Divided over data centers

“The U.S. is now spending more on data center construction than public transportation infrastructure,” Bloomberg reported earlier this month.

The data center boom has upended the American political landscape, connecting people from all kinds of ballot leanings while shining a light on local politics like never before. As more companies and individuals bet on artificial intelligence systems to power their websites, work and even schools, more infrastructure is required for AI models to compute around-the-clock requests.

For decades, states have competed with one another to court data center investment. Trade unions have clamored to build the private infrastructure for technology companies worth billions, or even trillions, of dollars while local opposition groups have continuously raised concerns about electricity use, environmental harm and whether the touted benefits of property taxes and jobs are worth the trade-off of losing massive swathes of land.

Enter businesses such as CyrusOne, a company that has built data centers for the better part of the 2000s, including dozens already operating across the globe. Now, it is securing deals to build out data centers that are dozens of times bigger than the company used to build, including a roughly $2 billion, 1,200-acre site for the U.S. Army in Utah announced this spring, as AI models demand far more servers than traditional cloud computing.

In April, the Sangamon County Board approved a conditional permitted use to allow zoning for a data center to be constructed on 280 acres of agriculturally zoned land, just 15 days after tabling the proposal following hours of public comment mostly opposing the project.

---

Concerns about the process

Board members and proponents of the area’s first hyperscale data center have said the proposal from CyrusOne introduced in November is in accordance with the zoning ordinance the county passed in July 2025 to formally allow data centers.

The two-page ordinance, Chapter 17.39 of Sangamon County Code, was quietly introduced last spring and passed the County Board without issue in July 2025. It offers fairly simple regulations for a complex industry. The code is much more limited than other zoning codes – more than 10 times shorter than those governing solar and wind projects – and even several hundred words shorter than the county’s public comment code.

Asked if he thinks the county’s code is comprehensive, Board Chair Andy Van Meter said the board is in the process of improving the ordinance.

“I think it tries to be (comprehensive); any government regulation can always be improved,” he told Illinois Times. “Over the course of those discussions, we learned about a number of improvements that I think the board is in the process of making.”

Amendments to the data center ordinance have remained tabled in committee since April.

Emails obtained through FOIA by The Coalition for Springfield’s Utility Future, a group of Sangamon County residents opposed to the project, show CyrusOne was communicating with county officials before the county committees began discussing zoning guidelines for data centers.

The emails show a representative of energy company Swift Current Energy, which owns and operates Double Black Diamond Solar farm, connecting CyrusOne and county zoning staff in February 2025 for a meeting one month later.

During the April 7 County Board meeting, then-District 12 board member Marc Ayers, a Democrat, pressed CyrusOne officials about how long they had been planning the project in Sangamon County.

Bradd Hout, CyrusOne’s location and power strategy director, told Ayers he couldn’t remember a specific date but said it was around the middle of 2025.

“We were made aware of this opportunity – it wasn’t part of a broader strategy to say, ‘Let’s go target Sangamon County.’ We are brought opportunities daily from people who have a very firm understanding of infrastructure,” Hout said. “That was maybe a few months before we submitted the application for rezoning (in October 2025). There’s a number of months of due diligence where we had to do field work, some preliminary survey civil engineering, those sorts of things. I would say it’s probably sometime in the middle of 2025.”

Ayers asked Hout if he knew CyrusOne was “coming here before July ’25?”

“Marc, we don’t know. I cannot speak to your own zoning determination process. It was an unanimously approved data center ordinance, because there was not enough awareness or engagement – I’m sorry,” Hout replied. “We’ve run through the regulations and the additional regulations that we’re complying with.”

Joel Benoit, assistant state’s attorney and the board’s legal adviser, told the board months earlier that instituting a moratorium could open the county to a lawsuit from CyrusOne or landowners, who could argue the proposal falls in line with the Sangamon County data center code. In February, a lawyer representing CyrusOne told board members “it probably would be legally inappropriate” to delay a vote on the proposal.

Saline, a small township of 2,000 residents in Michigan whose elected officials were opposed to a data center project, was sued by landowners and developers last year. The township ultimately settled, and developers broke ground this month on a nearly 600-acre data center.

Logan County failed to approve a broad ordinance to allow data centers in June, one month after approving a moratorium.

Tara Bergschneider is a Democrat running for District 7, the area where the CyrusOne project is slated to be built, and where Double Black Diamond Solar Farm opened last year. She has based her campaign on opposition to both data centers and encroaching solar farms and said the decision to institute an ordinance about the data center industry without public input effectively put the cart before the horse.

“This is manufactured pressure,” she said. “It’s caused division in our community. I don’t think there’s anything very fruitful that’s really come of this.”

Bergschneider also publicly accused Van Meter of asking current District 7 board member Craig Hall to resign so Van Meter could appoint Republican candidate Richard King to the board as an incumbent for the November general election.

“I guess I consider (King) a friend, but I’m not in any sense a close friend of his. I’ve only gotten to know him through politics,” Van Meter told IT, but questioned how “being friends with somebody is a now a bad thing.”

