Three roundtable groups weighed options Saturday during the first of three public discussions about data centers being held at different Statesboro venues. But if participants decided anything, it was only for themselves.
Open to everyone, the next will be held 9 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 22, in the Statesboro Home Builders Association building, 1223 Merchants Way.
Then the third and final installment in this “deliberative discussion series” is scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27, in the Jones-Love Cultural Center at Luetta Moore Park, 121 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The Institute for Vibrant and Engaged Communities, or IVEC, from Georgia Southern University is hosting the series, “Weighing the Options: Data Centers in Our Community.”
The first session started at 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, in the Honey Bowen Building at Memorial Park on Fair Road. About 20 people or one or two more, including the organizers, showed up.
“At the Institute for Vibrant and Engaged Communities, we believe community engagement is an important part of community governance, and so we have created these forums because this is an issue that is important to the community,” said IVEC Director Candice Bodkin, Ph.D. “We’re personally concerned that there’s not good conversation or dialogue that’s happening around concerns about data centers.”
As she noted, citizens speaking at formal hearings such as those of the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners or Statesboro City Council often are assigned three or five minutes each, with no back-and-forth dialogue.
“So this is an opportunity for folks to sit down with their neighbors, talk about their concerns, talk through some options,” Bodkin said. “It’s not meant to be that we come to a conclusion, or decision, that this is what we recommend.”
However, the IVEC team is taking notes of participants’ concerns and ideas, with the intent of delivering a report to city and county leaders.
Jayce Sudweeks, Ph.D., who co-founded the institute with Bodkin four years ago but is now in a new position with the university — director of Interdisciplinary Clusters of University Excellence — helped lead the event. Four graduate students completed the IVEC team that hosted the Saturday conversation. Participants gathered around three tables for mostly separate, small-group discussions.
Basic rule: ‘Be kind’
Sudweeks emphasized a couple of points at the outset.
“Number one, the university has not taken a stance for or against data centers,” he said. “So we’re trying to be as neutral and unbiased as we can, and so for this report we want (to hear from) everybody. It will reflect people who are for it, people who are against it, all of those types of things.”
Then he asked participants “to be kind and polite to your neighbors” in the room and across the table.
Guidebook’s facts
IVEC has produced a 26-page deliberation guide entitled “Data Centers in Our Backyard: How should our community decide?” and gave copies to participants at the check-in table. According to the introductory pages, 73 data centers were operating in Georgia as of December 2025.
Around that time, Georgia Power was approved by the state Public Service Commission for approximately 10 gigawatts of new capacity, mostly for data centers. The average residential monthly power bill had increased by $43 since 2022.
Meanwhile, Georgia since 2018 has exempted data center equipment from state and local sales tax, with state estimates placing the revenue loss at about $2.5 billion in fiscal year 2026. The IVEC guide lists its sources for these facts, and some local ones.
One of those local facts is that about three out of four voters in Bulloch County’s primary election in May, in ballot questions asked by both parties, opposed data centers locating here. Another factoid highlighted in the guide is that the maximum size allowed for a data center under Statesboro’s 2026 data center ordinance is 50 acres.
“The term ‘data center’ covers a wide range of facilities,” notes one section of the guide. It mentions that a small data center, “about the size of a large room” is already located in Statesboro, reportedly helping speed internet service for businesses. But Project Camellia, the data center OpenAI announced in July it plans to build in neighboring Effingham County, would occupy a nearly 1,400-acre campus and use 3.2 gigawatts of electricity.
So, 4AM Development LLC’s proposed two-story, total 230,000-square-foot building on an almost 27-acre site on Burkhalter Road in the edge of Statesboro is between those extremes. With a set of high-voltage transmission lines already running parallel to one side of the triangular tract, the developers applied to Georgia Power for an up to 99-megawatt supply.
Timelines of events
The guidebook carries a detailed timeline for that project and the city’s actions. On Aug. 18, the tract was rezoned from R-4 high-density residential to “O” for office by a 3-2 vote of City Council, including the mayor’s tiebreaker. But the project also needs a special use permit, also requiring council approval, and that process is now being held up by a legal challenge filed by a group of citizens in Superior Court.
A parallel timeline traces the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners’ actions in regard to data center policy. This includes a moratorium on data centers in the county unincorporated area, in effect most of the year and now extended until Dec. 31. An outright ban was defeated by commissioners’ 4-3 vote, including the chairman’s tiebreaker, Sept. 1, and the commissioners are now naming an up to 21-citizen “working group” to study the issue.
The county working group will be a completely different thing from the IVEC sessions.
Appeal & concerns
But the source of data centers’ appeal to local governments was acknowledged during Saturday’s discussions. Big investments, often in the billions of dollars, in buildings and data processing equipment are projected to yield millions in annual property tax revenue, but with few jobs created and thus low demand for public services.
The things that worry residents about data centers — electricity demand and utility bills, water usage, “noise, land and community character,” “trust and transparency” and the perception that the growth of artificial intelligence is driving the demand — are all noted in the discussion guide.
Three options
The core of the guide summarizes three options for deliberation. Option 1, “Protect our land water and way of life,” implies a ban to “keep data centers out of our community.” Option 2, “Welcome investment and let the market decide,” would “open the door to data centers” under “existing rules” and acknowledge “property rights.”
Option 3, “Plan ahead and set firm ground rules,” seemed to be favored by most individuals at Table 3, where the reporter sat down and took part in the discussion. Besides two grad students pacing the discussion and taking notes, others around the table were Councilmember Shari Barr, who acknowledged she had voted against both the Data Center Ordinance and the Burkhalter Road rezoning; Stetson Rowles, Ph.D., an assistant professor from Georgia Southern’s civil engineering and construction program who expressed concerns about clean water and cooling system additives; and local residents Denise Jones and Glenn Price.
Some feedback
After the discussion ended, the reporter asked those last two what they thought of it.
“I thought it was very good,” Jones said. “I definitely did learn a lot about the data centers, what they’re used for, how this comes to be in our community and that we need to have a voice to decide whether or not we want a big data center in our community.”
She said “not yet” when asked if she has decided whether she would be OK with one locating here.
“I loved the different points of view, and there were some things I felt confident on, but after learning more, I think that there needs to be heavy parameters put in before we make a final decision,” Price said. “There need to be safeguards and protections, basically.
“But overall, I thought the facilitation of this discussion was very useful, and I think we all were able to learn something from one another,” he concluded.
The hosts also asked participants to complete a one-sheet questionnaire with “before the forum” and “after the forum” sides, including a brief survey about their thoughts and concerns regarding data centers.
