Guide-rails for the Data-Centered Age

9/29/26

“I’m running to help build guide rails for a responsible transition to the data-centered age — ones that protect the well-being of Laramie County residents, businesses, and their future.

My approach rests on three commitments:

• Communication
• Collaboration
• Cumulative oversight”

Something big is being built around us

Laramie County is in the middle of the largest wave of industrial development in its history, and most of it is data centers. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Vantage and a string of newer developers have projects operating, under construction, or working their way through city and county approvals. Some of them are measured not in megawatts but in gigawatts.

These projects will shape our water, our power bills, our roads, our housing and our tax base for decades. Yet most residents learn about them the way I did: a headline, a rumor, a notice in the paper a few days before a vote. That is not how a community should meet the biggest change it has seen in a generation.

Where I stand: yes to growth, with guide rails

I am not running to stop data centers. They bring investment, a larger tax base, and a real chance to put Laramie County at the center of the next economy. Turning them away would not stop the data-centered age. It would only mean we have less say in how it arrives.

But growth without guide rails is how communities get hurt. That is why my campaign comes down to one sentence:

I’m running to help build guide rails for a responsible transition to the data-centered age — ones that protect the well-being of Laramie County residents, businesses, and their future.

Guide rails do not stop the car. They keep it on the road, and they protect the people standing beside it.

The gap: nobody is adding it up

Each data center is reviewed one at a time, by whichever body happens to have jurisdiction. The city handles annexations. The county handles unincorporated land. The state handles air permits and utility rates. Cheyenne LEADS, a private nonprofit whose board minutes are not public, does much of the recruiting and negotiating before any of them see a file.

What no one does is look at all of it together. How much water will these projects draw combined, from the same aquifers our ranchers and well owners depend on? How much new power, and who pays for the lines? How many workers, how many homes, how much traffic on the same roads? A project that looks manageable alone can look very different as the fifth or tenth in line.

A note on who controls our water. In Wyoming, water belongs to the state. The State Engineer’s Office, not the county, issues the permits to drill wells and use groundwater. Our area sits inside the Laramie County Control Area, where falling aquifer levels led the State Engineer to impose well spacing, metering and other limits. The county’s lever is land use: it decides what gets built on unincorporated land and can require proof of an adequate water supply before it approves a subdivision or major project. Inside Cheyenne, large users are served by the Board of Public Utilities. So the agency that permits the water is not the one approving the buildings, which is exactly why someone needs to add it all up.

State law does not fill that gap. Wyoming’s Industrial Siting Act was built to review exactly these questions for large projects, but its business-park exemption lets most data centers skip its full review and certification process. Governor Gordon’s Executive Order 2026-03, “Data Centers the Wyoming Way,” sets out good principles on water, grid and community investment. It directs state agencies, though, not counties, and no one has built the local arm to carry it out.

The Meta contractor wastewater incident this summer showed what happens when problems surface after the fact instead of before.

Over the decades, these rules have grown into a tangle: overlapping, unevenly applied, and full of exemptions no one planned for. A tangle like that doesn’t protect anyone. It invites delays, surprises and, sooner or later, lawsuits that stall good projects along with bad ones. Sorting it out now is how we keep growth moving and keep it accountable.

What I will do as your Commissioner

My approach rests on three commitments.

Communication. You should hear about a project when it is proposed, not when it is approved. I will push for plain-language public summaries of every major project: who is behind it, what it needs in water and power, what it will cost the public, and what protections are in place. When the county contracts for economic development services, those contracts and their results should be public too.

Collaboration. The city, the county, the utilities and the state are each seeing one piece of the picture. I will work to bring them to the same table, through a cooperative intergovernmental body that shares information and plans together instead of reacting one project at a time.

Cumulative oversight. This is the heart of it. Before we approve the next project, we should know what all of them add up to. That means:

• Cumulative water-impact review as a condition of county land-use approval for large projects, coordinated with the State Engineer and measured against what our aquifers can actually sustain.
  
• Decommissioning bonds. Wyoming already requires wind and solar projects to file reclamation plans and post financial assurance, such as a bond or escrow, so the land gets cleaned up if a project shuts down. Data centers face no such rule, even though the technology changes fast and today’s designs could be obsolete, restructured or abandoned within a generation. I will push for the same protection: money set aside up front, so taxpayers are never left holding an empty building.
  
• Community Benefits Agreements and Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) terms that are negotiated in public and put in writing, so promises of jobs and investment can be enforced.
  
• Standing up for ratepayers before the Public Service Commission, so households are not left carrying the cost of new grid capacity built for industry.
• 
  Real scenario modeling. Cheyenne is home to Derecho, a world-class research supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center. I believe a Wyoming task force of scientists should use it to model how data centers, water, power, climate and our local economy interact, so decisions rest on evidence instead of guesswork.

None of this requires saying no. It requires knowing what we are saying yes to.

Our county, our say

Wyoming people have always believed that the folks who live with a decision should have a voice in making it. The data-centered age is coming either way. Whether it strengthens Laramie County or strains it depends on the choices we make in the next few years, and on whether residents are part of making them.

I am asking for your vote on November 3 so we can build those guide rails together. Learn more at Davis4Wyoming.com.

— Lynne Davis, candidate for Laramie County Commissioner