A weekly newsletter on digital equity for Black people in the South.
A lot can happen in a week, especially when billions of dollars, new infrastructure and public policy are moving at the same time.
Each Monday, we break down the decisions that shaped the previous week across nine Southern states: Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia. We follow the broadband money, the data center approvals, the policy changes and the numbers behind them, then ask the question that often gets skipped: What does this mean for Black communities?
We also track the national decisions influencing what happens across the South.
“When I made him the last payment of the $600 for my freedom, he tore up all the receipts. I told him he ought not to have done so; he replied it did not signify, for, as soon as court day came, he should give me my free papers.”
Moses Grandy, of Camden County, North Carolina
Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America, dictated to and edited by George Thompson. Boston, Oliver Johnson, 1844. Full text via Project Gutenberg.
The week in one minute
Data centers
Entergy Arkansas filed notice of dismissal Wednesday, ending its federal lawsuit against the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Arkansas Times and a resident named Jessica Kivell, the Arkansas Advocate reported Sept. 16. The suit sought to stop publication of confidential details of the utility’s agreements with Altitude Capital LLC, a Google subsidiary building a data center in West Memphis.
A federal judge had already denied the utility’s request for a temporary restraining order in early September, treating it as an unconstitutional prior restraint.
The agreements at issue include a $526 million payment from the Google subsidiary to Entergy Arkansas. Google has announced $4 billion in data center investment in the state. Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation criticized the suit in the Advocate’s reporting.
A regulated utility collects from every household in its territory. When it goes to court to stop those households from reading what it agreed to, the argument it is making is that ratepayers are entitled to the bill but not the terms.
The resident named in the suit is the part worth holding onto. Two newspapers have lawyers. A private customer who reposts a document does not, and suing her alongside them is a message to everybody else who might.
The Arkansas Public Service Commission docket is public and the legislature’s Joint Energy Committee is taking testimony from Entergy right now. Both are places a customer can put a question on the record without a lawyer.
Arkansas lawmakers asked Entergy who is paying for the solar plant. The legislature’s Joint Energy Committee questioned Entergy officials Tuesday about the power arrangements behind the West Memphis Google project, the Arkansas Advocate reported Sept. 15. Co-chair Sen. Mark Johnson said a new rate rider added $22.81 to his own monthly bill, at a rate of just over half a cent per kilowatt-hour.
Sen. Matt McKee asked why ratepayers are helping fund the Cypress Solar project when Google says it covers the full cost of the data center under a pledge the company calls Fair Share Plus. Entergy’s John Bethel described the rider as a change in the timing of cost recovery rather than an increase in the total, saying it saves money in financing costs.
The coverage puts Cypress Solar at $1.6 billion and Google’s 20-year West Memphis commitment at $2.1 billion. Earlier reporting attached that same $1.6 billion figure to the total project rather than to the solar plant, and the two accounts cannot be reconciled from the coverage alone.
A rider is the cleanest example there is of a cost that arrives without a vote. It shows up as a line on a bill, it is approved in a proceeding almost nobody attends, and by the time anyone notices it has been collecting for months.
The $22.81 is one legislator’s bill and nothing more. What makes it useful is that he read it out loud in a committee room, which is a thing any customer can ask a legislator to do with their own bill.
Alabama Power filed three data center contracts with the numbers blacked out. The utility filed contracts with the Alabama Public Service Commission across 2026 for a Meta subsidiary in June, a Nebius affiliate in July and a third company in August, with contract length, minimum billing, capacity and pricing redacted from the public versions, the Birmingham Free Press reported Sept. 20. Commissioners and the attorney general’s office receive unredacted copies.
Act 2026-610 takes effect Oct. 1 and requires the commission to determine whether data center contracts benefit ratepayers. The report says Alabama Power secured an exemption for filings made before that date under interim rules, that the commission has not ruled on the docket, and that its public calendar shows no meeting scheduled before the deadline.
Southern Company says Alabama Power has added roughly 3 gigawatts of contracted data center projects, at about $2 billion in capital per gigawatt.
A new disclosure law only reaches what is filed after it takes effect. Filing early is not a loophole anybody has to argue for, because the calendar does the work by itself.
The commission is elected in Alabama, and the attorney general already holds the unredacted copies. Asking either one, in writing, what the redacted terms commit ratepayers to is a request that does not depend on the new law at all.
Georgia residents sued over a $20 billion project that agendas called something else. Two cases are now pending in Effingham County Superior Court over the OpenAI data center planned near Rincon, about 30 miles from Savannah, Inside Climate News reported Sept. 22. One, filed by five residents and the group One Hundred Miles and represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, alleges the county industrial development authority failed to give proper notice, rescheduled meetings without notice, sold publicly owned land without public discussion, and identified the project on its agendas as Project Gateway. The second challenges the zoning changes.
The project is announced at $20 billion, with up to 3.2 gigawatts of electricity demand and construction beginning in 2028. The property tax break runs 15 years at a 50% reduction and is valued at roughly $900 million. Coverage differs on the floor area, at 4.4 million square feet in Inside Climate News and the law center’s own account and 4 million in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The law center’s statement says officials requested a media embargo until after the tax abatement documents were signed, and that the site sits less than 1,000 feet from homes and next to two elementary schools.
A codename on an agenda is not a small thing. Public notice works by letting somebody reading the agenda recognize their own neighborhood in it, and a name nobody recognizes defeats that while satisfying the letter of the requirement.
Open meetings and open records law is doing more work against these projects right now than environmental law is. It is also cheaper, faster and available in every county in these nine states. The Birmingham abatement suit rests on the same ground.
A town of 1,400 in DeSoto County is weighing 1,000 acres. Walls, Mississippi, a majority-Black town of roughly 1,400 residents, is reviewing an application to rezone more than 1,000 acres from agricultural to light industrial, Mississippi Today reported Sept. 16. No developer has been publicly identified, and the request reached the town through a letter from a landowner’s representative to the planning director.
The planning commission meeting was set for Sept. 22 and moved to Walls Elementary School in anticipation of the crowd. No power or water demand figures have been published, because no project has been announced. Walls sits in the same county as the xAI Colossus 2 site in Southaven.
The outcome of that meeting had not been reported by the time this issue went out.
Rezoning is the decision. Everything after it is a permit, and permits are granted to uses the zoning already allows. A town that rezones 1,000 acres to light industrial before any developer is named has made the hard choice while the question still looked procedural.
Residents in Walls can ask for the rezoning to be conditioned, which means writing the limits into the zoning itself rather than trusting a future agreement. Noise caps, setbacks, water sourcing and a megawatt ceiling are all things Colleton County in South Carolina put on paper this week, and a small town can copy that text.
Colleton County wrote its rules and repealed part of its pause. The county council voted unanimously to create a Digital Infrastructure Overlay District allowing data centers on rural land west of Interstate 95 and on land already zoned for industry, Live 5 News reported Sept. 14. The rules set a 65-decibel noise cap, 200-foot buffer setbacks, a 300-acre minimum parcel size and a requirement for closed-loop or air-cooled cooling.
To make room for the overlay the council partially repealed the six-month moratorium it had passed earlier. Opponents submitted more than 5,000 petition signatures.
This is what a moratorium is for. The pause buys the months it takes to write standards, and the standards are what remain after the pause expires. Colleton now has numbers on paper that a developer has to meet.
Whether those numbers are the right ones is a separate argument, and the decibel cap and the cooling requirement are the two most worth reading closely in any county considering the same move.
