Data centers aren't the enemy. Bad deals are.

File legislation creating a statewide zoning classification for data centers with minimum standards for community engagement, environmental review, and conditional permitting: binding operating limits with independent monitoring, not developer promises at a public hearing. No more counties making this up as they go... shoehorning data centers into heavy manufacturing because nothing else fits, then accidentally opening a dozen other sites to by-right development with no public process.

Statewide minimum requirements for benefit sharing, clawback provisions with real teeth, and public reporting that applies to every deal: jobs delivered, water used, power drawn, taxes paid versus incentives taken, on a dashboard anyone can check. Same rules everywhere. No more race to the bottom between counties trying to outbid each other with your money.

And this is where the promises from Stop 1 come due. Project Delta's developer has pitched 250 to 500 permanent jobs and $40 million a year in tax revenue. Those are the developer's own numbers, so write them into the contract, with a clawback if they don't show up. A company that believes its own pitch loses nothing by signing it.

Require a percentage of tax savings to flow into a locally controlled Community Betterment Fund. Not a corporate donation or a PR gesture: a fund the community controls and decides how to spend. Broadband. Schools. Infrastructure. Whatever the community actually needs.

And build the framework the way labor builds Community Benefits Agreements: binding local-hire targets for construction and operations, registered apprenticeships on the build, training pipelines through the community colleges already here, negotiated with the community and enforceable in court. Not a press release with a ribbon on it.

Create a dedicated electricity rate class for large data center facilities so they pay their own way on the grid. No more shifting infrastructure costs onto residential customers. If you're consuming a small city's worth of electricity, you should be paying for the infrastructure to deliver it.

SB 730's cost protections are the start of this idea. A dedicated rate class goes further, and it shouldn't switch off at 100 megawatts, so nobody escapes it by designing at 99.

And repeal the worst provisions of SB 266, the "Power Bill Reduction Act": the fuel-cost shift onto families and the removal of the interim carbon target. The Power Bill guide covers that law in full.

Above a size threshold, self-supply should be part of the deal: generate or contract a real share of your own power, and commit to curtailment when the grid is stressed, before leaning on capacity everyone else pays for. This one isn't even radical anymore. The affordability study the House ordered inside SB 730 explicitly lists requirements that large customers generate a portion of their own power, and curtailment policies, in its scope. The White House pledge asks hyperscalers to build, bring, or buy all the energy they need.

One non-negotiable rider: on-site generation gets permitted like the power plant it is, with no "temporary" turbine dodge. In Memphis, xAI ran dozens of gas turbines for months without air permits, next to neighborhoods with some of Tennessee's highest asthma rates. Self-supply without permitting rules just moves the cost from everyone's bills to the nearest lungs. Stop 2 has the neighbors' version.

A Food & Water Watch analysis of Virginia's economic development data found that creating one permanent data center job requires nearly 100 times more investment than a non-data-center job. These projects create temporary construction work, a handful of HVAC and security positions, and then a skeleton crew with management flown in from somewhere else.

If a facility is consuming a small city's worth of electricity, tax benefits should be tied to a minimum ratio of permanent local jobs to energy consumption. Fall below it, benefits phase out. And require actual workforce development... apprenticeship programs, internship pipelines, partnerships with local community colleges, with numbers attached instead of "we'll try to hire locally."

The five proposals above are about money and machines. This one is about the part that broke first in this story: nobody asked. Write the asking into law, as statewide minimums for approving any large data center:

No code-name votes. No rezoning vote until the power draw, the water demand, and the kind of tenant are stated in the application itself. If a number exists for a TV interview, it exists for the county file.

Questions get answers on the record. A public information meeting shouldn't count as engagement when the applicant's own report lists the neighbors' question and answers none of it.

The town next door gets standing. Formal notice and a formal role for any municipality a project would sit beside, even when the parcel stops just outside its line.

Overriding your own experts costs something. Commissioners can still vote against their planning board. They should have to publish written findings explaining why.