Van Meter said he approached Hall last year in an effort to get him to run again.

“My conversations with Craig were focused around trying to encourage him to run again,” he said. “We generally support our incumbents, and I told Craig that we would support him if he chose to run again.”

Hall, who is also a Republican, told IT that Van Meter chose his words carefully when they spoke last year.

“He wanted to know what my future was going to be and if I wasn’t going to be on the board, could I look at options of not being on the board, but it was carefully worded,” Hall said. “He never asked me directly (to resign), but I pretty much understood what the conversation was.”

Hall said his philosophy of taking up public office would not allow him to resign anyway.

“Unless you’re moving for your job or something personal, when you run for office, you should serve that whole term. I don’t believe in leaving in the middle of a term so that politicians can place somebody in that chair. I think the people out here (in District 7) ought to choose who sits in that chair,” he said.

When Illinois Times first broke the news of the CyrusOne proposal last October, Hall told a reporter he hadn’t formed an opinion about it, as most of his constituents knew little to nothing about the project yet. As public outcry increased, Hall began to speak out against it and made an impassioned plea at the March 23 County Board meeting to table the vote on the CyrusOne project.

Nearly 700 people packed the BOS Center for that meeting, and prior to the public comment period, a vote to table the proposal failed. Hall requested a second vote to table the resolution following hours of public comment and rebuttals, explaining that the governing body for his township had little interest in any incentives CyrusOne could offer.

“I asked our board of trustees to our township, ‘Do we want to approach the company to see if there’s anything we could benefit?’ and I was really proud when they said, ‘We’re not for sale.’ I would like to ask this board to listen tonight, and I would like to ask if we could take another vote to table this, please.”

Just two weeks later, the County Board held another packed meeting at the convention center, this time approving the CyrusOne project 17-10 despite Hall making a motion to again postpone the final vote.

More than 60 people had signed up to speak, but this time Van Meter announced he would not waive the one-hour limit on public comments, as had been done previously. Hall told Illinois Times that limiting public comment diminished trust in the board.

“We should have let people speak, without a doubt. Some even said that this was the biggest issue this county ever has had to face, and you only allowed X amount of minutes per person and squished them in. I don’t think I’ll ever understand that,” he said.

Van Meter, who cast the tie-breaking vote to limit public comment at the April 7 meeting, said he doesn’t regret his decision.

“Yes, I do (stand by my decision), and I haven’t really experienced much of a backlash on that,” he said.

“That meeting came after six months of discussion and 14 public meetings – and it was really time to make a decision. We were basically just hearing the same thing from both sides of the of the argument,” Van Meter told IT.

Frustrated residents, including Bergschneider, say the board muzzled its constituents by denying an extension of public comment.

“As the chair, it is his responsibility, it is his duty to represent the people, and he chose to shut them up,” she said.

Hall reiterated that local government should listen to what its constituents have to say.

“Why would you not want to hear the opinions of people? Whether it be coincidence or intention, more people spoke in favor of the data center that night than concerns for the data center (before comments were cut off),” he said.

---

Concerns about zoning

Hall told IT the CyrusOne proposal would not have survived a standard zoning process.

“You’re a farmer, you buy farmland and you’re speculating to develop it, and if this went through a regular zoning – not a conditional permitted use – it would not hit any of the marks compared to any other zoning cases, whether it be a modular home or a stick-built home, because there’s no comparables to (a data center),” he said.

Cathy Bettis and her business, Joette Kennel, are just one mile from the site of the data center. Her parents had to go through a similar zoning process, getting conditional permitted use of agricultural land, in order to get the dog kennel approved more than 15 years ago.

She said that massive data centers, like the one she’ll soon be able to see from her front yard, should be reserved for industrial land, not agricultural areas.

“I’m trying to protect my livelihood here. Nobody wants to come talk to me about it or anything,” Bettis told IT of her attempts to contact County Board members outside of her own, District 7’s Hall. “Nobody’s talked to me, nobody’s asked me how I feel. Nobody has answered my emails with concerns – I have sent a couple very detailed emails and they don’t answer them.”

Bettis brought her concerns to the Sangamon County Zoning and Land Use Committee’s May 21 meeting.

“I just wish one of you, two of you, could be in my shoes and understand. I’m just a girl that was raised on a farm that loves dogs and wants to take care of people’s dogs,” she said when it was her turn to address the committee.

After the meeting concluded, a few board members spoke with Bettis out in the hallway. Bettis, like many others, told IT she’s been following county-level politics more closely since hearing about the data center proposal last fall.

About 10 miles north in New Berlin, farmers Justin and Desiree King (no relation to Richard King) are also opposed to the data center.

The Kings experienced their own challenges with obtaining proper zoning from the County Board when they decided to build a house on the farmland they already owned so their family members could be closer to one another. They said it was a four-year process to build the home through carefully coordinating with family members who purchased the land and consolidated parcels to avoid a “flag lot.” They moved to the farmland in 2023, though the property is in their company’s name.