Spartanburg County passed a one-year freeze with carve-outs. The council voted 5-1 for a one-year moratorium on new data centers, with Councilwoman Jessica Coker opposed, Fox Carolina reported Sept. 21. Amendments exempt facilities inside an established industrial park or on a former industrial site, cap power demand at 65 megawatts, bar self-generation except for emergency backup, and limit permitted use to data storage, management and processing.
Office server rooms are exempt and cryptocurrency mining is handled under separate rules. The council had delayed the vote in August to consult experts on local power and water impacts.
Counts council votes, months of moratorium and megawatts of permitted demand · Permitted demand is a ceiling, not measured load · Fox Carolina, Sept. 21, reporting by Ashley Listrom · The ordinance text was not read directlyMemphis put its moratorium off to October. The city council delayed a vote on a one-year data center moratorium hours before its third and final reading, the Daily Memphian reported Sept. 15. Council member JB Smiley said he would hold the ordinance until Oct. 6 and amend it to focus on hyperscale facilities.
Two other measures are pending, one setting renewable energy and cooling requirements and one substituting development standards for the moratorium. The council has no meeting scheduled between Sept. 15 and Oct. 6.
Three weeks is a long time in a permitting calendar. A moratorium stops applications from being processed, so every week it is not in effect is a week an application can be filed under the old rules and claim protection under them later.
Boxtown and Whitehaven already carry what was built before any of these rules existed. The Oct. 6 meeting is public and the ordinance is on the agenda.
The Birmingham data center now faces three separate actions. Consolidated zoning suits brought by residents and the Greater Birmingham Humane Society are before Judge Javan Patton Crayton in Jefferson County Circuit Court, with the next hearing set for March 8, 2027, WBHM reported Sept. 18. A Regions Financial shareholder, James Anderson, has filed a separate suit alleging that three land transactions executed in a single day inflated the price by $66 million.
Terri Michal’s suit over the 30-year, $3.2 billion tax abatement, filed Sept. 11 and covered in last week’s issue, alleges the industrial development board held an improperly noticed special meeting in May, exceeded its authority and did no independent cost-benefit analysis.
WBHM puts the Oxmoor Valley site at 80 acres and reports property tax rising from about $200,000 a year today to a projected $87 million a year after buildout. The al.com report of the original filing put the site at 75 acres. The $3.2 billion figure is carried forward from that filing rather than newly calculated.
Counts acres, dollars abated and projected annual property tax · Projected tax is an assessment estimate, not revenue collected · WBHM, Sept. 18, reporting by Olivia McMurrey · The complaints and the docket were not read directlyAtlanta is building more data center space than anywhere else in the country. A $500 million, 350,000-square-foot data center is proposed for southwest Atlanta near Sylvan Hills, Pittsburgh and the West End, Capital B Atlanta reported Sept. 21. In the first half of 2026 Atlanta had more data center space under construction than any other United States market, passing Northern Virginia for the first time.
Councilmember Kelsea Bond convened a task force to move the city’s data center strategy into public session, saying the mayor’s office had been developing it behind closed doors.
Sylvan Hills, Pittsburgh and the West End are Black neighborhoods on the south and west sides, which is where this city has put things it did not want near the north side for a hundred years. The pattern is old and the land is cheap for reasons that are written down.
A council task force is a weak instrument on its own. What it can do is force documents into the open before a zoning vote, and that is worth showing up for.
North Carolina’s attorney general asked for a separate rate class. Attorney General Jeff Jackson filed a proposal with the North Carolina Utilities Commission, as part of Duke Energy’s pending rate cases, asking it to create a distinct rate class for data center customers, NC Newsline reported Sept. 14. The filing also asks the commission to require Duke to publish its template data center contracts, report regularly on non-standard large-load agreements, update load forecasts every 90 days instead of every six months, and pause new natural gas plant development pending a forecast review.
Jackson said Duke is onboarding an unprecedented number of data centers without a clear plan to protect ratepayers from higher rates and unacceptable risk.
A rate class is the whole fight in one procedural word. Customers in the same class pay the same structure, so putting data centers in with everyone else spreads their costs across every household on the system.
Every one of these nine states has a commission that can be asked the same question, and in most of them the attorney general or a consumer advocate office is the party with standing to ask it. North Carolina has now written the request down, and it can be read and copied.
Mississippi River mayors asked states to control water exports. At the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative’s annual meeting in Natchez on Sept. 16, mayors called for state laws modeled on Missouri’s 2025 statute requiring a permit to withdraw water and move it more than 30 miles across a state line, Mississippi Today reported Sept. 18. Lawmakers from Mississippi, Louisiana and Minnesota committed to introducing bills, among them Sen. Derrick Simmons of Greenville.
The group spans 10 states and says 75% of its member cities have been approached about hosting artificial intelligence infrastructure. The article puts a large data center’s cooling demand at about 5 million gallons a day, which is a typical-facility estimate rather than a measured withdrawal at any named site.
Water law in most of these states was written for farms and for towns, not for a single customer drawing what a small city draws. The permit requirement the mayors are asking for is the first mechanism that would make a withdrawal visible before it starts.
The Delta counties along this river have the water and the least ability to say who gets it. A state bill filed in January is the venue, and Simmons has said he will file one.
A North Carolina moratorium lost in court, and the county owes damages. Superior Court Judge John Morris granted summary judgment to the developer Eco TIP West on Sept. 22, allowing a 750-megawatt data center at Triangle Innovation Point West near Moncure to proceed despite Chatham County’s moratorium, NC Newsline reported. Morris found no genuine issue as to any material fact and held that the county must pay damages. Neither a damages amount nor a case number appears in the reporting.
The county enacted the moratorium in February for one year, running through Feb. 11, 2027 or until new zoning regulations are adopted. The developer, which says it has invested $11 million, sued in April and the hearing was Aug. 31. At least 30 North Carolina local governments have adopted data center moratoriums in recent months.
The University of North Carolina School of Government published a guide to this exact problem on Sept. 16. It sets out that a moratorium under state law must state the problem, name the approvals suspended, carry an expiration date and include a plan for resolution, that one longer than 60 days requires a legislative hearing with notice published twice, and that state law bars reducing permitted uses or creating nonconformities without the owner’s written consent. Two 2026 bills proposing statewide data center standards did not become law.
This is the most consequential item in this issue for anybody writing a pause, and it arrived after most of the pauses above were passed. A moratorium adopted once an application is already filed invites a taking argument, and Chatham County now owes money it did not budget for.
Foley, Alabama passed its moratorium with no project on the table, and nobody sued Foley. Colleton County used its pause to write standards and then repealed the part of the pause that was in the way. That sequence, pause early then write numbers, is what survives a courtroom. The guide published six days before this ruling is the document a county attorney should be handed before the vote rather than after the complaint.
Stokes County rezoned 1,800 acres of farmland for the second time. Stokes County commissioners voted 3 to 2 on the night of Sept. 14 to rezone about 1,800 acres near Walnut Cove from residential-agricultural to heavy manufacturing conditional zoning for the Project Delta campus, developed by Engineered Land Solutions. The board approved the same rezoning by the same margin in January, and that approval was invalidated on procedural grounds after a legal challenge, forcing the developer to reapply.
