new electricity consumption in the United States, and most of that electricity still comes from coal and natural gas, which means every new facility is a new commitment to burning fossil fuels for decades.

Diesel backup generators sit on site and run on the worst days, throwing particulate matter into the air that nearby residents breathe, pollution that the medical literature ties to heart disease, lung disease, and cancer. Cooling systems run twenty-four hours a day, and one Loudoun County resident measured the noise at 70 decibels on his front porch, equivalent to a vacuum cleaner that never turns off.

Julie Bolthouse at the Piedmont Environmental Council, who has spent years studying these facilities and the harms they generate, put it plainly when a Winchester resident asked her what setback distance would protect a home: “Based on everything I’ve seen from data centers, what I’ve continued to reckon is that they shouldn’t be next to homes at all.”

All of this is so a handful of companies can sell AI services that, by the admission of the people building them, may never turn a profit.

This is happening right now in Loudoun County, Virginia, in rural Georgia, in the suburbs of Phoenix, and in dozens of other places where the land is cheap, the power is available, and the local tax base is hungry enough to wave through a project before residents find out it exists. If your community has those three ingredients, you are on the industry’s list.

Other countries have already done the math and pulled the emergency brake. Ireland imposed a de facto moratorium on new data center connections around Dublin in 2022, after the industry’s electricity consumption hit 22 percent of the country’s total, more than every home in Ireland combined, and the Netherlands restricted hyperscale data centers to a small number of designated sites in the far north of the country, while Singapore banned new data centers outright in 2019 and only began permitting them again under strict efficiency rules.

The argument the industry makes against a ban, that it is too radical, falls apart the moment you look at the rest of the world, where entire national governments have looked at the same harms and said no.

The legal authority to zone, permit, and ban industrial development belongs to your city council and your state legislature, which means a small group of organized neighbors can shut the door before it opens.

Here is the plan.

The first thing we do is make consistent contact with every elected official above us in the local chain of command, at minimum once per month, starting with the city council member who represents our district and working upward through the county commissioner, the mayor, our state representative, and our state senator.

We tell each one of them in plain words that the fastest way to lose our votes forever is to let a data center land in our town or our state, and we use whatever channels suit us best, whether that is a phone call into the office, an email to the staff, a direct message on a public social media account, or a scheduled in-person meeting. Stacking several channels in the same month moves the needle further than relying on any single one.

Frequency gets calibrated to how much we care, so someone who cares deeply about this can commit to five minutes a day, five days a week, for a year, while someone with less time available can land on once a week or once a month and still register, so long as the contact keeps arriving on schedule.

A single angry phone call disappears into the office voicemail, but the same voice showing up every week for a year becomes a name the staff knows and a constituent the elected official cannot ignore.

The ask itself has to be specific, because we are not asking for a study or a working group, we are asking for a complete and total ban on data centers in our municipality, written into law and passed in the next legislative session, with the elected official’s public endorsement on the record.

The ask needs to be recorded somewhere verifiable and tied to a concrete legislative session, because anything softer than that disappears into the routine machinery elected offices use to manage constituent complaints, and it dies there quietly.

Then we hand them the leave-behind, which means that when we walk into a meeting with a council member or a state representative, we hand them a one-page document that lays out the harms and the demand on a single sheet of paper.

We have built one for you, and it sits at the bottom of this article, formatted for printing and folding, and for contacts that happen through email or social media, we attach it or link to it directly. Something concrete needs to remain in their hands or their inbox after the conversation ends, which is how lobbyists move legislation through statehouses every day, and we can use the same method to defend our own communities.

This works because city councils and county commissions answer to a much smaller voting base than members of Congress do, which means a few dozen committed constituents showing up monthly can change a vote at the municipal level, and a few hundred organized neighbors operating on the five-minutes-a-day schedule can turn a town from welcome mat into the kind of wall the industry stops bothering to climb.

The numbers back that up, because Data Center Watch, a research project run by the AI intelligence firm 10aLabs, found that sixteen data center projects were delayed or outright rejected nationally between May 2024 and March 2025, almost entirely because residents organized and showed up.

The data center buildout is already happening, and the companies financing these facilities will not stop on their own, and the federal government is not going to protect our water, our air, or our climate.

The fight runs through city hall and the statehouse, because that is where the authority to zone, permit, and ban industrial development actually sits, and we use that authority, or we lose this fight by default.

The One-Sheet (Leave-Behind for Meetings)

BAN DATA CENTERS IN OUR COMMUNITY A constituent demand for legislative action

The Ask

Pass legislation in the next session that imposes a complete and total ban on the construction or permitting of data centers within our municipality. Endorse this legislation publicly and on the record.

Why Data Centers Must Be Banned

They drain our water.

• A single large data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the daily use of more than 16,000 average U.S. households.

• Loudoun County, Virginia’s data centers used approximately 900 million gallons of water in 2023 alone.

• Most data centers cool their equipment with drinking-water-grade potable water drawn directly from local utilities, which then becomes unavailable for households and farms.

They burn fossil fuels at industrial scale.

• Data centers are now the single fastest-growing source of new electricity demand in the United States, and most of that power still comes from coal and natural gas, locking in decades of additional fossil fuel combustion.

• Neighborhoods near dense data center clusters have seen residential electricity prices climb 267% over five years, because the families living nearby get charged for the grid upgrades these facilities require.

They poison the air.

• Backup generators that run on diesel and natural gas emit particulate matter that the medical literature links to cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and cancer.

• Federal authorities have authorized data center generators to run during peak demand events, releasing pollutants into communities where homes and schools sit close by.

They destroy quality of life.

• Cooling systems and generators produce constant low-frequency industrial noise that residents report shakes their homes, ruins their sleep, and raises their blood pressure.

• Larger industrial generators reach 100 decibels, equivalent to a jackhammer, and the noise can last for hours or days at a time.

They strain emergency services.

• Two Amazon data centers in Ohio called the fire department 84 times in a single year.

• Those same two facilities paid zero dollars in property taxes.

They threaten grid stability.

• In early 2025, a single fluctuation caused 1,500 megawatts of data center demand to swap to onsite generation, sending a destabilizing surge through the East Coast power grid.

• Some data centers operate under secret special-rate contracts with public utilities, paying below-market rates while existing residential customers subsidize the difference.

They operate in secret.

• Researchers at the University of Mary Washington found that 25 of 31 Virginia communities with proposed or approved data centers had nondisclosure agreements with local officials, which kept residents in the dark until projects were already approved.

Below you’ll find links to Existentialist Republic training and educational resources, with a free version of everything available.

But just so you know, we need 10 people to become subscribers every article and we have only hit that number 1 of the last 3 days despite having robust and growing readership.

Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent.

But if you can manage it, will you become an activist member of the Existentialist Republic and keep this all alive for your fellow makers of change?

Buy Some Coffee For Us

Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download

Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download

Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download

Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download

Activism Journal

More Free downloads:

Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass

Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative

All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills

The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare

Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure

Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross

Bumper Stickers