The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in Twiggs County Superior Court, alleges that Twiggs County ignored its own rules around zoning and public notices when the commission unanimously voted to rezone about 300 acres for the data center project on Sept. 18.
The property is owned by the Weyerhaeuser Company, which owns millions of acres of timberland across the U.S. The data center will be developed by Charlotte, North Carolina-based Eagle Rock Partners.
Preliminary plans show the data center consisting of up to nine buildings, three substations and two retention ponds. Eagle Rock estimates that the taxable value of the property once developed will be around $2 billion.
The plaintiffs — which include several property owners who live near the property and who have previously voiced their opposition — are asking the court to cancel the decision, which took the land from agricultural to commercial use.
“Individual Plaintiffs own and reside at properties located adjacent to and near the Subject Property,” the lawsuit reads. “As detailed below, they have a substantial interest in the zoning decision and will suffer irreparable injury and damage beyond the damage that other similarly situated owners will face should Twiggs County’s improper decision stand.” Lawsuit alleges the county didn’t give proper notice
The Twiggs County Local Code and Land Development Ordinance mandates that officials must post a sign on the property under consideration for rezoning that displays information about the rezoning and the date, time and location of the public hearing at least 15 days prior.
The complaint alleges that Twiggs County placed the sign on the wrong property and incorrectly stated the date of the hearing. The date was amended, but the sign wasn’t moved onto the correct parcel until nine days before the hearing date.
The lawsuit also alleges that by posting the sign incorrectly the county broke its own rules and violated residents’ rights to due process and transparency. The county didn’t examine a data center’s impacts, plaintiffs say
The suit goes further, alleging that the county broke its own rules by approving such a large-scale project without third-party review.
According to the Twiggs County Land Development Ordinance, “any development application which exceeds the applicable threshold criteria for Developments of Regional Impact (DRI) shall be submitted to the Middle Georgia Regional Commission (MGRC) for review.”
A DRI is a large-scale real estate project that will have effects that ripple beyond the local government jurisdiction where the project is located.
The ordinance forbids approving DRIs without a report analyzing their potential impact.
The project didn’t have that report at the time of the rezoning vote because the Georgia Department of Community Affairs paused reviews of data centers in July after a massive influx of projects across the state forced it to examine how it studies these developments, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The department said at the time that the pause wasn’t a moratorium on data centers, as they could still move forward at the local level, but later said data centers were still part of the DRI process.
The project could have opted for a review by the Middle Georgia Regional Commission, but Ken Loeber, a partner with Eagle Rock, said during a public Q&A prior to the vote that the project couldn’t be delayed. If the rezoning vote were delayed until Eagle Rock could procure a report, it would miss payments due to Oconee EMC, the company that has pledged to supply electricity to the project, and no longer have power.
Loeber said during the Q&A that Eagle Rock has followed all processes and regulations required by the state.
The lawsuit alleges that the Twiggs County Commission did not seek any information on the project’s impact beyond what the developer provided, and approved the rezoning unlawfully by not acquiring a report first.
“The failure of the County to submit and obtain Developments of Regional Impact Review with the MGRC despite the mandatory “shall” language contained in its ordinance constitutes not only a failure to follow its own Land Development Ordinance, but constitutes a violation of due process”, the complaint says. “In fact, the County failed to obtain any information or impact study other than that provided by the Zoning applicant itself.”
A lawsuit tells one side of a legal argument. The county has not yet responded to the lawsuit, and a court date has not been set.
© 2025 The Macon Telegraph (Macon, Ga.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
