My rural Kansas town has a bad case of data center fever. Boom or bust, we will never be the same.

A notice for a public hearing is posted at the intersection of G and 190 roads at the western edge of Emporia. The city has annexed the site for a proposed hyperscale data center, and a June 23, 2026, hearing seeks for public comment before the local planning commission. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

Does a town have a soul?

My town does.

You can catch glimpses of it in the hours before dawn on our streets and sidewalks, when the only others you’re likely to see are early rising pedestrians or the seasonal bicyclist. It’s present on Saturdays in June when the steps of the old church on the corner are crowded with the family and friends of the hopeful, and it sits thoughtfully on front porch steps when the first fireflies of summer punctuate the dusk.

It’s also there in kitchens and at dining room tables across town, where the occupants talk in quiet tones about rising prices, foreign wars, and the awful consequences of a major illness or a job loss.

This is a town built on the work of the human mind and of human hands, a town celebrated a hundred years ago by its most famous citizen, a country newspaper editor, for its essential goodness.

“Here is a county where every man puts his pennies into the county treasury to help his fellows, to pay his own way, to care for the common health of the community, and so preserve his own,” observed William Allen White in 1926. Those pennies, White wrote, went “to educate the children, to help the poor, to heal the sick, and to prevent poverty.”

Now women pay into the local treasury as well, although they get just 74 cents for every dollar a man makes, according to a recent study. Pay and employment have been on the minds of many here in Emporia in the last couple of years, as manufacturing jobs vanish at an alarming rate. The crippling blow was the closing of Tyson Beef, which took 800 jobs with it. At this time last year, the unemployment rate for town was 5.8%, making Emporia the unemployment capital of Kansas for towns of more than 25,000 population. The city’s unemployment rate is down to 4.2% now, according to the Kansas Department of Labor, which is near the state and national levels.

Last year’s dip sparked a civic panic to find something to fill the unemployment crater left by Tyson. No officials used the word “panic” in public, but that’s how some city officials described it to me in casual conversation.

Publicly, the Regional Development Association — a nine-member board consisting of representatives from the city, the county, the local university and the tech college — have stressed optimism, noting that for Lyon County as a whole, the civilian workforce numbers were up slightly. Leads were being pursued through the Kansas Department of Commerce, the board told the city newspaper in January, and a couple of other projects were in the works.

Early this month, the depth of the local economic panic was revealed.

The RDA had been quietly working for eight months on a deal to develop a 1,000-acre “hyperscale” data center in Emporia. In this case, hyperscale sounds impressive, but it means that it could be scaled to accommodate something modest — or something huge. The agreement would require the creation of a “digital infrastructure overlay district” for requested properties within the city limits that were zoned industrial. The private entity behind the project was listed as “Kanza Park Place LLC,” but the identity of the developer behind the project was to be kept secret until after the property just west of Emporia had been annexed into the city and rezoned.

Lyle Butler, interim president of the RDA, said the deal represented a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape the trajectory of our community.” Casey Woods, director of Emporia Main Street, said economic growth could be on the order of what the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant brought to nearby Coffey County decades ago. The deal could triple the local tax base, it was suggested, and just about every organization in town that represented a business or civic interest had a prepared statement supporting the data center proposal.

About the only group that had been left out of the discussion was the public. Discussions on social media and on the street in town were largely ones of concern about the project and outrage that the identity of the developer was being kept secret.

Such a reaction should have been expected.

Seven in 10 Americans are opposed to local construction of data centers for artificial intelligence, according to a Gallup survey released last month, including nearly half who are strongly opposed. That opposition was tied to concerns about the environment and quality of life.

Those concerns were echoed by one of the organizers of the opposition to the Emporia data center. Amanda Mendoza, a teacher who lives across the street from one of the tracts that would be used for development, said she and other landowners felt betrayed by the city commission because of the secrecy surrounding the project.

“There are many reasons why I am opposed to having a data center in my front yard,” Mendoza told me. “But I can say that protecting the health of my family, my neighbors and my fellow Emporians, including the health of our environment, water and energy resources that we share with the surrounding communities, is foremost.”

She said the city had failed to set any regulations for the proposed data center and had not shared sufficient information with the public.

