The first informational meeting of the Douglas County Data Center Watchdogs drew more than 100 attendees to the Lawrence Public Library Tuesday evening.
Nancy Thellman said the new group had been meeting for about two months to put together the presentation for the community.
She said they want to educate residents about local land-use rights, water demand and tax incentives that could make the area a target for large-scale data center development.
The group said it plans to meet at 6:30 p.m. on the fourth Monday of each month in the library’s meeting rooms, where organizers intend to hold deeper discussions with experts and residents about the issue.
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The goal of the group, organizer Lisa Harris-Frydman said, is to educate the public before any formal proposal reaches the city or county government, with speakers arguing that residents need to understand both the potential impacts and the industry’s site-selection playbook.
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“Some people in our community definitely don’t want data centers; some people want to know more about what they are, and if there’s an appropriate scale,” Harris-Frydman said.
She also warned that residents should not wait until a formal filing is on the books.
“Once we are at that stage, we are in trouble,” Harris-Frydman said.
Chelsi Hayden, former planning commissioner, said developers tend to look for “fast, easy and cheap” conditions — land, water, power, incentives, permissive zoning and limited opposition — and she urged residents to organize early rather than wait for a project to be filed.
Hayden and other speakers pointed to Kansas Senate Bill 98, passed in 2025, as one reason they believe data center development is accelerating in Kansas. The bill created a 20-year state and local sales tax exemption for qualifying data center projects in Kansas.
To qualify, a company generally has to commit at least $250 million in investment, create at least 20 jobs, sign a long-term electricity agreement and adopt a water conservation plan.
Hayden said the Lawrence land development code allows data centers by right in certain industrial areas, meaning a project could move forward without public input.
“Someone could file an application tomorrow, and it would go through the application process with planning staff and never have any public input,” Hayden said.
She said the county rules are different, but still in flux. Hayden said that county staff has recommended adding data centers, battery storage and crypto mining to the county code, and that the county is also in the middle of a diagnostic code review that could lead to future amendments.
Meanwhile, Lawrence city officials are expected to consider a possible data center moratorium in a commission agenda sometime in July.
Dominique Sexton, a Lawrence resident who became involved through a different local development fight, focused on the environmental and social impacts of hyperscale data centers. She said the effects should be understood as cumulative, rather than isolated.
Sexton described concerns about water use, pollution, land conversion, surveillance, misinformation and the rhetoric that data centers are inevitable. She said developers often rely on that message to pressure communities into moving quickly, and urged residents to challenge the idea that they have no choice.
“My question is, if it really is truly inevitable, why don’t we just slow down, because it’s going to happen, right?” Sexton said.
Dan Nagengast, former director of the Kansas Rural Center, said he tried to track proposed data center projects in the Kansas River Valley and beyond, but said the information is incomplete and scattered.
He said a project in De Soto appears to be among the farthest along, while other proposals in the region have been withdrawn after public pushback or slowed by local opposition. He said communities that organize early can force developers to spend more time and money, which can change whether projects move forward.
The issue is also likely to intersect with local politics this summer as the primary election is coming up on Aug. 4.
The evening ended with a call for ongoing organizing. The watchdog group’s next meeting is set for 6:30 p.m. Monday, July 27 in Meeting Room C.
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Courtney Lane (she/her), staff reporter, has worked with The Lawrence Times since April 2026. She can be reached at [email protected].
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Maya Smith (she/her), reporting intern, has worked with The Lawrence Times since February 2026. She was born and raised in Lawrence and is a journalism student at the University of Kansas. She works at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications as a communications assistant and has been a freelance reporter for the Kansas Reflector since 2024. Read her work for the Times at this link.
