Piedmont’s Data Center Fight Leaves Officials Caught Between Their Own Rules and a Developer’s Clock

Project Open Sky returned with fewer power plants and more promises. Residents said the safeguards still arrive too late. The City Council postponed the decision again.

Piedmont, Oklahoma, has spent months writing rules for data centers. Now its City Council is struggling with whether to follow them, replace them or negotiate around them for a project that has already consumed several public meetings.

The council did not approve or reject Cloverleaf Infrastructure’s Project Open Sky Thursday night. After more than three hours of presentations, public testimony and negotiations from the dais, members continued the planned-unit-development application to September 28. A related annexation item was also continued while the city verifies whether the property is already inside Piedmont.

The result left officials in a quandary they repeatedly acknowledged. They want the investment, tax base, and infrastructure money attached to the project. They also face constituents who believe the city is preparing to surrender protections it adopted only months ago, including a special-use-permit process for data centers.

That tension has become familiar across the country. Nearly 100 local governments in more than 30 states have considered or adopted data-center moratoria or similar pauses while they write rules for power, water, noise, land use and decommissioning. Other communities are building ordinances town by town, often requiring special-use approval and detailed studies before construction begins.

Piedmont already wrote an Industrial Technology ordinance. The dispute now is whether Project Open Sky should receive different treatment through its Planned Unit Development (PUD.)

Cloverleaf arrived this week with a heavily revised proposal. It removed the on-site natural-gas power plant, committed to closed-loop cooling, added a 75,000-gallon-per-day cap on city water, prohibited cooling-fluid discharge into the sewer and proposed continuous noise monitoring. It also offered a $10 million community commitment, including $1 million upon approval, and said the campus could support 300 jobs.

“The first one, probably one of the more significant ones in my mind, is we have removed power generation from the PUD,” the developer’s representative told the council. “We are no longer proposing to put a natural gas plant on site.”

The revisions did not resolve the central permitting fight. City staff said the PUD would make a data center a permitted use by right, removing the special-use approval otherwise required in the IT district. Staff proposed a conditional-use approval tied to PUD compliance, but the penalties, cure periods and revocation process were not yet settled.

“As it stands right now, there’s no penalties for violating any of this,” one official said. “That’s why we’ll change it.”

Residents said that was precisely the problem: the zoning rights would become permanent while the hardest promises would move into a development agreement that does not yet exist.

“The things that have been promised by this development—noise monitoring, funding, public safety funding, infrastructure funding, enforcement penalties—exist only on a list of topics for a development agreement that hasn’t been written,” attorney Kelly Work told the council. “It hasn’t been reviewed by the public or by this council.”

The pressure is not coming only from the room. In a July letter to Mayor Kurt Mayabb and council members, Oklahoma development lobbyist Brent Kisling urged them to find a way to approve the project. Kisling served as Oklahoma director of USDA Rural Development after being appointed during President George W. Bush’s administration and later led the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. He wrote that he is working with Cloverleaf.

“The easiest thing for a Council to do is say ‘NO’ to projects—NO is the default answer for government,” Kisling wrote. “Fortunately, forward thinking community leaders find a way to say ‘YES.’” He said Piedmont could define the terms of that approval, while arguing the project could nearly double the city’s annual budget and help fund roads, water infrastructure and schools.

The letter illustrates the other side of the squeeze on a small city: a nationally backed developer, experienced advocates and the promise of a larger tax base pressing from one direction; angry residents, unresolved engineering questions and the city’s own ordinance pressing from the other.

Council members sounded unconvinced that the draft provided enough control. They questioned who would monitor noise, how the city would measure compliance, whether decommissioning security should exist before construction, who would maintain off-site infrastructure and how promised home-buyout offers would work.

“I don’t feel like there’s adequate teeth in this,” one council member said. “How are you going to regulate? How are you going to sample? How are you going to measure?”

The meeting became tense enough that the mayor repeatedly warned speakers and later lashed out over accusations against city officials. “You guys have killed our lives,” he said. “You spread rumors about us.”

Cloverleaf wanted a decision. “I would love to have this done tonight, if at all possible,” its representative said. “This is our fourth time here.”

But the city attorney said there were too many changes to summarize responsibly into a motion. The council voted to wait for one consolidated document.

Piedmont has not joined the moratorium wave. It has moved farther down the road, into the harder question those pauses are designed to avoid: what happens when the rules are written, the application is pending and every available answer carries political and financial risk.