Let me tell you something. If I told my kids their bedtime was 8:30, and then three weeks after 8:30 came and went I announced that actually I’d changed it to 7:00 back in July, and also they were already grounded for missing it, CPS would be at my door. But when Yellowstone County does the exact same thing to a woman trying to protect her town, it’s called “a memo.”
Here’s what happened, and I’ve read this twice because I kept thinking I misread it. Kassi Solberg lives in Broadview, Montana. Population 140. You could fit the whole town in a Costco on a Saturday. A company called Quantica Infrastructure wants to build a 5,000-acre data center campus right outside Broadview. Twelve to sixteen buildings, each the size of two or three Walmarts. Eleven hundred megawatts of power. In a town of 140 people. So Solberg did what any sane parent would do. She started a petition to let voters decide whether they want this thing in their backyard. She needs 16,650 signatures. The county Election Department told her in June she had until August 12.
Then on July 30, Quantica called up County Attorney Scott Twito and said, hey, there’s a different statute that puts the deadline at July 13. Twito spent a weekend “researching” this and decided the developer was right. So on Tuesday he released a memo saying the deadline had passed three weeks ago. The deadline that, I cannot stress this enough, the county itself had given Solberg in June.
Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThe developer called the county attorney, and the county attorney moved the deadline into the past. I want you to sit with that for a second. A corporation picked up the phone, and a public official retroactively erased a deadline he’d already given to a citizen. If that doesn’t make your blood boil, check your pulse.
And it gets worse. Before any of this came out, the Yellowstone County Commission voted unanimously on July 7 to have the county attorney go to court to try to kill the petition entirely. Deputy County Attorney Steve Williams stood up and cited a Montana Supreme Court case about wind farms and said, basically, this petition is probably unconstitutional anyway. So they approved it for signature gathering, let Solberg and her volunteers knock on doors for weeks, and then simultaneously worked behind the scenes to torpedo it. With your tax dollars.
Solberg called it “Big Government at its most obvious.” I’d call it something stronger, but I’m trying to keep this clean enough that my mother-in-law can share it on Facebook.
Lio Voo / PexelsBrian Miller, an attorney working with Solberg (who’s also running for Congress, God bless him), said he’s going to file a claim asking a court to rule that yanking the deadline is unconstitutional. “You’re messing with people’s rights here,” he said. “You’re making people feel demoralized by their government.” Sir, demoralized is putting it politely. I’ve got four kids and a group chat full of moms who are spitting mad, and we are way past demoralized.
Meanwhile, Missoula County just passed a one-year moratorium on data center construction while they figure out how to regulate them. Their planning director talked about noise, water contamination, air quality. A data center in Wyoming contaminated the wastewater in Cheyenne with a rare bacteria. These are real things happening to real people, and the response in Yellowstone County is to let the developer rewrite the rules from the inside.
Twito says he’s “seeking guidance” from the secretary of state. Guidance. The county gave a woman a deadline, let her work toward it, and then moved it backward because the company building the thing she’s protesting picked up the phone. You don’t need guidance, Scott. You need a mirror.
One hundred and forty people in Broadview are supposed to just accept that a 7.8-square-mile industrial complex is coming to their backyard, and the one tool they had to stop it got snatched away by the same people who handed it to them. If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.