“We have yet to receive straight answers, only conjecture of what might be,” she said. “That’s not what I expect from the people who should care the most about us as a community.”

When the Emporia City Commission voted June 3 to annex five parcels of land at the west edge of town for the proposed “hyperscale” data center in the hopes of saving the local economy, it felt like a slap in the face to Mendoza and other residents.

The unanimous annexation vote came less than a day after the plan had been announced as the “Flint Hills Digital Campus,” a pleasant name that hides the soul-sucking nature of the development. The meeting room was filled with residents angry about the proposal, many of whom voiced their opposition for the record, but in the end the city commission provided no answers.

It all seemed a bit patronizing.

I emailed city manager Trey Cocking to ask, among other questions, how residents were supposed to provide informed input on the data center when they didn’t even know the identity of the developer behind the plan. After initially agreeing to answer my question, Cocking later directed a staffer to respond.

“The City’s role is to review land-use applications, zoning regulations, infrastructure considerations, and potential community impacts through public process,” communications manager Christine Torrens told me. “The City does not control when or how private business ownership or investment information is publicly disclosed.”

She referred me to Garrett Nordstrom, the developer’s spokesman.

Torrens said there was a “multi-step public review and approval process” with the next public hearing June 23, when the local planning commission is scheduled to take up the zoning request for the digital infrastructure district. The earliest the commission could consider the zoning commission’s recommendation would be July 15. Additional public hearings would occur if the project advances, she said.

On the day the commission annexed the land, I had a chance encounter downtown with Nordstrom. During an impromptu interview, he said it was “customary” for identities of investors to be kept confidential and that nondisclosure agreements were in place, but that the developer would be revealed after the rezoning was approved. The developer, he said, was an entrepreneur from an adjacent county who had strong ties to the area and had attended Emporia State University.

In a follow-up email with Nordstrom, I asked how large of an investment the project would represent.

“While the final investment will depend on the number of end users, facility designs, and the pace of development,” he replied, “projects of this scale typically represent several billion dollars of private capital investment over their lifetime.”

Nordstrom anticipated there would be a “gradual progression” of capital investment over the course of a decade or more, instead of a single massive construction project.

Turns out, residents didn’t have to wait long to learn the name of the developer.

Internet sleuths had noted that the registered agent for Kanza Park Place LLC, according to the Kansas Secretary of State website, had listed an address in adjacent Chase County associated with Gary Pinkston. Pinkston, 84, is a real estate developer known mostly for projects in California and Hawaii.

With the cat out of the bag and roaming wild on social media, Pinkston sent a press release on Monday, June 8, that identified himself as the developer. It was accompanied by a picture of Pinkston riding a horse in a field, somewhere. He said he was raised on the Flying J. Ranch at Cedar Point, Kansas, where his mother had been the postmaster for 30 years. He said he had “attended” ESU and later earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Kansas State University.

He described himself as a “third-generation” rancher who had returned to Kansas to manage the project for the benefit of his local region. The center would result in thousands of short-term construction jobs and hundreds of good-paying full-time jobs later. Pinkston said he saw himself as a steward whose aim was “to preserve the values and character that make this area unique.”

What the letter didn’t say is that Pinkston is a defendant in federal civil court in a case involving a $200 million luxury condominium project on the Big Island of Hawaii. Pinkston also has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which has temporarily stayed the condominium lawsuit. His residence in the bankruptcy case is listed as Tiburon, in Marin County, California.

Nordstrom, the spokesman, has characterized the condominium lawsuit as a dispute over a lending agreement and has said the Chapter 11 bankruptcy does not impact the “feasibility” of the Flint Hills data center project. He also told me he was scheduling interview requests for Pinkston, but that an interview could not be granted immediately.

It is clear why the RDA and other officials agreed to keep the identity of the developer a secret.

Data centers are the boom economy of our time, and Pinkston seems an unlikely developer to pull off an economic coup of this order. Most of his dealings appear to have been in real estate, and a data center is about as close to a condominium as a piano is to a fish.

Beyond that, there’s the larger question of how the RDA and city officials handled a proposal that seems a poor fit for Emporia. The “Flint Hills Digital Campus” seems like a cash grab that wouldn’t offer the kind of jobs likely to help Emporia residents already here. The best economic projects complement the areas in which they’re located. The Unbound Gravel, a bicycle race the brings thousands of riders from across the world to Emporia each year and results in an economic boon of about $22 million annually, seems a good example. But data centers can be located anywhere there is the infrastructure, and increasingly are.

