“The mayor signed a nondisclosure agreement, showed up to the first meeting, said you would be cut off from speaking if you said the words 'data center.' He said, 'This is not about data centers. This is about rezoning.' And we were all sitting there like, rezoning for what?”
Marketplace · Money & Markets · November 2026
Context
In a Marketplace report from Brookwood, Alabama, where residents are fighting several data center projects, local student Thatcher Rotenberry describes how the city rezoned land without saying why. The mayor says the NDA only stops him leaking information to other developers.
Transcript
If we do need to remove some of our coolant, you know, we truck that off site.
The first time local native Thatcher Rotenberry heard about a possible data center was in June. The developer announced a new data center campus at an undisclosed location. Then in September, the city council voted to rezone a residential area, but wouldn't say why. The
mayor signed a nondisclosure agreement, showed up to the first meeting, said you would be cut off from speaking if you said the words data center. He said, this is not about data centers. This is about rezoning. And we were all sitting there like, rezoning for what, Joe? What are we rezoning for?
The answer to that question didn't come until September on the day of the rezoning approval, according to Brookwood Mayor Joe Barger. After that, the city passed a reported $314 million tax break for data center construction. He also says there are not three Brookwood data center projects in the…
People don't know what they're talking about, and they get their information from incorrect sources, and they
think they know everything and they're ignorant.
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