“To this day, me and my wife don’t even own our home,” Justin King said. “We could not get a mortgage. It was a major financial burden. We had to extract the money from the farming operation to build the house, but we thought it was so important for (everyone) to be out here with us, we went ahead and did it anyway.”

The Kings are bothered by how the data center project was allowed on land zoned for agricultural use, in light of the challenges they faced building a house on farmland.

“The zoning is to protect us from things like this, from industrial complexes being put where they don’t belong,” Justin told IT. “That’s exactly what zoning is for, and it seems like if you have enough money the board is willing to overlook that.”

The Kings said they “don’t feel represented at all” by their County Board member, District 1’s Harry Fraase Jr, a Republican who voted for the data center. They said they reached out to Fraase Jr. numerous times prior to the vote.

“I got one response that said, ‘Thank you,’ that was all,” Desiree said.

Fraase did not respond to a call from an IT reporter seeking comment.

---

Will incumbents be affected?

The Kings’ frustration, shared by a number of Sangamon County residents who have showed up to County Board meetings and posted on social media to express their concerns, has turned into opposition for board members who voted for the data center.

“We’re hoping someone runs against him,” Desiree said. “I’m ready to support anyone opposing someone that voted for the data center.”

So far, no other candidates have filed for Fraase’s seat. The Republican-controlled board has 17 seats up for grabs this November, but June 1 was the deadline for major party candidates to file. A dozen districts have unopposed candidates – mostly Republican incumbents.

The Democrats have fielded zero candidates since the March primary, which occurred three weeks prior to the county approving CyrusOne’s conditional permitted use. The party has struggled to navigate the ongoing data center debate, caught between potentially thwarting future trade union support and angering local constituencies who believe these developers and data center operators are taking advantage of their communities.

The deadline for a write-in candidate to file a notarized “declaration of intent” with the proper election authority is Sept. 3.

Justin showed IT a State Journal-Register article from July 2018 which quoted District 9 board member Tom Madonia Jr. citing a petition that received more than 200 signatures as a reason to deny a zoning variance for an agricultural seed business.

“This is democracy at its best,” Madonia said at the time.

During the public comment section of the May 12 Sangamon County Board meeting, Justin read a passage of the 2018 SJ-R story to the County Board.

He told Illinois Times that the project that was denied zoning based on neighbors’ protests was an agricultural business seeking to locate in an agricultural area, which “makes a little more sense” than a data center seeking to build on farmland. Justin also questioned why Madonia cited public input as swaying the previous zoning decision but didn’t take it into account this time.

“He cared about what the people of Sangamon County wanted on July 10, 2018, but today he doesn’t,” Justin said of Madonia.

Madonia told Illinois Times that while he respects King’s opinion, “he’s comparing apples to oranges,” arguing the hundreds of people who signed the 2018 petition were verifiable, nearby residents concerned about heavy truck traffic. “Unlike the data center, where I have had zero, maybe two, three people – maybe – that live within a mile to two miles from the area contact me. That is it.”

Madonia also cited a local school district’s opposition to the 2018 seed business, calling the proposal “a recipe for disaster.”

Asked if he would support a data center project in his own district, Madonia said such a project isn’t likely since existing transmission lines around his district aren’t strong enough to carry the power load a hyperscale data center would require.

“I’d have to see where it’s at; again, this one is in the middle of nowhere. There’s already a (nearly) 5,000-acre Double Black Diamond Solar Farm that’s there,” he said.

So far, nearly 1,700 people have signed a petition “opposing approval of the CyrusOne data center proposal” and about 600 have signed another one that asks the Sangamon County Board to remove Van Meter as chair and Tony DelGiorno as leader of the board’s Democratic caucus. Although four Democrats on the board voted in favor of the project, DelGiornio was singled out on the petition due to his leadership role.

Van Meter said he was unbothered by the petition. “It kind of goes with the job,” he said, although he acknowledged that the data center is “certainly among the issues that have received the most engagement” during his more than 25 years as board chair. He estimated that constituents have contacted him around 100 times over the past year about the data center.

Both petitions were started by Bergschneider, who was one of the people signed up to speak during the public comment portion of the April 7 meeting. She said cutting off the public comments tarnished trust in local politicians.

“When it comes to trust, what makes a lot of the everyday people start to really second guess their local government is that this data center issue is not unique to Sangamon County,” Bergschneider said. “Information (about) the risks associated with these things is not unique to Sangamon County. We have ample evidence all around us. For our leaders to have access to that same information and evidence-based data, and to still make the choice that puts us in harm’s way – that’s where it breaks the trust for a lot of people.”

Bergschneider pointed out that opposition to the CyrusOne project has come from both sides of the political aisle.

“No matter what side of the fence somebody is on politically or whoever’s allegiance is with who … this data center penetrates those silos that otherwise keep people separated. When you see a bipartisan opposition, I think that’s not good for the county at all,” she said.

---

This article appears in June 25-July 1, 2026.