Sonya Cox, Rick Morris and Keith Wood voted yes. Wayne Barneycastle and Brad Chandler voted no. Every resident who testified was opposed, citing water use, noise and loss of rural character. Cox explained her vote this way: “For years I came up here to try to beg for money for the school system to put new roofs on, to repair schools, to give teachers a half a percent of a supplement, and it was like pulling teeth.” A separate economic analysis projected substantially lower revenue than the developer claimed.
The pitch that works on a rural county commission is not electricity and it is not jobs. It is a roof. Cox said so on the record, and she is describing 20 years of being told no by her own legislature.
An argument about megawatts does not answer that. A rezoning agreement with revenue floors, buffers and water conditions written into the zoning does, and it is available to any county tonight. Colleton County in South Carolina put that text on paper this month and a small county can copy it.
Spartanburg got a 457-megawatt air permit three days before the county froze new projects. The South Carolina Department of Environmental Services approved an air permit on Sept. 18 letting the Valara data center on Pine Street in Spartanburg generate 457 megawatts on site, up from 48 megawatts previously permitted, using 11 new natural gas turbines, The Post and Courier reported Sept. 21. That is permitted generating capacity, not output.
The permit sets 12-month rolling limits of 250 tons of volatile organic compounds, 250 tons of nitrous oxide, 25 tons of hazardous air pollutants with no single pollutant above 10 tons, and 157 tons a year of fine particulate matter at 35.88 pounds an hour. Reporting is quarterly in the first year, then twice a year if emissions stay below 80% of the limits. The companies are NorthMark Strategies and Valara, and the $2.8 billion project received county tax breaks in April 2025.
An aggregator republished the same story with a different permit date, a different agency name and 100 turbines rather than 11. The Post and Courier is the originating newsroom with a named reporter. Neither account gives a permit number.
The county moratorium reported above exempts facilities on established industrial sites and caps power demand at 65 megawatts going forward. This permit is 457 megawatts and it was issued before the freeze. A moratorium sets the rules for the next one.
On-site generation means the facility burns gas where it stands rather than buying from the grid, so whatever it does to anyone’s rates, the exhaust is in Spartanburg. Hold that against the federal proposal this newsletter covered in issue 02, which would end the requirement that states take public comment before issuing an air permit. This permit came through a process that had one.
Louisiana regulators waived competitive bidding for a data center’s power plan. The Louisiana Public Service Commission voted unanimously on Sept. 17 to grant Cleco an expedited path, waiving competitive bidding, for a power plan tied to Applied Digital’s $3.6 billion Delta Forge 1 data center near Boyce in Rapides Parish. Expected electric load is 430 megawatts by 2028, with initial facilities at 300 megawatts, about 200 permanent workers and a peak construction workforce of more than 1,000.
Cleco filed its application in July for a project announced in May, with operations expected in mid-2027. Chris Justin, a licensed professional engineer and a candidate for the commission, objected. “If that is the case, and Cleco wants this to be a system resource primarily paid for by ratepayers, we should not waive competitive bidding,” he said.
Competitive bidding is how a commission finds out whether the utility’s own plant was the cheapest way to serve a load. Waiving it means nobody has to show that it was.
If the plant lands in the rate base, every Cleco customer in central Louisiana pays for a decision that was never tested against an alternative. Louisiana elects its commissioners by district, so this is a question a voter can put to a candidate directly, and one candidate has already raised it.
North Little Rock wrote data centers into its zoning code with no numbers in it. The North Little Rock City Council adopted a zoning amendment on Sept. 14 defining a data center campus and making one a conditional use in I-3 industrial zones, so a developer must obtain conditional-use approval before operating. The ordinance carries an emergency clause and took effect immediately.
City Attorney Amy Beckman Fields said facilities may not “create additional stress on North Little Rock Electric or Central Arkansas Water that could negatively impact existing customers.” Council member Steve Baxter said he was “thinking about being proactive as it relates to protecting the citizens of North Little Rock.” No vote tally, ordinance number, setback distance, acreage minimum, megawatt cap, noise limit or water limit appears in the coverage.
The constraint is written as a judgment about stress on the city’s own utility rather than as a number, so it gets argued case by case and the outcome depends on who is on the council that year. Numbers are harder to write and much harder to argue around.
North Little Rock owns its electric utility, which is leverage a city on an investor-owned system does not have. Foley, Alabama uses the same leverage as a rule, requiring data centers to bring their own power instead of drawing on existing customers.
A Virginia supervisor withdrew his own data center application hours before its first review. Lee District Supervisor Daron Culbertson and neighboring property owners withdrew the rezoning application for the Remington Innovation Campus, a roughly 200-acre proposal in Fauquier County, early on the morning of Sept. 17, hours before the Planning Commission was to review it, the Fauquier Times reported. A county official said the withdrawal was processed at 6 a.m. and the commission took no action because there was nothing before it.
A consultant said county politics were a factor. A second data center application was pulled from the same meeting. At that meeting the commission voted unanimously to advance zoning changes requiring all future data centers to obtain a special exception permit and restricting them to land zoned planned commercial industrial development, which in Fauquier is only the Vint Hill area. The commission also recommended approval of a 20-megawatt battery storage facility on about 6 acres in Broad Run.
A sitting supervisor was an applicant on a rezoning his own board would decide, and the application disappeared two hours before anyone could ask about it in public. Nothing here required a nondisclosure agreement. The calendar did the work.
Withdrawal is not denial. The land, the owners and the funding are all still there, and an application can be refiled after the zoning fight it was avoiding has been settled. The commission’s vote the same evening is the thing that lasts.
Electricity rates rose about a third faster where the data centers are. Residential electricity rates rose 21.4% in counties with a high concentration of data centers against 15.7% in counties with none, according to a National Association of Realtors report covered Sept. 15. Only 251 of the 3,220 counties in the United States contain a data center. Loudoun and Prince William counties together hold 19% of all American facilities, the top 10 counties hold 42%, and 34 counties have 10 or more.
The methodology limits what the report can claim. Its survey went to 146,959 members in May and got 2,357 responses, about 1.6%, from a trade group with an interest in the answer, and it does not isolate causation. Its housing findings compare counties that were already wealthier and closer to job centers, so those should be left alone.
This newsletter argues every week that load concentrates in a few counties while the cost spreads across everybody. Here is that claim with a number on it, from an industry with no reason to make data centers look bad.
Use the rate comparison and skip the rest of the report. It is the one figure published this week that a county commissioner can be handed on a single page.
Public opinion on data centers turned sharply negative in seven months. The share of American adults saying data centers are mostly bad for the environment rose to 54% from 39%, for home energy costs to 50% from 38%, and for the quality of life of people living nearby to 49% from 30%, measured against a January baseline, Pew Research Center reported Sept. 22. On local jobs the share saying mostly bad rose to 24% from 15%, and on local tax revenue to 21% from 12%.
Asked about a new data center in their own area, 60% said they would be not too or not at all comfortable, 19% somewhat comfortable and 7% extremely or very comfortable, while 12% had not heard of data centers at all. The share who have heard a lot about them rose to 35% from 25%. The survey reached 10,548 adults between July 20 and Aug. 9.
A separate poll published Sept. 16 by the Associated Press and NORC found 53% of adults extremely or very concerned about artificial intelligence’s environmental effects, up from 41% in 2025, with about 60% supporting limits on new data center construction and majorities in both parties. That poll reported no sample size, field dates or margin of error in the coverage, and it is a different survey from the Pew one.
Every county commissioner who has been told that opposition is a handful of activists now has a national number to check that against. Sixty percent are uncomfortable with one nearby and the shift happened in seven months.