While most of the nation’s 3,900 existing data centers have been located in urban areas on the coasts, rural America is increasingly bidding for new ones. Despite the boom, driven by the increased computing demand of artificial intelligence, about $64 billion in new projects were canceled in 2024 and 2025 because of citizen opposition, according to the World Resources Institute. In Kansas, data centers have been the subject of intense local debate from Reno County to Ottawa to Topeka. Opposition to a data center in Independence, Missouri, has been fierce enough to force a recall vote against a city councilman.

Beneath the civic tumult is the larger question of what kind of society we’d like to choose for ourselves. Is a bigger tax base worth changing the essential character of our communities?

Advocates of big data argue that AI is one of those historical inflection points in which a disruptive technology supplants the old way of doing things, but ultimately is a boon to humanity. You’ve heard this reasoning before: The printing press replaced scribes, steam gave us horsepower without the need for horses, and digital media rendered older forms of communication like radio and newspapers obsolete. We’re collectively better off, even though it was bad news for the scribes and the grooms and the printer’s devils. This reasoning has flaws, because technology doesn’t progress in a straight line, but rather branches and turns like a river crossing the broad plain of human existence. The first instant form of communication, complete with networks and nodes, wasn’t the Internet but the telegraph, from the 1840s. If you think three dimensional photographs are a relatively recent invention, think again — the Victorians loved their stereoscopes. Technological progress defies our expectations.

Still, there are landmarks.

There was the printing press in 1455, the telegraph in 1844, and the atom bomb in 1945. Each were disruptive technologies that would transform the world.

But AI doesn’t resemble any of the technological revolutions that came before. It doesn’t help us think, it can’t turn a wheel, and any communication with it must be categorized as something other than human. What it does extraordinarily well is bring godlike speed to the counting and sorting and puzzle-solving tasks we already know how to do. While it may be too early to declare that AI thinks for itself, it’s certainly being used to think for us. That is frightening in the short term because it discourages us from deep thinking. It is terrifying in the long run as a rival to human thought that may eventually decide to do away with the opposition.

There’s a 10% to 20% chance that AI will destroy humanity. That estimate, by the way, isn’t just a guess by somebody who read too much science fiction as a kid, but the odds given by Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist considered the “godfather” of AI. It is important to note, however, that AI is still programmed by human beings, with human emotions and biases, and that to date no program has revealed an agency of its own.

Bipartisan efforts in 14 states have called for moratoriums on data center construction, according to the New York Times. Some cities, including Tulsa, have instituted temporary bans.

Kansas lawmakers, however, have offered incentives for data center construction. Senate Bill 98 provides a 20-year sales tax exemption on construction material while providing some modest environmental and security guardrails.

In Emporia, there have been public protests about every other day since the data center plan was announced. There have been protestors on street corners, at local meetings, and at the city zoo when the city commission visited for a business lunch. At the RDA meeting on June 12, when the board voted in favor of a letter of support for consideration of the project, uniformed police officers were stationed at the doors. Are civic leaders so afraid of public opinion that armed security is necessary? Such measures add fuel to the opposition. The protests may be as much a reaction to the secrecy of the project and civic heavy-handedness as to express concerns about the environment and the quality of life.

City officials have stressed the annexation is only the first of many steps required to make the data center a reality. Regardless, the economic development process that civic leaders have used for recruitment is broken. Of the nine members on the RDA, only two are Emporia city commissioners. For community members to develop trust in their leaders, they must feel included. In the case of the proposed data center, residents have mostly felt that their questions and concerns were an inconvenience. Residents were never surveyed or asked whether they would support a data center in their town.

Who would be the data center’s primary client? We just don’t know.

If completed as proposed, the data center would be across the street from farms and homes where people have lived for years. It would be within sight, and perhaps sound, of an elementary school in a residential neighborhood. It might also be the first view of the city that travelers northbound on Interstate 35 would have.

The soul of Emporia is worth saving, but creating a data center to physically separate the city from the Flint Hills and change the essential goodness of the town isn’t the way to do it.