Reporting by Latrice Williams, Savannah Morning News
Brian Mallory purchased his property in Effingham County on the outskirts of Rincon nearly three decades ago. The peace he says he enjoyed on his 3-acre parcel is what has kept him there. Now, though, the increase in traffic from the Project Camellia data center could threaten his rural way of living.
OpenAI announced in July that it will build a data center on 1,440 acres in Rincon. The tech company has committed to paying an average annual wage of $80,000 for those employed there.
At least 400 permanent jobs are expected to come to Effingham County as OpenAI advances plans for its $20 billion data center campus. Employment is projected to reach 1,000 positions at full buildout.
But Mallory wants county officials to consider putting the data center in another location within the county.
“Push it out if they have to keep it here,” said Mallory, who lives two miles away from the proposed development. “There’s spots in the county that are not very populated. Do a land swap or something in the middle of nowhere where there’s probably nobody within a mile or two, because there’s places like that in this county.”
Mallory also pointed to the need for additional recreational opportunities on his end of the county and would rather see officials prioritize a park than a data center. And he worries about an influx of traffic that would come from construction crews and employees. Highway 21, Hodgeville Road and McCall Road have seen a significant increase in motorists in the last few years.
“Given the track record of infrastructure improvements, to keep pace with current growth, it needs to stop, and that infrastructure needs to catch up,” said Mallory. “We got roads that are jammed up right now. I don’t think they grasp what it’s going to do.”
Protect Effingham County
A new advocacy group that launched in Effingham County aims to keep residents up-to-date on all things related to the new data center.
Anna Heidt-Harris, one of the co-founders of the group Protect Effingham, says their mission is to be a community bulletin board where residents can have access to documents or anything else they want to share with the public. The group was formed late July.
“Our whole goal is to help our community, so if you are part of a group and you want us to help, whether that’s getting information out or to pull resources together, we want to do that for the community,” said Heidt-Harris.
Protect Effingham is building its own phone broadcast service that would call residents with a prerecorded message offering updates or action items regarding the data center, according to Heidt-Harris. The idea is to ensure no community member is left in the dark regarding the data center, said Heidt-Harris, noting some in the area do not have social media profiles and cannot readily access information posted by the county or other groups.
The group isn’t taking sides, she said, just offering more transparency. Heidt-Harris said Protect Effingham intends to meet with the public as work on the data center proceeds.
More questions than answers
County officials have said the project did not require public feedback because the property where the data center will be built is already zoned heavy industrial.
Effingham County resident Evan Karp thinks residents would have processed the news of the data center differently if water, sewer, and site plans had been presented earlier.
“I think it would be important for us to all have a say in something that would be potentially so transformative to our community,” he said. “It’s one thing whether they’re legally required to bring this to the community, but if their mission is to be transparent and to protect the town here, it would be important to have community say.”
Heidt-Harris is calling for a noise and environmental study. “I think what we would need to go forward is to feel like the community has a voice, to have concrete things written down,” said Heidt-Harris. “There’s nothing that can be enforced right now, and so that’s kind of the main thing that we want.”
Karp added that unanswered questions are concerning.
“I think there are profound questions. Nobody knows what living next to a 3.2-gigawatt data center does to you,” said Karp. “We should really take the time to figure it out before we say, ‘Please make a home here.’ We want to spread awareness so that all the residents affected can have a say before it’s too late to raise their voices.”
Latrice Williams is a general assignment reporter covering Bryan and Effingham County. She can be reached at lwilliams6@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News.
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