Stop the CyrusOne Data Center in Sangamon County

We keep hearing people ask the question, “Why is this happening so quickly and why does it feel like we can’t do anything about it?”

Here is how that path was paved at a federal level.

1. Executive Order 14179 (January 23, 2025)
Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
> Directed federal agencies to reduce regulatory barriers to AI development and deployment.

2. Executive Order 14141 (January 14, 2025)
Advancing United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure
> Promoted development of large-scale AI infrastructure, including data centers.

3. Stargate AI Infrastructure Initiative (January 21, 2025)
> Announced alongside OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.
> Proposed up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure investment.
> Federal support pledged to accelerate construction and permitting.

4. Executive Order 14318 (July 23, 2025)
Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure
> Streamlined federal permitting.
> Reduced regulatory delays.
> Encouraged rapid construction of large data-center projects.

5. Executive Order on Strengthening Grid Reliability and Security (2025)
> Directed actions to increase electric generation and grid reliability to support AI and data-center growth.

6. Executive Orders Declaring a National Energy Emergency (2025)
> Expanded federal authority to accelerate energy infrastructure projects needed for growing electricity demand.

7. Executive Orders Supporting Domestic Energy Production (2025)
> Promoted increased natural gas, coal, nuclear, and other dispatchable power sources to meet AI and data-center energy needs.

8. America’s AI Action Plan (2025)
> Federal strategy focused on expanding AI leadership.
> Expanded computing infrastructure.
> Increased energy supply planning.
> Advanced permitting reform.

9. Federal Data Center Permitting and Siting Reforms (2025–2026)
> Directed agencies to identify federal lands suitable for rapid data-center development.
> Encouraged redevelopment of brownfield sites.
> Accelerated review of locations suitable for large-scale AI infrastructure.

10. Coal and Dispatchable Power Support Initiative (2025–2026)
> Linked preservation of existing coal generation to AI demand growth.
> Supported expansion of reliable dispatchable power resources.
>Connected energy policy directly to data-center and AI infrastructure expansion

County ••> to ••> county

OPEN FIELD COALITION FORWARD

The Field Was Already Alive
How a local question became a county-to-county public responsibility

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A field is already alive before anyone calls it a site.

It is carrying soil and root systems, drainage and birdsong, planted rows and wild edges, the work of hands that came before us, the roads families know by memory, and the quiet future of children who have no seat at the table where the ground around them is being decided.

Then I began reading the record.

What came into view across this surrounding central Illinois field was larger than any one meeting room should be expected to hold:

636 megawatts through the C1 Sangamon I LLC / CyrusOne data-center project approved in Sangamon County.

1,000 megawatts proposed through Eagle Rock Partners in Christian County.

500 megawatts proposed through Hut 8’s Logan Prairie Data Center in Logan County.

2,136 megawatts of approved or proposed data-center demand across three nearby county processes.

I am beginning the story of Open Field Coalition FORWARD with that number because it tells the truth about why the work had to grow.

One county can hear one proposal.

One family can read one packet.

One farmer can stand before one board and explain what land means when it is more than acreage on a development map.

But a region is the place that will carry the cumulative consequence.

I came into this work as a mother, a bedside nurse, a neighbor, a person of faith, and a candidate trying to understand what was being placed into the life of the community I serve. I was not sitting in a boardroom with the language already handed to me. I began where ordinary people begin: opening agendas, searching for maps, reading zoning filings, following public notices, listening to the promises being made, and asking whether the people most affected had been given enough truth, enough time, and enough room to understand what was moving toward them.

The first project that brought the question fully into focus was the C1 Sangamon / CyrusOne development on agricultural ground near Waverly in Talkington Township.

This is a massive server campus.

Its proposed footprint reaches across approximately 280 acres of Sangamon County land identified in the public record as agricultural ground and cropland. Its full electric demand has been reported at 636 megawatts. Buildings, backup systems, roads, utility infrastructure, water-service questions, emergency-response obligations, tax representations, and community promises all followed from the same proposal.

On April 7, 2026, the Sangamon County Board approved the land-use path for that project.

The official minutes record that 61 people had signed up for public comment. The final vote granted approval by 17 to 10, with one abstention.

The vote occurred. The people witnessed it. The ground entered a different chapter.

And still, the documents had more to say.

Inside the project’s official county filing was a Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative will-serve letter identifying Diamond Core Data Center Phase 1. It identified a Phase 1 data-center load reaching 336 megawatts and named RECC and NextEra Energy Marketing in the proposed service pathway.

Then came the sentence I could not set back down:

Service is contingent on the “execution of a tariff between the Data Center, RECC and NEM which will recover all costs and fees assessed to the load.”

I am a nurse. I know how a single line in a chart can change the seriousness of what you are looking at.

That sentence did not prove the public would be made to pay project-created costs. It did not prove the tariff had been signed. It did not tell us the final allocation of cost, reimbursement, payment security, default risk, or responsibility for transmission work.

It revealed where the proof must live.

Sangamon County’s public-facing information presented the assurance that residents would not pay for required transmission-line upgrades and infrastructure improvements, and that CyrusOne would pay for its electricity use and fair share of grid costs. The RECC letter identified a tariff designed to recover costs and fees assessed to the load.

