MAHOMET – Several Mahomet residents are calling on the village to ban future non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) after officials ended talks with a data center developer last week.
Officials were collaborating with Clean Cloud Energy, a data center developer based on the East Coast, for a plan to build a data center in the village. Those discussions ended after they faced backlash from the community.
At Tuesday night’s meeting, several residents said the village was not transparent with the community about these discussions.
“When was the right time for CCE? After the ‘i’s’ had been dotted and the ‘t’s’ crossed and the final product presented before the planning and zoning and village board meeting?” Mahomet resident Laurie Scott said. “That is not community engagement. It’s community bulldozing.”
President Jason Tompkins confirmed the village administrator did sign a village-wide NDA covering staff and elected officials, which he was aware of. But he said the preliminary discussions that village staff were having would have been the same with or without an NDA.
“The NDA was not our idea,” he said, “but I think going forward it should be a discussion we have to have.”
Trustee Bruce Colravy said he wants to propose legislation to ban village staff from signing NDAs. Some Champaign County Board members have similarly brought up that idea.
“I would also like — there are some people who don’t believe that the talks have actually ended,” he said, “So I’d like a draft resolution to institute a moratorium on data centers that matches Champaign County.”
Champaign County currently has a one-year pause on data center development. However, it does not apply to projects inside city or village limits, like the proposal in Mahomet.
“This represents such a small piece of the distrust that’s been built,” Colravy said, “and I think that we should do some things to try to repair that.”