Who bankrolls Emporia’s data center bid is the $3 million question. The answer is sought in court.

A notice could be seen in June 2026 near the intersection of G and 190 roads at the west edge of Emporia, with Interstate 35 in the distance. The site is part of a proposed hyperscale data center that has sparked furious debate. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

Thank God for open courts.

Secrecy has been a hallmark of the data center assault on rural America, and few subjects have been as secret — or as enigmatic — as the money behind the proposed “digital campus” for my town of Emporia, at the edge of the Flint Hills in east central Kansas. The stakes are enormous, and the fight over a thousand recently annexed and largely pastoral acres at the western edge of the city is representative of a conflict taking place just about everywhere.

The local land in question is the site of a proposed hyperscale data center that has broken local politics since the project was announced June 2. I don’t know any better word than broken to describe how a furious public backlash to the plan collided with defiant city officials to create an atmosphere of mutual distrust and suspicion. The result has been an unsettling of the municipal order that had kept Emporia a relatively stable, if somewhat dull, town for decades. The political froth has smeared just about every aspect of civic life here, rattling allegiances, challenging friendships and creating a general sense of unease.

It’s difficult to feel secure when the national conversation has been overtaken by experts warning of the existential threat to humanity posed by artificial intelligence. It’s as if thousands of privately funded Manhattan Projects are being plunked down in people’s backyards, with no government regulation, no oversight, and few answers about who exactly owns or controls the artificial brain bombs.

Small towns once felt like a haven from national news.

Now they are the headlines.

Despite days of public hearings, there has been little substantial information released about the investment behind the Emporia project. It’s difficult to tell if the city actually knows who put up the money behind Kanza Park Place, because it has denied or slow-walked open records requests seeking information. It’s disconcerting, considering the resources the city has thrown into annexing the land and creating special zoning regulations for the data center (and at present there is only the single proposal), all the while fending off an angry public. An enormous municipal machine has been built, yet we don’t know who really is behind the project.

But a recent filing in a sprawling Chapter 11 bankruptcy case in Georgia may eventually shed light on the ownership structure and finances of Kanza Park Place LLC, the Kansas entity that is the applicant of record. The debtor in the case, Gary Pinkston, has been touted as a benevolent neighbor and developer, but in sworn testimony in June, he said he had “no interest at all” in the project and received no compensation.

Just two days later, on June 25, Pinkston received a wire transfer of $3 million from Kanza Park Place, according to court documents. He had also received $20,000 from the same source a week earlier.

In addition, Pinkston had personally signed the rezoning applications.

The apparent inconsistency between Pinkston’s testimony and his actions is what prompted Meridian Pacific Holdings to ask the bankruptcy court on Sept. 4 to allow it to examine documents and other material held by Kanza Park Place and other non-debtor parties associated with Pinkston.

What is known about Kanza Park Place, the legal entity behind the Emporia Data Center project, can be summed up with a few lines: Kanza Park Place is a limited liability company, formed in October of last year, with a business address that is a lawyer’s office in downtown Emporia, and its registered agent is Garrett Nordstrom. That information comes from the Kansas Secretary of State, whose website requires you to identify pictures of handbags or other common items to prove you’re not a robot when searching for a business listing.

Nordstrom, the registered agent, is a governmental grant specialist from Lawrence and, from the outset, has been the spokesman for the Emporia project. Pinkston, the self-identified “master developer,” is an 84-year-old West Coast condo and shopping center developer who grew up in nearby Chase County. His home address is Tiburon, in Marin County, California.

On Tuesday I asked Nordstrom, via email, some questions.

Was Pinkston still connected to Kanza Park Place?

If so, could he be trusted when he apparently lied under oath?

Is Kanza Park Place still the developer of the Emporia data center and, if so, how would being subject to discovery in the bankruptcy proceeding affect the project?

“I appreciate the opportunity to explain and provide clarification,” Nordstrom responded. “I am aware of this but unfortunately will not be able to comment on this ongoing legal proceeding.”

Pinkston did not respond to a voicemail request for an interview.

The bankruptcy case seeks Chapter 11 protection for Pinkston personally and at least 17 limited liability companies or family trusts owned or managed by him. The bankruptcies were filed May 14, just weeks before the public announcement of the data center project.

Meridian, which Pinkston founded in 1988, is a group of investment and development companies with offices in California and Hawaii. It is now in conflict with Pinkston over Waikoloa Village Lofts West, a development project in Hawaii. Pinkston and Meridian have accused each other of fraud in cross claims associated with the bankruptcy, with a $28 million loan to Pinkston at the center of the dispute.

“Since the inception of this case, it has been clear Mr. Pinkston has used his numerous corporate entities as his personal piggy-bank,” according to Meridian’s motion. It seeks, under Rule 2004 of the federal bankruptcy code, the authority to subpoena the documents of Kanza Park Place and other non-debtor entities associated with Pinkston.

