A Ragtag Wisconsin Group Is Leading America’s First Anti-data Center Referendum

A small Wisconsin city upended by a data center backed by President Donald Trump is set to vote Tuesday on a referendum that could reshape grassroots resistance to AI projects nationwide.

The vote in Port Washington, a lakeside town of roughly 12,000 people just north of Milwaukee, appears to be the first time any U.S. municipality will go to the ballot to kneecap data center development. It marks an aggressive new tactic in an escalating movement to oppose the hulking artificial intelligence factories — and offers a potential blueprint for other small towns challenging Big Tech.

"I'm not aware of another ballot referendum that has been taken directly to the voters yet," said Brad Tietz, state policy director for the Data Center Coalition, which represents tech companies and developers. “If this trend continues and grows, it's going to have significant consequences for our economic competitiveness [and] our national security. I don't think that can be understated.”

The vote comes as companies descend on Middle America to build the data centers, which are major priorities for the White House and the U.S. tech sector but the object of scorn for roughly 3 in 10 U.S. voters who, according to a recent POLITICO poll, say they would oppose a facility being built in their area. At least three other U.S. cities are gearing up for referendums of their own this year, in a growing trend that pits grassroots organizers against some of the world’s richest companies.

If it passes Tuesday, the referendum won’t actually derail the proposed $15 billion, 1.3-gigawatt data center campus from OpenAI and Oracle, one of multiple “Stargate” AI infrastructure megaprojects that the companies are planning with Trump’s support. Rather, it would allow residents to potentially obstruct future projects by requiring city leaders to obtain voter approval before awarding developers lucrative tax incentives.

The backers, a group of roughly a dozen Port Washington residents who formed a nonprofit in October to organize against the project, placed the measure on the ballot after connecting on Facebook and protesting at city council meetings. Organizers said that it took roughly 10 days to collect the approximately 1,000 signatures needed to qualify their measure.

"None of us are specifically anti-development," said Carri Prom, a former nurse practitioner and mom of three who co-founded the nonprofit Great Lakes Neighbors United late last year to resist the Port Washington project. "We're not even really anti-tech. It's just that we want responsible development, and we want responsible tech moving forward."

The group's largely social media-organized protest campaign has gone viral thanks in part to impassioned coverage from internet-famous comedian and staunch AI critic Charlie Berens. Protests have spilled over into local city council meetings, including one where Great Lakes Neighbors United co-founder Christine Le Jeune and two other women were arrested.

She and Prom, both of whom spoke to POLITICO, said they weren’t deeply involved in politics before the data center fight, and that they had known each other for just a few weeks when they first created the organization.

“We’ve just banded together as a group of concerned citizens who really had enough of the way things were going,” Le Jeune said.

In emails to POLITICO, spokespeople for OpenAI and Oracle touted the Port Washington project’s expected financial benefits and sustainable features, such as a closed-loop cooling system that recycles water. The project will run primarily on zero-emissions energy sources and create 4,000 skilled construction jobs, along with approximately 1,000 long-term jobs, according to Oracle.

“We’re paying our own way on energy so ratepayers’ bills and electric grid reliability are not impacted by our data center. We plan to invest $175 million in local infrastructure upgrades to improve water mains, sewer lines, a new water tower, and power,” Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert said in a statement. “We take similar approaches at all of our AI data center locations to deliver long-term value to the community.”

OpenAI spokesperson Jamie Radice said the company “appreciate[s] the opportunity to be part of the Port Washington community,” adding: “Projects like this support tools people rely on every day, and we take that responsibility seriously.”

The White House didn't respond to a request for comment on the referendum or on concerns surrounding the Stargate project in Port Washington.

‘We’re a Rust Belt city’

Data center angst is particularly acute in the Rust Belt, where decades of deindustrialization has fostered disillusionment with politics and large corporations.

In Port Washington and across Southeast Wisconsin, now a data center hot spot that includes a megaproject from Microsoft and another proposed large-scale campus from Meta, leaders have touted the project as much-needed economic revitalization — only for local activists to push back over concerns about transparency, noise pollution, freshwater use and increased energy costs. Skeptics fear the AI boom is yet another overzealous promise that will flame out, leaving them to foot the bill.

Nationally, according to POLITICO polling, fears of higher electricity bills, rolling blackouts and increased taxpayer costs are voters’ top concerns about data center construction.

“This referendum is just a natural reaction to that,” said Amy Barrileaux, communications director for an environmental group, Clean Wisconsin, that has criticized the proposed Port Washington project. “It is people trying to get some kind of control over what is going on.”

Trump says the facilities are essential to U.S. technological dominance, while insisting tech giants should “pay their own way” to offset related costs and avoid spikes in utility bills for everyday Americans.

Tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon and others are racing to accelerate the AI models that data centers power, and they’ve spent millions on ad campaigns and political lobbying to advance their goal, arguing that AI is essential to national security and humanity’s future.

