AZFamily reported that on August 26 the Pinal County Board of Supervisors voted four to one against rezoning land south of Eloy for a data center campus. The developer, Vermaland, had already cut the proposal from 59 buildings to 11. It did not matter. A neighbor named Christine Wyman told the station that her HOA was never notified and that the community did not find out until several meetings had already passed.
That last detail is the whole story. By the time residents learned what was coming, the only role left for them was opposition.
Anonymous projects lose
Five days later, Attorney General Kris Mayes called on the legislature and the governor to pause approvals of new data centers statewide, citing water stress and rising electricity costs. She pointed to a 2025 Ceres analysis estimating that water demand could climb more than 450 percent if every planned greater Phoenix project gets built. Chandler’s council turned one down unanimously late last year. KJZZ has reported that Tucson and Gilbert are pushing for stronger community engagement rules before applications move.
It is easy to read all of that as a straight resource fight. Arizona has less Colorado River water than it used to and a lot of new load headed for the grid. That argument is real and it is not going away.
But it does not explain the pattern. Projects with close to identical water and power profiles are getting different answers from different rooms. What separates them is not the engineering. It is whether anybody in the room had heard of the project before they were asked to approve it.
The pro forma has a line item nobody funds
Land, entitlement counsel, civil, geotech, utility studies, traffic. All budgeted, all scheduled. Public communication gets whatever is left, usually a mailer thirty days out and a consultant hired the week after the first bad meeting.
That order is backwards. KJZZ has also reported that applications filed under non-disclosure agreements have fed public distrust of the entire category. The NDA protects a site assembly, which is a real interest. It also guarantees that the first thing a community learns about a project is that somebody was working to keep it from them. You do not walk that back with a rendering and a jobs number.
A project that arrives anonymous has already made its opening argument, and the argument was that the neighbors were not entitled to know.
Sequence, not spend
The fix is not a campaign. It is order of operations. Name the project. Say who is behind it, what it does, what it draws in water and power, and what it pays into the district, in plain numbers, before anyone has to file a records request. Show the massing from the road at the height a neighbor will actually stand, not from a drone position no human occupies. Put a person’s name on it who will answer a phone.
None of that is expensive anymore. The production cost of doing this well has collapsed. We run batch enhancement across architectural renderings, we build collateral through InDesign scripting, and we built Hoowee, our own animation app, so a short explainer video lands around six dollars instead of a production budget. What none of that decided was what to say, when to say it, and who says it first. That is still judgment, and judgment is the part that moves a vote.
Unfamiliar is not hostile
Developers keep describing this market as hostile. It is not hostile. It does not know you. A community that understands what you are building, on what schedule, with what draw, can still decide it does not want you, and that is a legitimate outcome and a fair fight to lose.
What is happening instead is that good projects and bad ones are losing the same way, on the same grounds, because they all showed up looking identical and unannounced. The pause Mayes is asking for may or may not pass. The one the neighborhoods have already imposed is working fine without it.
If your entitlement schedule runs eighteen months and your communications plan starts at month sixteen, you do not have a communications plan. You have a press release for a vote you already lost.
