The Bulloch County Data Center Committee, created by the county Board of Commissioners and consisting of 15 citizen volunteers recruited by five of the elected commissioners, met for the first time Tuesday evening. Members selected their chair and vice chair and began planning further meetings, including one slated for 5:30 p.m. next Monday, Nov. 2.

It will also be open to the public and held in the commissioners’ meeting room at the County Annex.

Commissioners Chairman David Bennett, County Attorney Jeff Akins and Clerk of the Board Venus Mincey-White sat at one end of the table for Tuesday’s organizational session. Planning and Development Director James Pope was also in the room. But those four are not members of the committee.

“I’m very happy with the committee that we have,” Bennett said afterward. “They do a very nice job of providing a good cross-section of our community. We’ve got folks from the agricultural segment here, we’ve got folks from insurance, we’ve got two people from local environmental groups on there, planning and zoning experience, folks just from local industry.”

The committee members are Will Anderson, Frank Davis, Keely Fennell, Keith Hamilton, Ben Kirsch, Vicki Lewis, Jeanne Anne Marsh, Kevin May, Rick Mock, Alana Olsen, Nick Shealy, Seth Upchurch, Ben Watkins, Glenn Womack and Sandra Wooten.

Bennett led the preliminary presentation. He summarized the Code of Ethics for government service, noted that meetings of the committee will be public and its documents accessible under Open Meetings and Open Records laws and mentioned parliamentary procedures. He also had the committee members sign a public commitment to one another.

“This is a very emotionally charged issue, OK, and what we are charging you to do is to look at the facts, to look at data, and to come up with some recommendations for the county,” Bennett told them.

“With that, we want y’all to work together, and some of y’all are probably diametrically opposed to what we are talking about right now, but we’re going to have to sit around a table and act like adults and come up with something that works for the best of the county,” he said, “not what’s necessarily best for us personally.”

Committee mandate

His introductory slide show spelled out a “mandate” for the committee to “evaluate technical and community impacts and deliver a comprehensive report with actionable recommendations concerning the county’s draft data center zoning resolution and policy frameworks.”

The Board of Commissioners previously considered a draft ordinance drawn up by Pope and other county staff members, but then also toyed with a permanent ban. Rather than adopting either, the board has repeatedly extended a moratorium against permitting a data center anywhere in the county’s unincorporated area.

That temporary block is currently set to expire Dec. 31. But Bennett said the commissioners would not expect the committee to fulfill its mandate by then. Instead, he said he had consulted Akins and that the elected board could legally extend the moratorium by up to 180 days.

Davis chosen chair

After these preliminaries, the committee members, with a motion, a second and a unanimous vote, chose one from among them, Dr. Frank Davis, as chair of the committee. Davis is a retired trauma surgeon who lives in Bulloch County. He has spoken during public participation at commission meetings and a previous hearing on data centers, and also serves on the advisory committee for the Groundwater Sustainability Program, also known as the Hyundai wells mitigation plan.

“There are a lot of counties in the past that have brought data centers in and the data centers proved not to be a good match for the county, they have not been good community partners, and we want to eliminate that,” Davis told reporters after the meeting. “The reason there were failures in the past was that there were not a good set of ordinances for data centers to have to follow. … We want to get ahead of the curve.”

Bennett at first told committee members not to worry about extending the moratorium, that he and the commissioners would take care of that. But after committee members started making motions of their own, one was to place a request for a moratorium extension first on their agenda for next Monday’s committee meeting.

By summer 2027

“We don’t want the moratorium to expire until we have a complete set of ordinances so that if somebody is interested in bringing a data center in, they know what the rules are and they know what the expectations are, and then through that process the citizens will know that we’ve done due diligence,” Davis said Tuesday.

Asked if the request will be for a 180-day extension, he told reporters, “We’re not in a big hurry, but realistically, we’d like to have something done by this summer. … That hopefully is a realistic timeline, meeting twice a month, except probably during the holidays.”

Committee members indicated they will invite experts in subject areas such as water usage, power supply, environmental effects of data centers and community financial potential to future meetings.

The committee will be dissolved after delivering recommendations to the commissioners, Bennett said.

Mix of members

The committee members elected Glenn Womack as their vice chair. He previously served on the Bulloch County Board of Education for a four-year term and chaired it for part of that time. He is a business owner in timber and land management.

Incidentally, the committee member who made the motion nominating Davis as chair was Jeanne Anne Marsh, chair of the county Planning and Zoning Board.

But also on the committee, Ben Kirsch is legal director for Ogeechee Riverkeeper, and Alana Olsen is part of another environmentally concerned nonprofit organization, Coastal Communities United. One or two farmers and at least one residential builder are among the other members.

But not 21 members

Originally, when proposed by Bennett and discussed by the elected board in early September, the committee was suggested to have up to 21 members, with each of the seven commissioners to name three. But Commissioner Toby Conner, whose term ends with the year, did not submit names.

Commissioner Nick Newkirk had wanted to serve on the committee himself, and when other commissioners did not agree to that, Newkirk also did not nominate anyone else, Bennett said.