A developer in the Bay County is interest in building data centers in Bay County (Cities: Bay City, Auburn, Essexville, Pinconning; Counties: Bangor, Beaver, Frankenlust, Fraser, Garfield, Gibson, Hampton, Kawkawlin, Merritt, Monitor, Mount Forest, Pinconning, Portsmouth, and Williams). He has expressed that if the community does not back him, he will not go through with this endeavor. If you live in or near Bay County, THIS is your chance to make a difference. THIS is your opportunity to protect your community from the damages that come along with data centers. When you sign this petition, you are saying NO to data centers in our communities! Here's some reasons that signing this petition is making the right decision for your community:

Economic Impact: We’d be paying for this decision indefinitely and won’t be reaping any benefits.

• Tax breaks remove community financial benefit. Use AND sales tax breaks on the construction and equipment purchases in MI prevent communities from receiving money from these endeavors that are directly impacting them. Many data centers are impacting funding for areas like school, impacting generations that don’t even have a voice in the matter.
• “New jobs” aren’t sustainable for individuals. Data Centers don’t require many people to operate. The addition of data centers to communities isn’t creating many jobs locally when you look past the overhead opportunities like construction and engineering, and many of the boasted “new well paying jobs” are remote, some even being taken overseas.
• Individuals and families will pay more for energy. Energy price rates will rise for consumers and small businesses because the rise in energy demand strains grid capacity and pushes for new infrastructure to be built, making energy more scarce and more expensive. This will not impact any large tech companies.
• Big tech companies don’t care about you. Overall, trying to attract big companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon to our community is pointless. These companies all have horrible track records rooted in greed and a lack of care for consumers, employees, and the communities they take over.
• Industries supported by data centers aren’t growing fast enough. We already have an influx of infrastructure being built with the rise of AI, and many of these AI companies are projected to continue losing money until they disband because they’re expanding faster than they can financially support. This means one of two things: these companies will start charging users (and many already are) or they will dissipate (or, both in succession).

Environmental Impact: We’d be signing onto industries that future damage our fragile environment.

• Fossil fuel use will only rise. Overhead use of fossil fuels to construct and engineer data centers support the operations of fossil fuel plants, wasting limited resources and promoting harmful emissions. This moves us away from clean energy goals we’ve been working towards as a society.
• Closed-loop systems don’t stop harmful water impact. Even if the cooling systems utilized by data centers are closed-loop, which is the route that has been mentioned in discussions about the systems utilized in our community if data centers were to be built, tens to hundreds of MILLIONS of gallons of water are utilized. The water being used to cool in these systems must also be cooled down itself, requiring more energy use. There are no truly sustainable options.
• Noise pollution impacts local species. The Bay County is home to many different species of birds and mammals whose communities will be impacted by noise pollution caused near data centers. Even after construction, data centers emit a constant hum or buzzing, impacting local wildlife and even potentially becoming bothersome to anyone living within a 2-mile radius of a data center.
   

You don't have to hate AI to realize that data centers damage communities—you just need to be informed. The promises you hear about data centers are empty and there is an immense amount of data to prove it. Make Bay County an example to Michigan AND the rest of the country. Please protect our community and the ones surrounding it. SAY NO TO DATA CENTERS IN BAY COUNTY!  

If you have any questions or have credible evidence to support that anything I have stated here is incorrect, feel free to contact me at: rw09bird@gmail.com and I will get back to you as soon as possible. 

Here is a GREAT resource if you’d like to learn more about the topics I touched on here, as well as more I didn’t mention: https://stpp.fordschool.umich.edu/sites/stpp/files/2025-07/stpp-data-centers-2025.pdf