A note from the author: what follows is an article on how to keep a data center from being built in your community, after that you’ll find a one-page leave-behind you can print, fold, and hand to any elected official you meet with, or your neighbors, or any organization you want to inform on the subject, and a set of links to additional Existentialist Republic resources at the bottom.
Helen Messer found out a few weeks before the vote, when a developer announced plans to drop a 350,000-square-foot data center onto a 22-acre lot in Chesapeake, Virginia, a couple of hundred feet from her back yard on the other side of a small retention pond. The project would have been the first major data center in Hampton Roads, and Messer and her neighbors did not have a lobbyist, but they had each other and a church social hall where they met to organize within days of learning about the proposal.
They turned up at the planning commission, which voted six to one against the project after hearing nearly fifty residents testify against it, and then they turned up again at the city council, where the vote was seven to zero to reject the rezoning on June 17, 2025…