A steady rain after church services did not deter hundreds of Coweta County residents from gathering at Morgan’s Market on a recent Sunday to sign a petition that would give the community a direct vote on Project Sail, an 831-acre datacenter complex that industrial real estate firm Prologis is seeking to build about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta.
The petition drive, launched several weeks ago, is one of roughly a dozen signature-gathering events across the county. Melanie Tomlinson, a 58-year-old lifelong Coweta resident and organizer with the group Citizens for Rural Coweta, said she had never previously been involved in local politics. “I never thought I would be involved in something like this,” Tomlinson told the Guardian.
Tomlinson described more than a year of county commission meetings on the issue, during which attendance grew from fewer than a dozen people to more than 100. In December, the commission passed an ordinance she said overlooked community input. “It was like a brick wall,” she said. Shortly after, the referendum plan took shape, and residents also filed a lawsuit seeking to block the project.
Coweta County, home to about 160,000 residents and less than an hour’s drive from Atlanta is a predominantly Republican area — two-thirds of voters backed Donald Trump. Under Georgia’s constitution, a certain percentage of registered voters in a county must sign a petition to trigger a referendum on a policy or decision by elected representatives; the threshold varies by population.
If organizers reach their target of about 14,000 validated signatures, Coweta would become only the third county in state history to hold such a referendum. The most recent precedent came in January, when residents of Sapelo Island — a community of descendants of enslaved West Africans — successfully voted down a proposal to allow larger homes. An earlier effort to force a referendum on the Atlanta police training center known as Cop City failed after the city tied the effort up in court.
The Coweta County petition is part of a broader wave of local opposition to datacenters, which have proliferated across the U.S. to meet demand from artificial intelligence computing. MSI previously reported that Monterey Park, California, became the first U.S. city to pass a referendum permanently banning datacenters earlier this month. In January, residents of Georgia’s Sapelo Island successfully staged a countywide vote defeating a proposal for larger houses — one of the few successful referendums in state history until now. Recent polling suggests seven in 10 Americans would oppose a datacenter being built near their homes, according to the Guardian.
“Our overarching goal is to protect the rural character of Coweta County,” Tomlinson said.
At the Morgan’s Market petition event, volunteer Jenn Riggs, a 41-year-old graphic designer who lives on land that has been in her husband’s family for generations, said she felt the county commission had overlooked its constituents. “I don’t feel like we’re trying to be radical,” Riggs said. “We’re trying to be heard.”
Riggs noted that the commission had rezoned the 831-acre site from “rural conservation” to “industrial” for the project. “We have bald eagles all year,” she said. “If this [project] impacts our ground water, our ability to see the night sky … it affects the way we’ve lived for generations.”
Chris Manganiello, water policy director for Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, said the “largest threat” from Project Sail to nearby rivers is sediment runoff from construction, which can affect water temperature and fish habitat.
The Guardian queried each of the county’s five commissioners. Spokesperson Cathy Wickey responded with a statement that read in part: “Every perspective contributes to the dialog and we always welcome civic engagement. … Ultimately, our responsibility is to serve the entire community.” Prologis did not reply to a query from the Guardian.
John Leseur, a 25-year resident of Newnan, the county’s largest city, said: “I think the whole thing’s a crock. These datacenter people, these billionaires, they prey on small, rural towns, with loose zoning laws. With that-all, that AI stuff, enough’s enough.”
Nearby, José and Fabiola Guerrero had been following reporting on Fayetteville, Georgia, where residents noticed low water pressure and the utility company discovered it had supplied 30 million gallons of water without charge to a datacenter developer. Brad Weyant said he had been following environmentalist Erin Brockovich’s work gathering data on thousands of datacenter projects nationwide. “I distrust the whole thing,” he said.
Carla Jackson told the Guardian she moved to Coweta from Loudoun County, Virginia — known as “Datacenter Alley” for its density of facilities — in 2022 to get away from that landscape. “When I came here, I said: ‘This is it – paradise. It’s wooded, I see deer every day. If one datacenter comes here, that’s not going to be the end of it,” she said. At least five datacenters are planned for Coweta County. Jackson said she had trained 38 volunteers and gathered signatures everywhere she went — her neighbors, her veterinarian, her dentist.
Quentin Savwoir, director of programs and strategy at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said the referendum tool shows “people don’t have to acquiesce to elected leaders – particularly when they don’t have people’s interests at heart.”
Manganiello said he had never seen grassroots opposition as he is seeing with datacenters. “Everything about datacenters in Georgia is unprecedented,” he said, noting that rural counties are also passing moratoria on construction. “This sentiment is not going away.”
Tomlinson said she hopes Coweta’s efforts can inspire other communities dealing with the issue. “I hope that other places see [what Coweta County is doing] and care as much as we care … I hope it makes them brave, to stand up and do something.”