The jobs and tax findings are the ones to watch. Those are the two arguments developers lead with, and they are the two where opinion moved least in absolute terms and most in proportion. People are not rejecting the promise. They are starting to price it.
Virginia
Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed Executive Order 22 on Sept. 18, establishing a data center accountability framework and an artificial intelligence task force. Projects drawing more than 25 megawatts at peak are excluded from state site readiness programs, and executive branch agencies are barred from entering or enforcing nondisclosure agreements that block public disclosure of proposed data center development, with a carve-out for national security.
The order sets deadlines for the rest. A community engagement toolkit is due in 120 days. Noise regulations, a backup generation analysis, water scarcity criteria and workforce reporting are due in 180 days, and siting recommendations from Virginia Energy in 240 days. The water scarcity criteria name the Eastern Virginia Groundwater Management Area, which covers the Hampton Roads and Southside side of Interstate 95.
On costs, the order directs the chief energy officer to press utilities, the State Corporation Commission and PJM for measures that shield Virginia households from infrastructure costs driven by large data center loads, including assigning reliability procurement costs to the facilities themselves.
Reaction split along lines that do not track party. Speaker Don Scott of Portsmouth called it a moratorium on bad actors in the industry. Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas, also of Portsmouth, said it does not end the roughly $2 billion in sales tax exemptions. House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore called the package internally contradictory.
The nondisclosure ban is the part that changes what a resident can find out. Localities have been negotiating with companies whose names they were not permitted to say out loud, which meant a public hearing could be held about a project the public could not identify. That is exactly what the Effingham County suit in Georgia is about, and Virginia just made it harder to do at the state level.
The water line matters for Hampton Roads and Southside specifically. The groundwater management area the order names is the eastern half of the state, and it is the half with Norfolk, Portsmouth, Petersburg and the Southside counties in it.
The exemptions are still there. The framework is rules and studies, and the $2 billion a year in sales tax relief is a legislative question that comes back in the 2027 session.
Newport News gets the first merger hearing, on Oct. 7. The two unannounced public hearings in the State Corporation Commission’s review of the $67 billion Dominion and NextEra merger now have dates and places, WTVR reported Sept. 22. The first is Oct. 7 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, the second is Oct. 9 at the Fairfax County Government Center, and the Richmond hearing remains Nov. 5 from 2 to 5 p.m.
The same report covers Clean Virginia’s motion to compel NextEra to produce documents on political misconduct allegations in Florida and on its failed bids for JEA and Santee Cooper. The joint petitioners have answered more than 2,200 discovery questions. A commission decision is expected in January 2027.
Last week two of these three hearings had no location, and the open question was whether either would land outside the Richmond and Northern Virginia corridor. One did, and it is first. Hampton Roads speaks on Oct. 7, four weeks before Richmond.
Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton and Newport News are all Dominion cities, and Christopher Newport is reachable from all of them on a weekday evening. Anyone who wanted the commission to hear from Hampton Roads now has a date, a room and three weeks to fill it.
The attorney general asked to restart the merger clock. Attorney General Jay Jones filed testimony Sept. 18 arguing that the companies’ Sept. 14 supplemental filing is a materially different proposal and that the 180-day review period should run from that date, Virginia Mercury reported Sept. 21. The current deadline is Jan. 11, 2027, and a reset would push a decision to March.
The sweetened terms extend residential bill credits to four years from two and job protections to five years from 18 months, and add a downtown Richmond office tower. The original filing was July 15. The supplemental filing arrived the first business day after the deadline for intervenors.
A locality deciding whether to spend money on lawyers to intervene was deciding against the old offer. The better offer showed up the next business day, after the door closed.
Richmond made its intervention vote on Sept. 10 and had to hold a second vote to do it, because the first one failed on absences. Petersburg, Portsmouth, Norfolk, Hampton and Newport News are all inside this territory and none of them is in the case.
One Google campus, $264 million in grid upgrades. Appalachian Power estimates $264 million for transmission and substation work to serve Google’s campus in Botetourt County, Cardinal News reported Sept. 16 from the utility’s application to the State Corporation Commission. The filing discloses the campus peak demand publicly for the first time, at about 300 megawatts.
The work covers nearly 20 miles of line, conversion of some 69-kilovolt segments to 138 kilovolts, one new substation and four modified, targeted for Nov. 15, 2029. The site holds three proposed buildings of 300,000 square feet each on 312 acres bought in June. Appalachian Power says revenue from Google covers the cost so other customers do not pay more, which is the utility’s assertion in its own filing rather than a finding by the commission.
Counts dollars estimated, megawatts of peak demand, miles of line, kilovolts and acres · An estimate in an application is not money spent, and peak demand is not energy delivered · Cardinal News, Sept. 16, reporting by Matt Busse · The application was not read directlyLoudoun moved toward a pause and Prince William voted on its overlay. The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors voted 7-1-1 at its Sept. 15 business meeting to direct staff to draft a resolution pausing board action on data center and electrical substation applications that need legislative approval, for up to 12 months. Staff return with the resolution Oct. 20, and the board indicated it should be retroactive to Sept. 15. Supervisor Kristen Umstattd voted against and Supervisor Caleb Kershner abstained. Some coverage described the pause as already in effect, which the retroactivity explains.
Prince William County supervisors were scheduled to vote Sept. 22 on shrinking the Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District and requiring special use permits. The outcome had not been reported by the time this issue went out.
Neither county is majority Black and neither vote is about a Black community. They matter here because applications do not stop when a county stops taking them. They move to counties with cheaper land, smaller staffs and boards that meet in rooms with fewer people in them.
Southside, the Richmond metro and Hampton Roads are where that pressure lands next in Virginia, and the Black Belt counties of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia are where it lands across the region. A county that wants standards in place is better off writing them before the first application arrives, which is what Foley, Alabama did and what Colleton County, South Carolina has now done.
The two new data center bills from Rep. Suhas Subramanyam were introduced Sept. 8 and carry numbers. The Data Center Fair Share Act is H.R. 10322, which amends federal utility law to set standards for how utilities recover large-load infrastructure costs and conditions highway funding on state compliance. The Responsible Data Center Siting Act is H.R. 10321. Both were referred to the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Virginia has nearly 400 operating data centers and more than 200 planned, Virginia Mercury reported Sept. 16. Planned means announced or filed, not built.
Counts bills, facilities operating and facilities planned · Planned facilities are not built facilities · Bill records at govinfo, read directly; coverage from Virginia Mercury, Sept. 16, reporting by Shannon HecktSouthside got $400,000 for artificial intelligence and Northern Virginia got $3.68 million for quantum. The Department of Housing and Community Development announced $6,149,252 in GO Virginia regional investments on Sept. 17. Region 3, which covers 15 Southside localities, received $400,000 for an artificial intelligence entrepreneurial ecosystem project spanning advanced manufacturing, emerging technology and agriculture. Region 7, Northern Virginia, received $3,684,912 for a quantum hub. Region 5, Hampton Roads, received $1.2 million for maritime career pathways.
The program reports 27,000 jobs created and 58,000 people trained since 2017, which is a cumulative self-report rather than an audited count.
The Northern Virginia award is 9.2 times the Southside award. Southside is where the transmission line gets routed and where generation and its exhaust get sited, and it is receiving a twentieth of this package.
That ratio is published in a press release with the figures next to each other, which makes it the easiest thing in this issue to put in front of the people who write these allocations.
