Personal Injury Attorney in Marion, SC

MARION — Construction could begin on an $800 million data center in a rural South Carolina county as soon as this year, but some residents say they’re just learning of the project’s existence.

Marion County Council hastily approved tax breaks for Stream Data Centers, voting on all three readings in January.

The body approved final reading as residents prepared for a rare South Carolina snow. This, and the project not initially being labeled as a data center, caused some residents to feel they’d been left in the dark.

“We feel like we were betrayed by our decision makers,” Jessica Thomas, a Marion resident, told The Post and Courier.

The project was initially presented under the code name Project Liberty. Later, the company was listed as Eagle Myra LLC on agendas. The company operates under Stream.

“I understand you need to protect certain entities,” Thomas told The Post and Courier. “Fine, you call it Project Liberty, but there was no data center attached to it.”

Thomas’ sentiment matches those of many residents who felt blindsided by the data center and attended a Feb. 26 Q-and-A session — the second of two sessions the week of Feb. 23 to address concerns about the data center.

People packed the Marion County Administration building during the Thursday morning session. All seats were filled, and people gathered in the back as residents lined up for their turn to ask questions about the data center.

Many residents believed the session, which was listed as a special-called meeting on Marion County Council’s website, would give them the opportunity to question county council members.

Instead, representatives with Stream, the state Department of Commerce, the state Department of Environmental Services and MarCo Rural Water Co. Inc., were gathered to answer questions.

“The company was here, but they gave us corporate answers,” Idreese Foxworth, a Marion resident, said.

Foxworth was one of many residents who had questions about the data center. Attendees asked about water and power usage, job creation and environmental impact.

The data center will likely have two phases with up to six buildings the county’s industrial park on U.S. Highway 501 Bypass. The first phase would see three buildings constructed in the next five to 10 years, according to Santiago Escobar with Stream Data Centers. The second phase could potentially see four to six more buildings, he said.

Anthony Bolner, a founding partner of Stream, said the company will create 20 jobs at the facility, with whatever company that ultimately uses the data center’s capacity potentially creating more jobs.

Escobar also said Stream has conducted environmental studies to be sure there are no negative impacts when they begin developing.

Residents such as Thomas and Foxworth, both of whom are involved with the environmental organization United People Project, raised concerns of potential bias in the study. The pair said they would have shared that concern if they had known about the data center.

“We would have asked for independent studies to be done around environmental and safety concerns,” Thomas said. “We would have just shared our concerns ahead of time so that we had input into whether or not this was actually going to be good for Marion County.”

A representative for MarCo Rural Water Co. Inc., said Stream’s water demand for its first center is “very small” at 7,500 gallons a day, which he compared to that of a small office building.

South Carolina as a whole is attracting more and more data centers.

A $3 billion data center was expected to come to Spartanburg, but the project now appears “all but dead,” after Spartanburg County Council announced it wouldn’t consider more property tax incentives for data centers until the state passed a law regulating them, according to previous reporting from The Post and Courier.