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Two counties, two planning boards that said no or not yet, two boards of commissioners with the final say. One vote happened, but between a lawsuit and a refiled application, that story is wide open again. The other vote is days away.
In January 2026, Stokes commissioners voted 3 to 2 to rezone nearly 1,850 acres of residential-agricultural land along the Dan River for Project Delta. The developer hadn't named a tenant, hadn't presented a detailed site plan, and hadn't explained where the promised jobs and tax revenue would come from. Hundreds of residents showed up to oppose it. The commissioners approved it anyway.
There's a piece of this that deserves more than a zoning argument. The site includes land tied to the Saura people and the Hairston Plantation, where descendants of enslaved people still maintain cemeteries nearby. The commissioners approved the rezoning without meaningfully assessing the impact on those places.
The January vote didn't end the story. Community groups, residents, and Indigenous-led organizations sued the county in March 2026 over the rezoning. And the application itself came back: a revised version was filed July 20 with substantially tighter conditions. Next to homes, noise is capped at 60 decibels by day and 50 at night, with a low-frequency cap on top. Generators stay 300 feet from the boundary. Open-loop cooling and direct water withdrawals from streams, wells, and the river are banned. Compliance gets measured by an independent, board-certified sound engineer. And this didn't happen by magic: back in June, with the second application still taking shape, the developer was already telling FOX8 it was "looking to even go tighter on our noise limits." None of that was in the first draft. Full rooms put it there.
The county's own experts have weighed in since. In July, with the second application pending, the Stokes planning board voted 6 to 1 to recommend a six-month pause on data center approvals, saying the county needed time to study the risks residents kept raising. Within days, the commissioners rejected the pause.
So this is live again, in a courtroom and in the county meeting room, where residents are still filling the public comment period. A refiled application means a fresh look, and a fresh look is a real chance: the commissioners now have eighteen months of new information, a set of conditions their neighbors fought for, and room to weigh all of it without anyone pretending January didn't happen. Hopefully they take that chance.
Sources: WUNC on the January 2026 rezoning vote · SELC lawsuit announcement (March 2026) · Refiled application documents incl. Proposed Zoning Conditions (July 20, 2026) · FOX8/WGHP developer interview (June 4, 2026) · WFDD: planning board backs six-month pause, 6-1 (July 10, 2026) · WFDD: commissioners reject the pause (July 14, 2026)
In Rural Hall, Project Iron Spur wants 128.54 acres directly across from Town Hall. Application F-1669, filed by the Drox Group. The current plans show three two-story buildings totaling about 1.12 million square feet, up to 80 feet tall, on a roughly 144-acre site the 2016 area plan had marked for mixed use, not industry. And here's the detail that tells you how the rules work: the parcel sits just outside municipal limits, so the town it would tower over gets no vote. The decision belongs entirely to the Forsyth County commissioners.
The town's elected council has been on both sides of it: Resolution 901 formally opposed the rezoning, then Resolution 912, passed June 22, withdrew that opposition and expressed support. Either way, a town resolution is advice. The vote belongs to the county.
Forsyth's planning board studied it and voted 7 to 2 to recommend denial. This isn't a partisan observation, just a simple one: the county asked its own experts, and its experts said no. On July 30, the commissioners can follow that advice. Hopefully they do.
One more thing the public documents conspicuously don't say: the project's power draw in megawatts. That blank matters, because the protections in SB 730 switch on at 100 megawatts. The missing number is the difference between covered and not covered.
The Forsyth County commissioners meet Thursday, July 30 at 2:00 p.m. at 201 North Chestnut Street in downtown Winston-Salem. It's a public meeting: you can be in the room, and you can watch it live online.
The agenda is posted here, and ruralhallinfo.com keeps a running file of every Iron Spur document. This page will be updated with the outcome.
Sources: F-1669 Rezoning Exhibit (May 15, 2026) · Voluntary Conditions · Rural Hall Resolution 901 (opposition) · Resolution 912 (support, June 22, 2026) · Rural Hall Area Plan Update (2016) · WFDD: planning board recommends denial, 7-2 (June 11, 2026)
If you read the property tax guide, you already know the answer. The state capped how county revenue can grow, exempted this industry's equipment from the taxes counties could have collected, and killed the school funding case. Approving big capital projects is one of the only growth paths Raleigh left counties. Stokes's approval is what that setup was built to produce. The accountability problem isn't one board's judgment. It's that every step happened somewhere most voters weren't looking, under rules written somewhere else.
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