BEAD watch
Twenty of 63 cooperatives have given the money back. Sixty-three electric cooperatives across 27 states won BEAD awards and 20 have withdrawn, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association said in a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dated Sept. 16, reported by Broadband Breakfast on Sept. 21 and Light Reading the same day. Chief Executive Jim Matheson attributes the withdrawals to delayed implementation, shifting guidance, cost constraints and unrealistic funding assumptions.
The association’s central complaint is a federal pole attachment rule it says applies to cooperatives across their entire electric systems rather than only in BEAD project areas, in territory where cooperatives are otherwise exempt from that regulation. About 42% of BEAD fiber miles are expected to be aerial, and about 40% of those aerial miles would run on cooperative-owned poles. One provider’s domestically made fiber rose 40% in price in August alone.
More than 200 cooperatives nationally deliver broadband, serving almost 2 million rural homes and businesses.
This newsletter has carried the cooperatives’ warning twice before without a number attached to it. The number is now one in three.
In much of the Black Belt the cooperative is the only builder that will run line down a dirt road for 40 houses, and an address a cooperative gives back does not go to somebody else. It goes back on the map and waits for the next program.
Cooperative boards are elected by their members. A member can ask at a board meeting whether this cooperative is still in, and get the answer in the minutes.
The estimate of what is left in BEAD got a second week of coverage. Route Fifty and Light Reading both reported Sept. 21 on an analysis by Alex Karras and Michael Santorelli of the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute estimating that about 1,041,099 locations will appear on the supplemental lists for a second BEAD round. The same analysis puts the decline in eligible locations at 69% since the original December 2022 allocation, and says 79% of the locations that needed BEAD then are now served, no longer serviceable, or covered by another program.
A second round is priced at $5.3 billion to $8.8 billion, which would leave $12.2 billion to $15.7 billion of the $42.45 billion unspent. Light Reading adds that 1,038,504 of those locations, or 99.8%, have low-earth-orbit satellite service available, and 155,826, or 15%, have unlicensed fixed wireless available.
The analysis itself was published Sept. 9 and was covered in last week’s issue. The authors describe their counts as estimates of what the lists will contain rather than the lists themselves, which NTIA has not published.
Satellite availability is availability. It says a signal can reach the address and nothing about whether anybody there subscribes, can afford it, or has a clear enough view of the sky. Last week’s issue carried the Ohio finding that 70% of addresses designated for subsidized satellite service sat under obstructing tree canopy.
A figure that is 99.8% is doing argument work, not measurement work. When a state broadband office cites satellite availability as a reason not to fund fiber to a set of addresses, the question to put in writing is what obstruction analysis it ran first.
Colorado cancelled a BEAD award and called in investigators. The Colorado Broadband Office terminated grants to Maverix Broadband covering 10,232 locations after an investigation found cancelled invoices, unpaid contractors and about $3.2 million missing, Broadband Breakfast reported Sept. 22. The award was nearly 25% of the state’s total allocation. The matter has been referred to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and to Treasury inspectors.
The outlet ran two stories the same day, one headlined $103 million and one headlined $100 million. We read the first. Interim director Alison Terry said the enhanced monitoring found Maverix had done this for more than one vendor.
Colorado is nowhere near these nine states and the reason to carry it is the mechanism. The state caught this through enhanced monitoring of invoices, which is a thing a broadband office either does or does not do, and which none of the nine has said publicly whether it does.
When a subgrantee fails, the addresses go back to unserved and the clock starts over. That is the cost that lands on the county, and it lands years later.
Federal review got fast and the poles became the problem. Louisiana’s broadband office says federal environmental review now returns an answer in about six days on average, down from roughly six months, and that it has processed more than 55,000 reviews, Broadband Breakfast reported Sept. 18 from a panel at a Connected Communities event. Virginia officials at the same panel named utility poles and rights-of-way as the constraint that binds now.
Kansas is relocating roughly one-third of its awarded project sites.
Two weeks running, Louisiana is the state in this region publishing numbers a resident can check. The six-day figure counts reviews processed and says nothing about an address connected, and it is still the answer to any office that blames permitting for a construction schedule that has not started.
Poles are the next bottleneck and they are owned by the cooperatives that are currently walking away from the program. Those two facts are the same fact.
Federal
A condition in the federal grant terms for BEAD, the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, requires a state to pledge that it will not enforce any law, regulation, order, contracting requirement or other enforceable obligation that directly or indirectly regulates the rates, terms and conditions of broadband internet service, Harold Feld of Public Knowledge wrote Sept. 17. The condition is numbered 50 in the grant terms and conditions NTIA issued Nov. 18, 2025, and it also covers net neutrality rules, open access requirements and what the text calls other utility-style rules.
Feld reads the condition as applying to everything a BEAD-funded provider does inside the state, not only to the addresses BEAD paid to reach. Every state and territory that accepted the money accepted the condition, and all 56 final proposals were approved in August. That puts all nine states in this newsletter inside it.
His analysis is about California, which he describes as trading $1.42 billion in construction money for state protections he values at $5 billion to $16 billion over 10 years. The top of that range assumes every eligible household enrolls in a low-cost plan, so read it as a ceiling rather than a count.
This is the affordability argument ending before it begins. A legislator in any of these nine states who wanted to cap what a BEAD-funded provider charges a low-income household, or require it to publish its prices, or hold it to a service standard, now has a signed grant condition standing in front of that bill.
No Southern newspaper covered this, and the reason is that none of these nine states had such a law to give up. That is the part worth sitting with. The condition costs California billions and costs Mississippi nothing, because Mississippi already had nothing. What it takes from these states is the future rather than the present.
The document to ask for is your own state’s signed grant terms and its certification letter. Those are public records. The exact wording of what the state promised, and for how long, decides whether an affordability bill in the 2027 session is possible or pointless.
The House passed a bill on who pays for data center electricity. The House voted 417 to 3 on Sept. 16 to pass H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, which directs state public utility commissions to consider adopting standards requiring data centers that draw more than 100 megawatts to pay the full incremental cost of the generation, transmission and distribution built to serve them rather than shifting it to residential and small-business customers.
Rep. Gabe Evans of Colorado is the lead sponsor, with Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida identified as co-lead. The committee vote was 52 to 0 on July 21 and the 100-megawatt threshold was narrowed by amendment. States would have one year to begin considering the standard and two years to decide. The bill also reaches power supply costs, requires financial assurances before construction and provides for cost recovery if a large customer leaves early. The committee says 24 states already have comparable standards, and analysts quoted in trade coverage do not expect Senate passage before the November midterms.
The bill does not make anybody pay anything. It requires state commissions to consider a standard and to decide, which moves the argument to nine state capitals instead of settling it in Washington.
Those are better odds than they sound. A commission proceeding takes written comments from anyone who sends them, and it happens two hours from home rather than 12. North Carolina’s attorney general filed for this exact standard two days before the House vote, and that filing is the template.
The fee that funds school and rural internet hit a record 42%. The Federal Communications Commission released a public notice Sept. 14 proposing a fourth-quarter contribution factor of 42.0% for the Universal Service Fund, up from 38.8% in the third quarter. The factor is a rate charged against carriers’ projected interstate and international end-user telecommunications revenues, and carriers pass it through to customer bills.
The fund spends roughly $8 billion a year across four programs, among them Lifeline and E-Rate. The factor was held down by applying $69 million in unused schools and libraries money and $56 million in unused rural health care money as offsets.