In the months before the bankruptcy filing, Meridan alleges, Pinkston transferred millions of dollars to himself or company insiders, and did not initially disclose those amounts to the bankruptcy court. The transfers appear to be “part of a convoluted shell game” among various Pinkston entities and trusts.

Meridian, the motion argues, “is clearly entitled to investigate, among other things, the transfer of funds between Kanza Park Place and Pinkston and the nature of such transfers” and “the ownership and capitalization of Kansas Park Place.”

Meridian also seeks to determine whether Kanza Park Place should be deemed part of Pinkston’s property in the bankruptcy proceeding.

In July, Emporia City Manager Trey Cocking said Pinkston’s bankruptcy case was a “non-factor” in the city’s consideration of zoning and other applications from Kanza Park Place. Cocking said it was his understanding that Pinkston had no financial interest in the project.

In June, Pinkston told a local radio station the bankruptcy would have no bearing on the Emporia data center. Nordstrom, the spokesman for Kanza Park Place, also said the bankruptcy did not reflect Pinkston’s career in real estate and would not determine the “feasibility” of the Emporia project.

Really?

It is difficult to believe individuals who are presumably familiar with business and law could not anticipate that creditors in Pinkston’s bankruptcy filing would be curious about the nature of his interest in the data center project. Such official myopia has been a civic contagion in Emporia, because not a single city official publicly questioned Pinkston’s background or his current financial troubles.

But the general public was clear-eyed.

The bankruptcy was a red flag for anybody paying attention.

A hearing on Meridian Pacific’s motion to examine Kanza Park Place is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 29, at the federal bankruptcy court in Gainesville (the cases were filed there because some of Pinkston’s business interests are in Georgia). If the motion is granted, we may finally get answers about the money behind the Emporia data center. A court has the power to compel responses and seek documents that ordinary citizens and journalists don’t.

But even if the motion isn’t granted, there’s value in those queries becoming part of the court record.

It is shameful that those questions weren’t part of every public meeting Emporia officials have had on the data center since June 2. But the city commission has voted unanimously to advance the data center at every step so far, ignoring pleas from the public for caution.

A citizen petition driven by Emporia Neighbors United has successfully placed a city data center ban on the November ballot. Similar petitions have been circulated in communities across Kansas, including El Dorado and Edgerton, with mixed results. Some cities, including Emporia, have sought declaratory judgments to block the petitions. If the Emporia petition is found to be primarily administrative in nature, the public vote will be moot.

Even if a judge determines the ban is a proper issue for voters to determine, it is not expected to impede the Kanza Park Place project, as city officials approved it before the petition was certified.

There’s more to the story of what has happened here since June 2, and it includes a recall petition against a city commissioner and a movement to change the structure of government from a commission to a council, to better represent working-class neighborhoods. I’ve already written about the protestor who was arrested during a city meeting for clapping and how an unexpected coalition formed to fight the data center.

For decades, Emporia has been a pleasant if sleepy college town whose legacy was that of a “heartland utopia” envisioned by editor and author William Allen White. In recent years it has lost hundreds of manufacturing and meat processing jobs, creating economic desperation of historic proportions. Civic leaders sought a big fish solution, and Pinkston and Kanza Park Place must have seemed like a whale. The choice, we’ve been repeatedly told by business leaders since early June, is to embrace progress or to wither away.

But the conversation cannot be reduced to progress versus provincialism. Those who engage in the expected arguments about environmentalism or economic development soon find they have lost the larger narrative driving people to action. The question is: who are we as a community?

The question is made sharper by the growing alarm over the speed at which AI is progressing. The irony is that rural America’s quest for jobs may ultimately contribute to a cataclysmic disruption for workers nationwide, as jobs are lost to technology at an unanticipated rate. Advances in computing technology can be a boon for humanity, but we’re not seeing revolutionary cancer cures. Instead, we’re witnessing an uncontrolled cyber arms race. The time for governmental regulation, international cooperation and strategic limits on AI is now.

We stand at a pivotal, if not terminal, moment in human history, taken by surprise at the speed at which it arrived. Just six years ago, we were paralyzed and separated by COVID. Now things are moving so fast it seems impossible to keep pace with a changing political, cultural and technological landscape. Yet we must not give in to exhaustion or despair, because the decisions we make now will either shape our communities for generations to come — or hasten their demise.

Some readers have objected to my referring to Emporia as “my town” in these columns, pointing out that I wasn’t born here. Others have said I don’t understand the community because I didn’t go to high school here. But citizens are more than accidents of birth or survivors of shared secondary education. After 20 years on Constitution Street, I can confidently say it is my town.

Just as the town where you live is your town, too.

Give me a community that values humanity over machines, compassion over profits, and fact over folksy fictions. Let us use technology with restraint and pursue economic development with wisdom. Give us competent judges and lawyers and open courts, transparent government and responsive lawmakers, reliable health care and food for all. Give us art and music and love. Let us make communities that are worthy of our best and most engaged selves. We cannot revisit the past, but we can imagine a future worth striving for.

No machine can, or should, do that for us.