The people deserve the executed agreements that turn those assurances into something measurable.

That was the doorway.

I walked through it because public trust should never rest on a promise when a signed agreement is what determines who will carry the weight.

Then the horizon widened.

Christian County families began confronting an Eagle Rock Partners proposal described as an $8.8 billion, 1,000-megawatt data-center development. People there brought questions about farmland, water, electric demand, transparency, local authority, and what such a project could mean for the lives already planted in that community.

Logan County residents were already facing Hut 8’s proposed 500-megawatt Logan Prairie Data Center near Latham. Their county moved toward a twelve-month moratorium for large-scale data centers so time could be used to write rules and consider the public responsibility before approval.

Morgan County took its own precautionary step. With no formal data-center application yet submitted there, residents and officials responded to what they were seeing nearby and approved a six-month moratorium to study standards before an application could place them under the same pressure.

Each county carries its own facts, its own authority, its own record, and its own people.

Together, they revealed the shape of the problem.

Major data-center development was moving through central Illinois in separate local processes while the consequences belonged to a much wider living region. Electric infrastructure, transmission planning, working land, water protection, road use, emergency preparation, public cost, schools, tax promises, and public trust cannot be responsibly understood as isolated pieces when more than two thousand megawatts of disclosed demand are gathering across neighboring communities.

The people needed a place to meet the whole question.

That is how Open Field Coalition FORWARD came about. The name came from recognizing what the work was asking of us.

Open Field begins with the actual ground.

The places already holding food, habitat, water movement, family history, rural memory, and the ordinary beauty of lives lived close to weather and season. The zinnia in our mark is not decoration to me. It is an honest sign of what is at stake: the right of living communities to be treated as more than available space for the next industrial demand.

Open Field also means the records must be brought where people can see them. The hearing notice. The parcel map. The utility letter. The signed agreement. The board vote. The permit condition. The public promise. The unanswered question.

A democracy becomes thin and brittle when public decisions grow too technical, too rushed, or too distant for the public to follow. People should not need an attorney, an engineer, a donor network, or an invitation from an insider before they are allowed to understand what is being decided around their homes.

Coalition came from seeing how many people already held necessary parts of the truth.

The farmer who understands the ground.

The homeowner who understands the road that floods after hard rain.

The parent who understands that a child inherits the consequences adults normalize.

The worker who deserves both dignified employment and honest information about the larger project.

The firefighter who understands what new industrial infrastructure may ask of local response.

The ratepayer who reads a promise and asks for the document that makes it binding.

The resident who opens a county packet for the first time and finds the sentence that gives everyone else a clearer question to ask.

No one person can carry an entire region’s public responsibility alone.

No one county should have to learn the hardest lesson after the vote and then watch another county begin from the beginning.

When enough doorways open, a coalition forms.

FORWARD is the choice to carry useful truth while it can still protect people.

It means we map what is approved, what is proposed, and what remains uncertain.

It means we preserve the public record.

It means we attend meetings, submit questions, request agreements, follow permit conditions, watch legislation, study local authority, and share what one community learns with the next community before its people are told the important decisions have already been made.

It means a person can enter this work with one question and still belong.

That matters to me because of my faith.

I follow Jesus, and I believe every person touched by these decisions carries God-given dignity. The farmer. The worker. The official. The landowner. The developer. The resident who supports a project. The resident afraid of what it may mean. The child who will grow into a world shaped by decisions they were too young to influence.

That dignity is precisely why accountability belongs here.

Truth is not cruelty.

Asking for proof is not hatred.

Protecting people from consequences they were never fully equipped to examine is part of loving our neighbor.

Stewardship asks us to take seriously what has been placed within our reach: land, water, public trust, human labor, public office, community safety, and the lives of people who may never have the power of the corporations arriving before their local government.

Artificial intelligence has made these questions even more urgent. Industrial-scale computing capacity is being built into our physical world through land, electricity, utilities, tax structures, public approvals, and the decisions of real human beings. When powerful institutions describe AI as the shape of education, work, medicine, security, and childhood, the people deserve to understand the infrastructure required to power that vision and the cost of placing it into the communities where they live.

Children need more than technological promises.

They need land that has been tended wisely.

Water protected with care.

Human teachers, caregivers, workers, and neighbors whose value has not been reduced by the next technological ambition.

Public officials willing to demand proof before assurance becomes consequence.

Communities connected strongly enough to tell the truth to one another while choices can still be shaped.

This is the field I am opening.

A county-to-county public record and action field.

A place where information moves neighbor to neighbor before decisions land on people who were left outside the language needed to understand them.

A place where we can learn together, keep the record honest, protect the living world around us, and insist that industrial-scale development answer to the public good.

Your part does not require you to know everything.

Find out what is being proposed near you.

Read one document.

Attend one meeting.

Ask for the agreement behind one promise.

Bring one neighbor into the conversation.

Carry one verified truth from your county to another person who may need it before their own vote arrives.

A bee does not belong to one bloom.

It moves what gives the field a chance to keep living.

That is what Open Field Coalition FORWARD is here to do!

Neighbors, not strangers.
Pollinators for the people, the land, and the future.
Downstate Illinois