New lawsuit alleges unfair secrecy around Effingham data center

A group of plaintiffs is asking a judge to declare that the Effingham County Industrial Development Authority unfairly did public business in private and to throw out the agency’s deals with OpenAI affiliate Octans Georgia for a data center near Rincon.

Five county residents plus the nonprofit environmental group One Hundred Miles allege that the county development authority didn’t provide proper notice or a meaningful agenda for the key July board vote that bound the community’s land to the maker of ChatGPT software and granted the company a 50% property tax break.

The plaintiffs, represented by counsel from the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center, also claim that the authority has failed to publicly discuss the sale of land to Octans or to hand over information about the transaction.

“Georgia’s public process rules exist because communities should not learn about major decisions only after deals have been negotiated behind closed doors,” said SELC attorney Zachary Henneesee, in a press release announcing the lawsuit filed in Effingham County Superior Court. “The Effingham County Industrial Development Authority must follow the law and give the public a real opportunity to be heard.”

The development authority “respects the legal process and will carefully review the allegations once it receives formal notice,” an authority spokesperson said via email Monday afternoon. “It would be inappropriate to comment on the claims before the ECIDA and its legal counsel have had an opportunity to review the filing.”

The lawsuit comes as the county commission has given itself more time to review Octans’ plan for the roughly 1,440-acre site. A vote was originally set for the commission’s regularly scheduled meeting on Sept. 15, the same day the conservative AI Data Center Revolt bus rolled into town and speakers protested the secrecy around the deal. Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock made the same charges about secrecy last month, when he visited Effingham County and called for a data center moratorium in the state.

The county development authority has spent tens of thousands of dollars on countering public anger about the data center, which will use as much electricity as about 2 million houses, generated at thirsty and polluting power plants.

A separate lawsuit alleges that the county itself skipped a required public review of the zoning rules that have paved the way for Octans to plan a data center.

This article first appeared on The Current and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.