Whose water it is

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Ida Huddleston and her daughter Delsia Bare, who own a 1,200 acre farm outside Maysville, Kentucky. A company operating unnamed was buying up land, and wanted 463 acres from Bare at $48,000 apiece and 71 from Huddleston at $60,000, against a county average closer to six thousand. Together that came to $26.48 million, and both women had already agreed to it. Then they learned what the ground was for, a 2.2-gigawatt data center. They backed out. Bare’s parting instruction to the buyer’s representative was to kick rocks and don’t come back.

Two days ago I published an essay that says the people carrying both ends of this trade are mostly quiet about it, and that the loudest opposition comes from people far from the cost, far from the benefit, and close to the keyboard. I was describing myself. Maysville is the counterexample, and it isn’t a small one. Nobody has ever stood closer to the benefit than a farmer holding a signed agreement at eight times what her neighbors’ land is worth. She was not quiet.

The fascinating thing about this situation is they weren’t holding out for a better number. They had the number, they agreed to it, and the thing that unwound the deal was finding out the use.

Which is where the essay owes a correction. Its hardest move was that footprint arguments prove too much: aim the logic honestly and it convicts streaming video and a new phone every two years, so the guilt essentially lives with all of us and the water bill can’t single out the data center. I wrote that the ownership question survives that test and the water bill mostly doesn’t. I still think that holds for the way the argument usually travels, which is at a distance, where somebody’s aquifer is standing in for the thing you actually object to. Huddleston is not at a distance. When she says they know what it looks like when the food and the land and the water go, she is describing her own well and the ground under it. The argument proves too much once it leaves the county. At the point it starts from, it isn’t an argument. I drew the line around the class of claim when the line belonged around the distance.

Then the really thorny part, her neighbors sold. The county rezoned 28 properties, some 2,080 acres, from agricultural to industrial on May 22, and in July Bare put her name to a complaint asking a court to throw that rezoning out and stop the project. If it works, it takes the ground out from under every neighbor who took the check and made a different call about the same aquifer. Every person in that fight lives there. There is no comfortable suburb anywhere in it.

My essay disqualified me on purpose. I live outside Nashville, the substations aren’t coming to my street and neither are the jobs, so I don’t get a vote on Richland Parish or Maysville. That still seems right. What I didn’t examine is the assumption riding underneath it, that a seat exists somewhere out there where this question resolves, and that closeness is what supplies the answer. Mason County has the closeness. It is at war with itself.

So the honest version is worse than the one I published. I ended by saying I don’t know whether that Louisiana parish made a good trade. Maysville suggests the not-knowing doesn’t clear up as you move toward it: