Bob Clark is right.
I want to start there, because everything else I'm about to say depends on it. Yesterday, the founder of Clayco published an essay arguing that America doesn't have a data center problem — it has a trust problem. That communities deserve facts, measurements, and honest conversations about tradeoffs before the decisions that shape their futures. That fear and distrust are overwhelming towns that deserve better. That the question isn't whether America will build data centers, but whether we'll build them responsibly.
I agree with every word of that. I know, because I just spent the last year writing not one, but two books that say the same thing. The latest, The Death of a BANANA Republic, has more than 400 sources behind it. It came out last week. It reached the top 10 in Energy Policy new releases in twenty-four hours.
It opens with a Clayco affiliate's project.
Mr. Clark's essay contains a remarkable paragraph. He acknowledges, to his credit, that not every project has been perfect. "There have been developers who communicated poorly," he writes. "There have been public meetings where residents felt decisions had already been made before they were invited into the conversation."
There have been. The phrase does a lot of work. It concedes the failure while dissolving the party responsible. Nobody communicated poorly... the communication poorness simply occurred, somewhere, like weather.
So let me supply what the passive voice leaves out, from the public record.
Festus, Missouri. A $6 billion data center campus, developed by CRG, Clayco’s real estate and development arm, negotiated in secret. A framework announced on March 20, 2026, whose own bullet points promised the developer would not build private wells. The signed infrastructure agreement, as KSDK reported after reviewing it, contained a provision running the other direction if the municipal supply fell short. An agreement approved on March 30, eight days before a municipal election in which every incumbent on the ballot was swept from office. A company executive asked on camera, on April 13, whether the neighbors' wells would be affected, who answered that this was a question he could not answer.
Four recall petitions were certified. The officials they targeted then voted to prevent the elections from reaching the ballot. A town revolted against its own government, not because it hated technology, but because it had to revolt just to learn what the project planned to drink.
That is not a story that "spread online." That is not fear outrunning facts. That is the documented, dated, on-camera record of how a trust problem gets manufactured.
I'd note, gently, that the header image on Mr. Clark's essay is a conceptual rendering of that very project. So perhaps the proper nouns weren't needed after all.
Here is the part that may surprise him: his essay's criticism of the opposition is one I share, and my book prosecutes it harder than he does.
He writes that advocacy organizations spend significant money spreading dramatic stories that collapse under examination — the jar of dirty water, the mysterious hum, the routine permit reframed as conspiracy. He's correct, and I'll go further than he did: my book documents the funding architecture behind professional infrastructure obstruction, the algorithmic fear economy that monetizes a town's anxiety, and the difference between a neighbor who can be satisfied and a movement that can only be defeated or obeyed. There is an acronym for the second kind — it's on the cover.
So this is not an activist responding to a developer. This is someone who spent three chapters defending the data center industry from its worst critics and who is now asking the industry to stop handing those critics their best material.
Because that's what the quiet build does. Every NDA, every masked LLC, every agreement signed while the documents are still warm from the copier is a gift to the exact conspiracy economy Mr. Clark's essay deplores. The Tinfoil Caucus doesn't need to be right. It needs a vacuum. Secrecy is the vacuum.
Mr. Clark offers the industry's standard answer: confidentiality agreements aren't designed to hide information from the public; they protect competitive negotiations, the same as they would for an auto plant or a semiconductor fab. What's normal inside economic development, he writes, often looks secretive from the outside.
I understand the argument. I simply watched what it costs.
When "normal" produces a town that learns its own government's commitments from a leak, "normal" is the problem. And the perception gap he acknowledges — that standard practice looks secretive from the outside — isn't a communications failure to be managed. It's a design flaw to be fixed. In an age of screenshots, FOIA requests, and algorithmic outrage, the secret always breaks, and when it breaks, the absence of prior transparency becomes the story. The project never recovers the trust it declined to build.
But here's the good news, and it's the reason this response is an invitation rather than an indictment: the fix isn't theoretical. His own essay cites it.
Among the communities Mr. Clark lists as data center success stories is Elk Grove Village, Illinois.
He's right about that one, too. I know, because it's the proof-of-concept chapter of my book. Mayor Craig Johnson has been governing that town for thirty-seven years on a method that is the precise inverse of the quiet build: no NDAs. No masked entities. The power requirements, the water draw, the tax math — public from the first conversation, because Johnson treats that information as the community's right to know rather than as commercially sensitive material to be protected from the people who live there.
The results: twenty operating data centers. Nineteen more planned. $45 million a year in property taxes from data centers alone. A $400 credit on every resident's water bill, plus $400 in gift cards, because the tax base outran the budget. Twenty-five years without a single controversy. Until the national fear economy finally came looking, and found no vacuum to fill, because the residents already knew the numbers. Their mayor had told them.
Elk Grove Village is not compatible with the confidentiality-first playbook. It is the alternative to it. A developer cannot cite the town built on radical transparency while defending the practice of negotiating in the dark. One of those things has a thirty-seven-year track record. The other has Festus.
Mr. Clark writes that "the industry needs to develop new ways to protect legitimate business confidentiality while giving communities greater confidence that decisions are being made openly."
It doesn't need to develop them. They're developed. They're published. The framework is called the Municipal Covenant, and it has been in print since my first book: radical transparency from the first conversation. Ratepayer protection, verified before approval. Workforce commitments that turn a tax asset into a community anchor. Enforceable civic contributions that arrive in year one, not year ten. The water number published — with the cooling architecture named and the daily draw capped in writing the public can read — before the ink dries.
None of it prohibits confidentiality where confidentiality is legitimate. All of it prohibits the specific thing that destroyed the Festus project: a community discovering, after the signatures, what was negotiated in its name.
So here is my offer, and it is genuine. Mr. Clark has announced a series of essays taking the biggest data center concerns one at a time — land use, noise, electricity, water, jobs. I'll be reading every installment, and I hope the water essay includes Festus's numbers. But essays are the easy part. If Clayco adopts the Covenant on its next project — publicly, verifiably, math on the table from day one — I will be the first person in America to say so, in print, by name. And if that project earns its community's standing ovation the way Elk Grove Village's did, it won't just rebuild Clayco's trust. It will prove, at exactly the moment the country needs proving, that the American way of building — transparent, accountable, democratic — can still outbuild the alternative.
Because Mr. Clark is right about the biggest thing of all: America must build this infrastructure. The country racing us suffers no zoning hearings, no recall elections, no trust problem — because trust is not a thing its builders are required to earn. Ours are. That is not our weakness. Done right, it is our advantage: a community brought into the process becomes a partner, and partners don't file injunctions.
We don't have a data center problem. We have a trust problem.
Agreed. Trust is built the same way the buildings are — in the open, to spec, with the math on the table.
In Festus, they're still waiting.
The conversation worth having starts with the proper nouns.
