Guest opinion column by Pinal Unlocked, published in Pinal Post’s Opinion section. Views are the author’s own.
A Response to Pinal Partnership on Data Centers
Pinal Partnership, a membership-based economic development organization in Pinal County, recently circulated a newsletter by its president and CEO, Craig McFarland, “Data Centers: A Free-Market Model for Our Digital Future,” which also ran as an op-ed in Pinal Central. It urges government leaders to reject “fear-based opposition” and avoid any pause in data-center development, and argues that many concerns about water, electricity, noise, and land are based on misinformation or misconceptions.
The Partnership’s stated mission is to “improve research, planning and coordination” around infrastructure and natural resources. Yet the newsletter urges officials not to pause and treats those concerns as fear-based opposition.
The Partnership has backed the project directly. Its May Government Relations Committee recap called for community support for Vermaland’s La Osa project ahead of the May 27 Board vote and circulated a draft support letter addressed to the Board of Supervisors. It urges the supervisors not to let “misinformation and fear rip away an incredible opportunity.” Both the letter and the newsletter warn against fear while arguing from fear, adding that “America stands to lose.”
Several of the individuals and organizations involved in the La Osa Data Center project also occupy leadership roles within the Partnership. The applicant is represented by Court Rich, a Rose Law Group co-founder who has presented the project at the county hearings. Rich also chairs Pinal Partnership’s Energy Committee; his sister, Rose Law Group founder Jordan Rose, chairs its board and was one of its three founding directors. The applicant’s lawyer and the chair of the group advocating for the project are brother and sister; and Rose Law Group is the Partnership’s counsel and provides its lobbyists. Rich, the project’s representative, has described a “tremendous amount of misinformation” about the project, the same framing found in the newsletter and the template letter. He has also been an associate scholar at the Goldwater Institute, and the Goldwater Institute is one of this newsletter’s principal cited authorities. Two of the five supervisors who will vote on the rezoning, Jeffrey McClure and Mike Goodman, serve on its board of directors, as do County Manager Leo Lew and Bryan Kitchen of EPS Group, the engineering firm that prepared the project’s water analysis. The Partnership is entitled to advocate, that is not illegal. The point is narrower: a newsletter from a group whose leaders are this closely tied to a project it is urging the county to approve should be weighed as advocacy, not neutral analysis.
Throughout the newsletter, contested engineering, economic, and policy questions are presented as settled facts. Those distinctions matter because zoning decisions are permanent, while project descriptions and operating assumptions can change over time. Often a data center is narrowly described as a building full of servers. A modern AI campus usually includes much more, such as substations, battery storage, cooling infrastructure, and in some cases on-site power generation, so whether a given claim is accurate depends on which part of the project is being described. That matters because the county is being asked to approve the entire campus, not just the server halls.
Noise is a quick illustration. The newsletter’s assurance that generators run only a few hours a year is true of the backup generators kept on-site for outages, but not of the cooling fans and equipment that run around the clock, or of the on-site gas plants the La Osa application proposes for the project’s second and third phases, which are described as on-site generation rather than emergency backup. (The applicant has since floated a smaller version with a single plant, but that reduction has not been made a binding stipulation.) The same gap runs through the reassurances on water, electricity, and contamination, which the earlier articles in this series examine in detail.
The claim about foreign influence
The newsletter’s sharpest move blames opposition on foreign money and Chinese propaganda, linking to a Fox News story about a Bitcoin Policy Institute report. There is a real thread there: the report cites congressional inquiries into how some national activist networks are funded. But that same report acknowledges opposition to data centers is largely genuine and homegrown, grounded in ordinary concerns about water and power. A resident’s question about water use or who pays for a new substation deserves an answer, not an accusation of foreign influence. Whether concerns originate locally or nationally, they still rise or fall on the evidence.
The comparison to China
The newsletter’s closing argument is that pausing means falling behind, with China the implied rival, whose recent experience illustrates that rapid construction alone does not guarantee success. After 2022, Beijing made AI infrastructure a priority and local governments rushed to build. More than 500 projects were announced across 2023 and 2024, and, by multiple reports, up to 80 percent of the new computing capacity sat unused as of early 2025. More than 100 were canceled in the 18 months through mid-2025, against 11 in all of 2023, and some that got built were reportedly used to capture subsidized power and state-backed loans rather than to run workloads. Beijing eventually stopped approving new projects outside eight designated hubs. With a grid roughly 60 percent coal, and closer to 70 percent in the east where most data-center demand is concentrated, it builds at an emissions disadvantage as well. China’s experience shows that building quickly is not, by itself, a competitive advantage. Siting decisions still have to match demand, available infrastructure, and long-term economics.
Asking that these questions be answered in the binding record before a decision does not mean anyone is opposed to responsible growth. Research, planning, and transparent review are how communities distinguish between good projects and projects that require additional scrutiny.
Whether it goes forward, and on what terms, is for the Pinal County Board of Supervisors, who take it up again on August 26.
The Board of Supervisors hears the case on August 26 at 9:30 a.m. at 135 North Pinal Street in Florence. The hearing is open to the public. Written comments can be submitted to the clerk of the board at [email protected], referencing case numbers 2026-PZ-003-26 and 2026-PZ-PD-003-26. Comments sent to the clerk are shared with the full Board and become part of the official record of the case.
About the Author
Eirini Pajak is a licensed real estate agent and Pinal County resident. She covers local land use and development decisions through her Pinal Unlocked page on Facebook and runs the Pinal Code Watchers community group. Her chiweenie Peso joins her on county rounds and features in the photo series accompanying this work.