In the same week SpaceX filed again urging the commission to abolish the High-Cost program outright, on the grounds that satellite service has made rural broadband available. Its own filing concedes that affordability, not availability, is the remaining problem.
The rate rises because the revenue base it is charged against keeps shrinking while the programs do not. Traditional telephone service is that base, and it is disappearing.
That arithmetic is the argument behind every proposal to cut these programs, including the open inquiry into whether to shrink E-Rate or end it, on which comments are due Oct. 13. Anyone filing in that docket should expect the 42% to be quoted at them, and the answer is that a shrinking base is not the same thing as a shrinking need.
Nothing moved on the digital equity grants this week. No order, filing or announcement in the Digital Equity Act case was published between Sept. 14 and Sept. 23. The case is National Digital Inclusion Alliance v. Trump before Judge John D. Bates, and NTIA is under an obligation to file a status report every 30 days while the program is paused.
According to Benton Institute reporting on the joint status reports filed in August, the parties are set to confer on Oct. 16, the government has said it targets a December opening for the competitive grant program application, and the stay carries an outside date of Jan. 15, 2027 for issuing a notice of funding opportunity.
Congress appropriated $2.75 billion for the Digital Equity Act in 2021, of which $1.25 billion is the competitive grant program.
A negative result is still information when you are waiting on money. Nothing new happened, the next date on the calendar is Oct. 16, and December is still what the government is saying out loud.
Any organization in these nine states that intends to apply should be writing now rather than waiting for the notice, because the window will be short and every draft written before the July ruling has language in it about race and ethnicity that has to come out.
The E-Rate paperwork got its approval while the program’s future sits in a docket. The Federal Communications Commission published notice Sept. 14 that the Office of Management and Budget approved the information collection tied to the E-Rate competitive bidding rules, covering the program’s Forms 470 and 471. The collection counts 25,000 respondents and 83,560 responses a year, at 236,890 burden hours.
E-Rate pays for internet service at schools and libraries. It is separate from the commission’s open inquiry into whether the program should be limited to rural areas or ended, on which comments are due Oct. 13.
The paperwork notice is routine. The Oct. 13 docket is not, and a library board, a school board or a county commission can file in it with a letter.
In a lot of small Southern counties the library is the only public building with a reliable connection and a person behind a desk who will help you use it.
NTIA published nothing in the window. The agency’s most recent item is dated Sept. 3 and concerns states using BEAD savings for a location true-up, and no NTIA document appeared in the Federal Register between Sept. 14 and Sept. 23. The savings at issue were put at $21 billion in that Sept. 3 release.
One in-window notice from the Census Bureau, published Sept. 17, covers the 2027 field test of the Current Population Survey supplement that carries income and health insurance questions. It does not mention the Internet Use Survey, which rides on the same survey and is the instrument behind federal device and online-use figures. Comments on the field test are due Nov. 16.
Counts dollars of program savings and comment deadlines · NTIA, Sept. 3, read directly; Federal Register, Sept. 17, document 2026-19087, read directlyAround the states
All nine broadband offices published nothing. Not one of the nine state broadband offices posted a news item between Sept. 14 and Sept. 23. The two most active, North Carolina and Louisiana, last posted Sept. 10, four days before the window opened.
Several have been quiet far longer. Mississippi’s BEAM news page is still serving unreplaced template content with items headed “Recent News 01” dated 2020 and 2019. Tennessee’s broadband announcements page carries nothing newer than Nov. 13, 2024. Georgia’s broadband page lists nothing newer than December 2025, Alabama’s nothing since March 24, South Carolina’s nothing since June 30 and Arkansas’s nothing since June 11.
None of the nine has posted a revised eligible location list or opened a challenge window for a second BEAD round. Every challenge process we could verify closed between September 2024 and February 2025. The agency-wide newsrooms in Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia did publish in the window, on wastewater, manufacturing and economic development grants, and none of those items mentions broadband.
The revised eligible address list decides whether your county’s addresses are funded in the next round, and a state can post that document without posting news about it. Eight of these offices have news pages that would not tell you.
Watch the BEAD document and challenge pages directly, on a schedule. Mississippi’s news page has been serving demonstration text left over from a website build for more than five years, which is its own answer about how that channel is meant to be used.
North Carolina’s satellite grant closes Wednesday night. The Division of Broadband and Digital Opportunity is taking expressions of interest until 11:59 p.m. Sept. 23 for its $1 million Broadband Satellite Resiliency Grant. State agencies, local governments, volunteer fire departments and community anchor institutions including schools, libraries, community colleges and community centers can apply, with priority to the 39 counties in the Hurricane Helene federal disaster area.
The money covers equipment and installation materials only. The program page states plainly that no portion of the funds may be used for internet service subscriptions.
Thirteen days from open to close, and one of them is left. If you know a fire department, a library or a community center in one of those 39 counties, telling them tonight is the whole intervention.
The equipment-only restriction is the part to notice for next time. A grant that buys a dish and not the service assumes somebody local will find the monthly payment, and that assumption is where these programs usually break.
Virginia’s comment period on next year’s grant rules closed Sept. 18. The Department of Housing and Community Development took public comment on draft 2026 guidelines for the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative, the state’s own broadband grant program, through Sept. 18. No application round is currently posted.
Measures a closed comment period, not an open application · Virginia DHCD, program page read directly · The draft guidelines carry a closing date but no posting dateCost and access
The Census Bureau released last year’s income and poverty figures. Median household income was $87,460 in 2025 and the official poverty rate was 10.2%, counting 34.5 million people, the bureau reported Sept. 15. The uninsured rate was 7.9%, counting 26.7 million people without coverage for the entire year, and the Supplemental Poverty Measure was 13.1%.
These come from the Current Population Survey supplement, not from the American Community Survey. The response rate for that supplement was 61.3%, still below where it was before the pandemic. No county broadband figure comes out of this release.
Household income is the denominator under every affordability argument about broadband, and a national median tells you nothing about the Delta or the Black Belt. The survey that would, table S2801 of the American Community Survey, still has no release date.
Until it does, an argument about what service costs relative to income in a specific county has to be built from the county’s own numbers, which mostly means older ACS five-year estimates.
Benefits portals are failing people before the eligibility question is reached. State benefits websites that do not work with screen readers or keyboard navigation deny services through technical failure rather than through a decision anybody records, Route Fifty reported Sept. 21. The piece puts it plainly: the resident goes without food or medical coverage, and the state records it as a closed case.
It cites an accessibility index finding an average of 62 detected accessibility issues per webpage, concentrated in forms, links, images and keyboard operation. That figure counts detected defects on a page and measures conformance, not whether anyone completed an application.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, state and local governments serving 50,000 or more residents must meet the web accessibility standard by April 26, 2027, and smaller governments and special districts by April 26, 2028.
Two deadlines are now on the calendar, and the second one covers exactly the small counties and special districts across these nine states that have no web staff at all.
A county that starts in 2028 will miss it. A county that asks its vendor in writing today whether the benefits portal meets the standard has a paper trail and about 18 months.
Memphis households pay the second-highest mobile phone bill in the country. American households paid a median of $100 a month, $1,200 a year, for mobile phone service in 2026, according to an analysis of bill payment data published Sept. 18 by doxo, a bill-pay company. Among cities the highest medians were San Diego at $2,035 a year and Memphis at $1,976, which is about $165 a month.
