Informally organized as Protect Statesboro, citizens opposed to the construction of a data center in an otherwise residential area on Burkhalter Road have started a petition drive for a referendum to repeal the city’s Technological Facilities and Data Centers Ordinance.

“My goal is repeal of the whole ordinance, and I think that it needs to be rewritten, if they’re going to rewrite one, with input from people like our Riverkeepers and other nonprofits who know more than they do about this,” said Protect Statesboro lead organizer Ameigh Denali. “They need to be consulted.”

With Statesboro City Council reduced to four members after the May 19 resignation of longtime District 2 Councilmember Paulette Chavers, the ordinance was adopted on a 3-1 council vote June 2. It prohibits “hyperscale” data centers larger than 50 acres in the city limits, but allows smaller “edge” facilities of 50 acres or less, as a special use only, in highway-oriented commercial, or HOC; light industrial, or LI; mixed-use, or MX; and office or business, or O, zoning districts.

Then the council on Aug. 18, by a 3-2 vote including Mayor Jonathan McCollar’s tiebreaker, approved a zoning change from R-4 high-density resident to 0, office or business, for the roughly 27-acre site at 6539 Burkhalter Rd. It is owned by 4AM Development LLC, whose owners, investors previously involved in residential projects, plan to have a two-story, roughly 230,000-square-foot data center built there.

The developers have submitted a preliminary sound study and a water use plan and are working on fulfilling other requirements for the special use permit, requiring another council vote.

Meanwhile, the so far informal petition drive for a referendum is separate from the complaint filed Sept. 17 in Bulloch County Superior Court by 11 citizens and the established nonprofit Coastal Communities United seeking to have the court reverse the rezoning. But Protect Statesboro’s grassroots effort and the formal court challenge, whose participants are also called “petitioners” in a technical legal sense in their court filing, have some participants in common.

Meets again Sunday

At least two of the 11 citizens named in the court challenge attended Protect Statesboro’s second organizing meeting the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 27. One of them was Lori Braselton, listed as a “sightline owner petitioner” in the legal complaint. Her home is in The Outpost subdivision, on the other side of the Cottage Row apartment complex, which neighbors the 4AM Development site.

“Data centers are going to have to go somewhere, but they don’t have to be in residential areas,” Braselton said during the Protect Statesboro group discussion.

Statesboro city officials have compared the proposed 4AM Development data center, which would be an “edge” sized center and not “hyperscale” according to the definition in the city’s ordinance, to two edge-type centers a Statesboro delegation visited at Alpharetta in January.

But Braselton believes this a “false equivalency,” she said, based on descriptions of the Alpharetta facilities as situated in more “mixed use” than purely residential areas and requiring less electrical power than the up-to 99-megawatt supply the 4AM developers have requested from Georgia Power.

“What they’re proposing to build should use significantly less than the 99 megawatts, and so to me that opens the door to maybe something not transparent is going on,” Braselton said after the meeting.

Some of the people in the Protect Statesboro discussion speculated that if the 4AM center is built as described, it could lead to more data centers being developed in the same area.

The informal group has a third meeting scheduled for 4 p.m. this Sunday, Oct. 4, at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Statesboro, 6762 Cypress Lake Rd.

Sort of like BAC’s effort

“Home rule” provisions for petitions to bring referendum elections to repeal or amend county ordinances and resolutions are spelled out in the Georgia Constitution. That is what Bulloch Action Coalition organizers attempted to use to repeal Bulloch County’s agreements with Bryan County regarding the county-owned wells to supply water to Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America.

Those petitioners faced a target of 10% of Bulloch’s registered voters from a previous election, or approximately 4,500 signatures. After reporting substantial progress, the BAC abandoned the effort in July 2025, noting that the state stepped up the timeline for a plan to replace the wells with surface water.

3,116 voters required

But the state Constitution left it to the Georgia General Assembly to set home rule requirements for cities. So the Protect Statesboro organizers are looking to a state law, GA Code 36-35-3, which sets different percentage minimums for cities of different sizes.

For municipalities with from 5,001 to 100,000 residents, the law allows an election to amend or repeal a city ordinance to be called based on a petition signed by “at least 20 percent of the electors registered to vote in the last general municipal election.”

The number of Statesboro-resident registered voters at the time of the 2025 city general election was 15,578, according to information Denali obtained from Bulloch County Election Supervisor Shontay Jones. That would make Protect Statesboro’s petition target 3,116 signatures, minimum. But this would also require a process for the city to verify the signatures as those of registered, resident voters.

Denali said she believes that number of valid signatures is obtainable.

“I’m confident in it,” she said. “Bulloch Action, they came really close in the county. … I feel confident we can do it. There’s enough people that are against the data center within the city limits who are registered voters. I feel very confident that it may not be easy, but it can be accomplished.”

The Protect Statesboro group actually began the petition, less formally, with a somewhat different intent.

“It began as a message to the mayor, and I wanted to get 1,025 signatures of people within the city limits on it so that I could present it to Mayor McCollar and say, ‘See, we have this many city residents – which is the margin of your win in the last election – that don’t want this,’ because I feel like if he understood, he probably wouldn’t do this,” Denali said.

She has notified all previous signers of the change of plan and that, if they are Statesboro residents, names and addresses may be checked against voter rolls, she said.

As of Friday, Oct. 2, the petition had 697 signers, of whom 246 were known to reside inside the city limits, Denali said. She observed that this was “almost 10% of 3,000” with the group having “not run a ground campaign really at all.”

A Metter connection

The group’s website, https://protectstatesboro.com, also contains a link to “Protect Candler County” pages, carrying information and concerns about two sites reportedly being considered for data centers, one possibly within Metter and one just outside the city limits in the county’s jurisdiction near Metter Municipal Airport.

Metter resident Sherril Johnson, attending the Sept. 27 Statesboro meeting on behalf of Protect Candler County, described a different goal her little group has for the Candler and Metter elected officials.

“We’re hoping they’re going to put a moratorium of six months on it before they continue so that we can learn more about (the proposed data center projects) and everything,” Johnson said.