Overview:
Sixty-one years after civil rights marchers fought for voting rights in Alabama's Black Belt, residents face another struggle over political power: whether they have a meaningful voice in a billion-dollar development planned near a historic landmark.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights marchers made the 54-mile trek from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, they spent their final night before reaching the Alabama capitol at Robert and Mary Gardner’s farm in Lowndes County.
Now known as Campsite #3, the site is part of the National Historic Trail commemorating the famed voting-rights march.
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Soon, though, the historic site could have a new neighbor: An 800-acre hyperscale data center known as Project Red Clay, just a half mile away. If completed, it will be the largest in Alabama, running off 1.5 gigawatts of power — enough electricity to power 900,000 homes.
Massive Tax Credit
The developer behind Project Red Clay, a Texas-based company called Cloverleaf, recently won a 20-year tax abatement worth $1.1 billion in tax relief to build the project, despite widespread opposition from the county’s poor and predominantly Black residents.
This comes for the vague possibility of economic gain.
Abre’ Conner, NAACP director of environmental and climate justice
Abre’ Conner, the NAACP’s director of environmental and climate justice, said in a statement that the green light from Lowndes County represents a larger national trend “to leave the people most impacted out of the decisions and force data centers into places that are already bearing the brunt of environmental and climate harms.”
“This comes for the vague possibility of economic gain,” she said.
Few Public Details
In Alabama, officials have granted 30 years of tax abatement to massive data center projects. But a new law taking effect in 2027 will reduce that period to 20 years.
Because the project is located in the unincorporated community of Burkville, the Lowndes County Commission handled the approval process and was to schedule a special meeting at Cloverleaf’s request for the abatement.
However, instead of scheduling the meeting, the commission voted 3-2 on Oct. 13, giving Project Red Clay a 20-year abatement that will benefit the company by more than $1 billion.
Conner says that despite the project’s scale and cost, residents have been left in the dark because of a lack of publicly available information; moreover, officials have given them little opportunity to weigh in.
“The reasonable questions that residents want to understand are regarding the environmental impacts. And the county refuses to respond despite its legal duty to do so,” she said. “If the community’s life span decreases because of empty promises of a better future, does the county believe that justifies rewriting clear [state] Open Meetings Act rules?”
Sewer Crisis
Lowndes County, in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt region, is nearly 70 percent Black. Residents are no strangers to environmental justice fights. For decades, Black communities in the county have had to contend with the lack of modern sewer or septic systems in many homes.
Families have often resorted to a solution called “straight piping”: disposing of household waste through sewage pipes that run directly into their backyards, posing a significant health risk.
Cloverleaf estimates Project Red Clay would consume as much as 100,000 gallons of water per day from the Pintlala Water System, but it has not disclosed how it would treat wastewater. Concerned residents and activists point out that Lowndes County might not have the water, power or sewer capacity for the project, and many residents are still dealing with a major sanitation crisis.
Noted environmental activist Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in Lowndes County and made her name fighting for modern sewage and clean water in her home county. The EPA and the Alabama Department of Public Health finally reached a settlement in 2023 to address the sewage crisis, but it was later canceled in the early days of the Trump Administration.
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“I would like to extend an invitation to President Trump to come to Lowndes County and spend the night in the homes of the people that are going to be living near this data center to see what it’s like to live in Lowndes County,” Flowers told The American Prospect. “I think he should go and spend a night along the Selma to Montgomery Trail in one of these communities that would be impacted by this hyperscale data center.”
With no remaining regulatory hurdles to clear, the construction on Project Red Clay could begin next year.