Mobile bills reach 88% of households, second only to electricity at 90%, and run about 1% of household income nationally. The company analyzed aggregated anonymized payment activity from more than 10 million consumers and 120,000 billers across 45 service categories and about 97% of ZIP codes, which measures what households actually paid rather than what plans cost or what was available.
Mobile is how most low-income households get online, and Memphis is second in the nation on this measure. Against a median Memphis bill near $165 a month, the federal Lifeline benefit for broadband is $9.25, a figure that has not moved in years.
This is commercial data from a company that processes bills, which makes it current and gives it no stake in the answer. It also means nobody has broken it out by neighborhood, and a citywide median in Memphis hides a great deal.
California showed that a second form removes 63 points of Lifeline enrollment. The California Public Utilities Commission approved two decisions on Sept. 17, making disaster protections permanent for California LifeLine customers and allowing providers to build applications that enroll a household in the state and federal programs at once. The disaster protections waive non-usage and annual renewal requirements for at least 30 days with automatic extensions, and waive activation, connection and conversion fees.
The figure behind the second decision is the one that travels. When Verizon customers could apply to both programs in a single step, 98% were enrolled in both. After the Federal Communications Commission revoked California’s federal waiver in February, dual enrollment fell to 35%.
Sixty-three percentage points of enrollment disappeared with no change in who was eligible. What removed people was a second form. Remember that the next time low take-up gets explained as a lack of awareness or interest.
The two mechanisms that quietly drop households from Lifeline are de-enrollment for non-usage and missing a recertification deadline, and both are exactly what a hurricane or a flood makes impossible to comply with. Every one of these nine states has federal disaster declarations most years and none of them has this protection. A state commission can adopt it, and California has now written the order to copy.
Virginia localities asked the FCC which addresses lose their copper phone lines. Counties and agencies in Virginia told the Federal Communications Commission they fear Verizon’s retirement of copper telephone lines will leave rural areas without reliable voice access, and asked for specific information on which locations would lose copper service and what alternatives exist, Broadband Breakfast reported Sept. 14. New Jersey and New York agencies filed similar concerns. The coverage is mostly behind a paywall and gives no docket number or customer count.
The live date sits outside this window and needs stating anyway. In January the commission approved AT&T’s request to discontinue copper service affecting roughly 90,000 customers across 18 states, more than 30% of its copper footprint outside California. That list includes Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, eight of the nine states here. Discontinuation could begin Nov. 15.
Copper is the line that works when the power is out and when there is no cell signal, because the phone company powers it from the central office. The households still on it skew old, rural and poor, and they are being moved onto equipment that needs electricity inside the house.
Nov. 15 is seven weeks out and the approval was granted in January, so most of the people affected have had no notice they would recognize as notice. A county commission, a sheriff’s office or an emergency management director can file at the commission asking for the location list, which is what the Virginia localities just did. That filing costs a letter.
Algorithms
A waiver provision in a crypto bill would reach lending decisions. The American Civil Liberties Union urged the Senate on Sept. 15 to strike Section 509 of the Clarity Act, which it says would let companies seek waivers from any financial regulator rule, including rules on privacy, security, consumer protection and civil rights. The organization’s specific concern is artificial intelligence systems making lending and housing decisions without the adverse action notices the law now requires.
An adverse action notice is the piece of paper that tells you why you were denied. It is the only reason anybody ever finds out that a model was used, and it is what makes a discrimination claim possible at all.
Take it away and the denial still happens. It just arrives without a reason, which is the same position a permit applicant is in when the comment period disappears.
Mississippi’s Meta settlement money is spoken for, and none of it is digital. Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced a plan to spend $189 million over 10 years, or $18.8 million a year, Mississippi Today reported Sept. 17 through Route Fifty. The allocation includes $6.8 million to the Department of Mental Health for youth programs, $6 million to Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, and $6 million to the Department of Education for afterschool programming, alongside $6.1 million from a related Cambridge Analytica settlement.
The total could reach $270 million if Snap, TikTok and YouTube settle as well. None of the announced allocation goes to broadband, devices, digital literacy or digital access.
This is money a technology company paid over what its products did to young people, and it is being spent on parks. That is a lawful use and it is also a choice somebody made in a room.
Tennessee has not made its choice yet. Its share runs through a new state fund and the legislature decides in January, and the permitted uses there are written broadly enough to include digital literacy and online safety programs. Mississippi shows what happens when nobody asks.
A researcher tied Georgia voters to their own ballots in two counties. A Princeton University researcher told a Georgia legislative committee that he used an artificial intelligence tool on publicly available data to tie individual voters to specific ballots with high certainty in Heard and Cherokee counties, the Georgia Recorder reported Sept. 17. Georgia plans to move to hand-marked paper ballots for the 2028 election, replacing machines bought on a 10-year contract and first used statewide in 2020.
The state constitution guarantees ballot secrecy. Federal law still requires at least one voting machine per precinct for voters with disabilities, so the change cannot be all paper. Geoff Hale of the Center for Democracy and Technology told the committee that “Georgia is not purchasing something that will remain permanently secure. Election security is a process and not a purchase.” Michael Specter of Georgia Tech said a system is only secure if the adversary knows how it works and it is still secure. Several Georgia counties also suffered cyberattacks on water systems this year.
Hand-marked paper ballots are what election security advocates have asked for, and this is the cost nobody priced. In a precinct with few voters, the public voter file plus the turnout record plus released ballot images can narrow a vote down to a person.
Small precincts are rural precincts, and in Georgia a great many rural precincts are majority Black. Ballot secrecy is not a technicality in a place where people within living memory knew exactly what a publicly known vote could cost them. The committee is still writing the procurement guidelines, so reporting thresholds and limits on ballot image release can still be written in.
A Tennessee woman spent 164 days in jail over a face matched to somebody else’s fake ID. Angela Lipps sued the city of Fargo, North Dakota, and a former detective for $10 million plus punitive damages over an arrest she says rested on a facial recognition match, in reporting published Sept. 15 and Sept. 17. Eight felony counts were filed June 30, 2025, she was arrested July 14 and released Dec. 24, roughly 164 days in custody.
The alleged error is specific. The match was run against a photograph taken from the actual suspect’s forged identification card rather than from surveillance footage, so the system compared Lipps to a picture of a different person’s fake document. Lipps lived in Tennessee, had no North Dakota record, did not match the suspect’s physical description, and no financial evidence tied her to the thefts. Neither report names the vendor or the system, and the two disagree on when the suit was filed.
The failure is not that the software was inaccurate. It found a good match to the photograph it was handed, and the photograph was of the wrong person. No accuracy statistic about the algorithm would have caught that, because the problem is in the input.
One hundred sixty-four days is the number that should govern policy. A city or county that uses this technology can require in writing that a match never serve as the sole basis for an arrest and that the source of the probe image be documented in the file. That is a procurement condition rather than a ban, and it is squarely within a council’s authority.
The African Diaspora
Cape Town organizers went to court over two data centers. The housing movement Housing Assembly, working with the British nonprofit Foxglove, filed a legal challenge in August against two proposed Equinix data centers in Cape Town and asked the South African Human Rights Commission to investigate and impose a moratorium, Rest of World reported Sept. 17.
The two proposed facilities total 174 megawatts, and one would use 4.4 billion liters of water a year, which the reporting equates to the annual consumption of 18,000 homes. Africa has about 409 megawatts of operational data center capacity, under 1% of the global total for a fifth of the world’s people, and that is projected to reach 2.2 gigawatts by 2030.
