Questions worth asking before anything is signed.

• Which cooling design will the facility use, committed in writing? The difference between open evaporative towers and a sealed closed loop is roughly fifty-fold in water use.¹⁰⁰¹⁰²
• What is the projected peak summer-day water demand, not just the annual average? Peak-day demand is what stresses small municipal systems.¹¹⁵
• If there is cooling-tower blowdown, where does it go, in what volume, and can the city’s wastewater plant handle the dissolved-solids load? Quincy, Washington’s plant couldn’t; Microsoft ultimately paid $31 million to fix it.¹²⁰
• Will the operator disclose the water-treatment chemical list up front? In The Dalles, non-disclosure, not chemistry, is what bred distrust.¹²¹
• Will there be baseline water testing of nearby wells and the Levisa Fork before construction? Georgia’s well dispute is unresolvable largely because nobody has “before” data.⁸⁶

• Will the agreement set numeric noise limits at the property line, including a low-frequency (dBC) limit, not just dBA? Chandler, Arizona wrote enforceable limits into law; some Virginia counties now use 65 dBC.⁴⁰⁴⁶
• Who measures and enforces, and what happens when a limit is exceeded? Wolfe County neighbors were promised a sound wall and got “sound blankets.”¹⁵⁶
• When are generator tests run, how often, and are they restricted to weekday daytime hours?⁴⁸

• Which tariff will the facility take service under, and does it guarantee the customer pays the full cost of serving it, like Kentucky’s new large-load tariffs requiring at least 80% of forecast for 15 years?⁵⁸⁵⁹
• Who pays for grid upgrades (substations, lines) if the project grows to 75–100 MW, and what happens to those costs if the project leaves early?²
• What collateral or exit protections exist if the operator scales back, the “phantom data center” problem utilities are now planning around?⁶⁷

• How are the 40 projected permanent jobs defined (direct employees on site, at what wages), and how is compliance measured and reported? The city itself says projections are not enforceable obligations.²
• What are the consequences for missing the jobs numbers: clawbacks, payments, termination rights? Kentucky’s crypto-era promises were “not always fulfilled.”¹⁵⁷
• Is there a local-hire or local-contractor commitment for the 190-job construction phase?²

• Is the land leased or sold? A ground lease keeps recurring revenue and returns the land if the project dies; a sale doesn’t.³
• Do all commitments run with the land, binding any future owner after a sale or restructuring?²
• Is there a decommissioning obligation: who removes equipment and restores the site if it shuts down, and is it bonded?
• Does the agreement require heat-recovery plumbing at construction, so neighboring park tenants can use the waste heat? Cheap now, prohibitive later.¹³³¹³⁶

• How much diesel is stored on site, in what kind of tanks, with what spill prevention (SPCC) plan and secondary containment? EPA calls leaking storage tanks a common source of groundwater contamination.¹²³¹²⁴
• Are the generators Tier 4 (the cleanest standard), and what are the permitted annual runtime hours?⁷⁷
• What does the stormwater management plan require during construction, the phase that produced Georgia’s sediment complaints?⁸⁶

• Will the city disclose the end user when one signs, and will usage reporting (water, power) be public on an ongoing basis? The Dalles took a 13-month records fight to learn its own numbers.¹⁰⁶
• Will the complete agreement be published with enough time for meaningful public review before the vote, as the city has promised?²
• If revenue materializes, is any portion set aside (banked or invested) rather than absorbed into the annual budget? Other places made that choice deliberately, before the money arrived.¹³⁹¹⁴²

The fastest way to negotiate well is to start from what other governments already wrote. These are the primary documents (each is in the source registry with a working link) worth handing to counsel:

• Chandler, AZ data center noise ordinance: enforceable decibel limits written into law before approval.⁴⁰
• West Virginia HB 2014 (2025), enrolled text: the data-center property-tax distribution formula, including the income-tax-reduction fund.¹³⁹
• Kentucky Power Tariff I.G.S. filing (PSC Case 2024-00305), large-load terms already filed in this utility territory: 20-year terms, collateral requirements.⁵⁹
• AEP Ohio data center tariff settlement: the 85% minimum-payment structure regulators approved next door.⁵⁷
• Virginia JLARC data center study (2024): the most comprehensive independent state analysis of impacts, positive and negative.¹⁵
• EPA water reuse case study: Quincy, WA, what discharge did to a small city’s plant and the company-funded fix.¹²⁰
• Loudoun County’s own explanation of how data center revenue funds rate cuts and services.¹⁴²
• Pikeville’s own documents: the executed MOU and the city’s statement of what it is examining.³²