“The data center industry is the foundation, the backbone of our economy today,” said Tietz of the Data Center Coalition. “Prohibiting them from entering markets is going to have a larger impact.”

Nationwide, at least three other communities — Monterey Park in California, Augusta Township in rural Michigan and Janesville, an industrial town in Southern Wisconsin — are slated to weigh data center-related ballot measures in 2026 elections. In Ohio, grassroots organizers are attempting to place a ban of data centers over 25 megawatts on the statewide ballot in November.

“We feel like we're in emergency mode,” said Jessica Baker, a real estate agent and one of the organizers who filed the Ohio ballot measure petition last month.

The resistance has already driven away at least one developer in Monterey Park: Australian firm HMC Capital last week withdrew its plans for a 250,000 square foot facility in the Los Angeles suburb, according to a letter posted to Facebook by the city’s mayor.

But data center proponents in business and government contend that criticisms of the computing facilities’ impacts are exaggerated, pointing to mixed findings in recent research. They argue data centers are a rare opportunity for small towns to grow their local tax base, fund schools and revitalize their community — and that blocking the facilities is short-sighted.

“We can bring some significant development to our city, because we lost all of our industry in the early 2000s. We’re a Rust Belt city,” said Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke. “And now we have this going to the vote, and it could really mess up our city.”

NIMBY or not?

The Port Washington referendum campaign has prompted Neitzke and other project proponents to defend the facility’s merits, leading to skirmishes with activists.

Vantage Data Centers, the company partnering with OpenAI and Oracle to construct the Stargate facility in Port Washington, has advertised the project in a billboard ad along a major freeway in the area, Le Jeune said. It’s also offered free car washes to residents whose vehicles were coated in dust kicked up by construction of the data center campus. (Vantage representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Neitzke told POLITICO that he and other city officials have tried to be transparent about the project. He said the city has held hearings to discuss the plan and that government leaders refused to sign nondisclosure agreements with project developers — only to be met with angry protests and anonymous death threats.

The mayor said he also met with Berens, the comedian, for two hours to try and diffuse tensions. He described the conversation as “very friendly” but “felt there was confirmation bias taking place.” (Berens didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

“We had to bring in the sheriff's department one night, it got so weird. We had an arrest in our council chambers,” Neitzke said, referencing a December city council meeting where Le Jeune and two other women were arrested and ticketed for disorderly conduct. “It's scaring other communities out of any digital development.”

Le Jeune contends she was civil during the meeting and said the arrest was unnecessary, calling it an “absolutely shocking and horrific experience.” She said her and the two other women plan to appeal the citations in court.

Neitzke and local business leaders argue the proposed referendum would stifle all kinds of future development because it targets the biggest financing tool that Wisconsin communities rely on to spur economic growth — called tax incremental districts, or TIDs — instead of proposing a blanket ban on data center development. The measure as drafted would require city leaders to seek voter approval before creating a TID with a “base value” of $10 million or more.

“You can't tell a prospect that you need to wait for an election, let alone tell them that they have to put their company on a ballot. It will be a killer for economic development,” said Dale Kooyenga, president of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce and a former Republican state senator.

MMAC filed a lawsuit seeking to block the referendum that could be heard within days after Tuesday’s vote.

That hasn’t deterred organizers. Prom and Le Jeune argued that increased citizen oversight shouldn't be a burden for noncontroversial projects and that nearly all other recent TIDs in Port Washington were small enough that they wouldn’t have needed citizen approval under the proposed referendum.

They also framed the referendum as their only option to head off future data center projects after leaders plowed ahead to approve the Stargate project and after a recall effort targeting Neitzke flopped.

“It seemed like something we could do now,” Prom said of the referendum. “We didn't want this to happen in the same fashion again, for the public financing just to be given to these multibillion-dollar companies.”

Meanwhile, independent Wisconsin municipal finance experts told POLITICO the measure appears legally vulnerable because it would expand the scope of local referenda power beyond what’s explicitly dictated in state law. One of those experts, University of Wisconsin, Madison, urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen, said he thought the case may end up in the state Supreme Court.

“The question is, can you actually submit something to a referendum that is not required in [state] statutes?” Paulsen said. “The idea that every expenditure needs to go to voter approval is just incredibly cumbersome.“

The referendum is also calling attention to the policy vacuum at the state level. While lawmakers introduced multiple proposals last year to standardize rules for data centers, the bills stalled amid partisan division. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers signaled he would veto a Republican-led proposal to regulate the facilities, while a separate, Democratic-led measure with more stringent sustainability requirements failed to receive a floor vote in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

“We're going to continue to have these fights, municipality by municipality, project by project, until we make some sort of decision,” Paulsen said. “But if we say everybody gets to be a NIMBY, then we don't get the products and economic development that we say we want.”