A Housing Assembly member told the outlet that their members know what it is to queue for water, to go without electricity and to wait decades for decent housing.
The sentence about queuing for water is the same sentence that gets said in Orangeburg and in Memphis. The companies are the same companies, the water question is the same question, and the answer everywhere is that the facility gets its allocation first.
Foxglove is a legal nonprofit that took this case on. The comparable role here is played by the Southern Environmental Law Center, which filed twice this month, and there is no reason those two sets of lawyers should not know what the other is filing.
The gap that matters worldwide is the one between coverage and use. The GSMA published its State of Mobile Internet Connectivity report Sept. 15. Globally 3% of people, or 270 million, live where there is no mobile broadband network at all. Another 38%, or 3.1 billion people, live under a network they do not use.
In sub-Saharan Africa 25% of the population uses mobile internet. The coverage gap there is 9%, or 110 million people, and the usage gap is 66%, or 820 million. An entry-level internet-capable handset costs 27.6% of monthly income across the region and 76% of monthly income for the poorest fifth.
Rwanda is the clean illustration. It has 96% 4G population coverage and 21% of the population using mobile internet.
This is the glossary at the bottom of this newsletter, measured on four continents. Availability is not adoption, and where they diverge the difference is almost always money.
It is also the answer to anyone who says a county is covered. Sub-Saharan Africa’s usage gap is more than seven times its coverage gap, and no amount of further building closes a gap made of price.
Kenya’s largest carrier passed a million home connections. Safaricom reported 1,024,950 fixed broadband subscriptions at the end of June, a 36.1% share of the market, TechCabal reported Sept. 22 from Communications Authority of Kenya statistics and the company’s annual report. Urban fixed broadband penetration is 17.3% and rural penetration is 0.6%.
Average revenue per fiber customer fell 2.5% even as connected homes rose 45.9%, which means growth is coming from cheaper plans. Starlink holds 27,616 subscriptions, or 1% of the market.
Counts subscriptions, which are not households or people · Measures subscription and penetration, not availability · TechCabal, Sept. 22, reporting by Kenn Abuya · The regulator’s statistics were not read directlyOn the calendar
Sept. 23: North Carolina satellite resiliency grant closes at 11:59 p.m. Priority to organizations in the 39 Helene disaster counties. Equipment and installation only.
Deadline · NCDITOct. 6: Memphis City Council takes up the data center moratorium. Delayed from Sept. 15 and expected to be narrowed to hyperscale facilities.
Council meeting · Daily Memphian, Sept. 15Oct. 7: first public hearing on the Dominion and NextEra merger, in Newport News. Christopher Newport University, 6 to 8 p.m. Fairfax follows Oct. 9 and Richmond Nov. 5.
Hearing schedule · WTVR, Sept. 22Oct. 13: comments due at the FCC on the future of E-Rate. The inquiry asks whether the program should be limited to rural areas or ended.
Deadline · Reported in issue 02 from Broadband BreakfastOct. 16: the parties in the Digital Equity Act case are to confer. The next status report is due on the 30-day cycle.
Court date reported in coverage · Benton Institute, Aug. 19Oct. 20: Loudoun County staff return with the data center pause resolution. The board has indicated it should be retroactive to Sept. 15.
Board meeting · Data Center Dynamics, Sept. 18Nov. 9: comments due on the NTIA Internet Use Survey question set. This decides what device and digital skills data will exist in 2028.
Deadline · Federal Register, Sept. 9Nov. 17: applications close for the Native Entity Grant Program and the third round of the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program. Awards run $500,000 to $2.5 million.
Deadline · NDIA, Sept. 14Sept. 24: a free 25-hour internet literacy livestream starts at 9 a.m. Eastern. Connected Nation is running sessions on passwords and scam recognition with organizations across several continents. Free, and easy to point a library or senior center toward.
Event · Telecompetitor, Sept. 21Oct. 5 and Oct. 6: two more North Carolina hearings. Vance County takes up a 900-megawatt campus proposal and a possible 60-day moratorium on Oct. 5. Raleigh holds its data center moratorium public hearing Oct. 6 at 7 p.m., limited to 30 minutes.
Hearings · City of Raleigh, read directly; Vance County via NC Data Centers, Sept. 18, an aggregating newsletterNov. 15: the earliest date AT&T’s approved copper discontinuation could begin. It covers roughly 90,000 customers across 18 states, eight of them in this coverage area.
Authorization granted January 2026 · Broadband Breakfast, Jan. 13, 2026April 26, 2027: the web accessibility deadline for governments serving 50,000 or more. Smaller governments and special districts have until April 26, 2028.
Deadline under the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II web rulePeople and money
A Georgia regulator left the commission for a data center developer. Tricia Pridemore resigned from the Georgia Public Service Commission on Sept. 4, before her term ended, and has joined the data center developer DC BLOX as executive vice president for energy, regulatory and policy, the Georgia Recorder reported Sept. 16. In that role she represents the company before lawmakers, regulators and utilities.
While on the commission she voted on the rule meant to make data centers fund their own energy infrastructure, a rule critics said still left residential customers exposed to some costs. Georgia law bars former officials from lobbying for one year. DC BLOX operates in Rockdale and Douglas counties and has a planned Conyers campus drawing 216 megawatts from Georgia Power.
The commissioners who write the rule about who pays are the same people the industry hires afterward. That is legal, it is disclosed, and it is worth saying out loud in a newsletter that spends most of its space on cost allocation.
Georgia elects its commissioners. A one-year lobbying bar is a state statute, and a legislator who wants a longer one files a bill.
Two federal programs opened for tribal and Native entities. The Native Entity Grant Program has $250 million available and the third round of the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program has $540 million, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance reported Sept. 14. Awards in both run from $500,000 to $2.5 million, with a four-year performance period and awards expected in spring 2027.
Eligible activities include digital skills training, distribution of devices other than smartphones, and broadband subsidies at a minimum of 100 megabits per second down and 20 up. Applications close Nov. 17.
Counts dollars available and award sizes, not locations or people served · NDIA, Sept. 14, guidance read directly · The federal notices of funding opportunity were not read directlyComing up
“The release date for the 2025 ACS 1-year estimates is being determined. The Census Bureau is assessing the impact of the new departmental administrative order.”
The bureau’s notice went up Aug. 6 and the page has not been revised since. American Community Survey table S2801 is the source for nearly every county and state broadband subscription figure in circulation, including the ones this newsletter needs.
A tip sheet published Sept. 18 lists releases on government organization, nonemployer statistics and the marine economy. It does not mention the American Community Survey.
Without table S2801 there is no county-level broadband number for any of these nine states. State and national averages are where the Black Belt goes to disappear, and this is the second issue running that the answer has been the same three words.
Two votes we could not report. The Prince William County supervisors were to vote Sept. 22 on shrinking their data center overlay district, and the Walls, Mississippi planning commission was to take up the 1,000-acre rezoning the same evening. Neither outcome had been published as of Sept. 23, when we checked again. Both will be in the next issue. The Fauquier County application scheduled for Sept. 17 was withdrawn and is covered above.
Pending · Scheduled meetings, outcomes not reportedWhat the numbers mean
You’ll see a few terms throughout this report that sound similar, but they don’t always mean the same thing. We try to be clear about what each number actually tells us.
Every figure is labeled based on what was counted or measured. And when we’re using someone else’s research instead of the original source, we’ll say that too.