SALISBURY, N.C. — Ahead of Monday’s county commissioner’s meeting, opponents of a potential data center project hosted a rally to voice their concerns.
The potential project sits off Long Ferry Road in a rural part of Rowan County. According to a statement from the county, the site was purchased by a developer who is evaluating the property for a potential data center campus, though no end user has been identified.
The property was rezoned in the fall, opening up data centers as a potential future use, but those who live near the site, like Carol Malone, said they never got an adequate chance to weigh in because they didn’t know a data center was a possibility until the land was already under construction.
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“They came in like gangbusters. It was farmland one day, and in less than two weeks, this happened,” she said. “Nobody ever heard one word about a data center.”
According to the county, since 2021, there have been six public hearings related to zoning on the Long Ferry Road property. And beforehand, signage was posted along the road, and notices were mailed to adjoining landowners and included in the Salisbury Post.
The county website shows a timeline of public communication regarding the property, with mailers sent out in June and August of 2024 mentioning the zoning and legislative hearings to allow the addition of “data center” as an approved property use.
Rick Mahaley, who lives across the street, said he attended a meeting related to the property but also hadn’t heard anything about a data center, especially not in the lead-up to construction over the past few months.
“They claim they sent 35 letters and none of us got them,” he said. “If anybody should get one, it should be the person that’s right directly across the road from it.”
Sal Cerbone, whose property is also close enough to the site to hear the construction daily, said he, too, felt blindsided by the project. He said he went door-to-door with a clipboard to neighbors up and down the road, asking if anyone had heard about a potential data center or a rezoning meeting. He said overwhelmingly, people signed their names, saying no.
“These are the people that live around the area that I contacted, and nobody, nobody from all the area around here was notified that anything was going on here, and these are the people that matter,” Cerbone said.
According to the county, since the land was legally sold and rezoned, no further board of commissioners approval is required for a data center campus to be built.
As neighbors wait to see what will come of the property, Mahaley said construction has already started taking a toll on his daily life.
“This dust has caused me to be at the doctors every week for the last three weeks,” he said.
He’s worried that will only worsen as the project moves forward.
“I have no idea what my future is here because it’s not what it was going to be,” he said.