The record on data centers, annexation, and the TAI overlay — Mayor's Minute

This is my full Mayor’s Report as I delivered it at the August 24, 2026 City Council meeting. I’m publishing it here, in full, so anyone who wants the complete record can read it directly rather than rely on what’s circulating online. For a short, plain-language summary of where the question stands now, see Where the data-center and battery-storage question stands on the TAI information site.

TL;DR

For anyone who wants the short version before the full account:

No wrongdoing, and I can document every part of it. No NDA was ever signed, no data-center application was ever submitted, no approval or annexation was ever promised or signed, and I received no money or compensation of any kind from anyone.
The overlay was a public draft, not a deal. I posted the full draft ordinance on a public website before the Council adopted anything, and asked for feedback. It was a framework of protections, not an approval.
Everything went through legal review. When Youthfront asked for an NDA, our attorney said no and none was signed. When they submitted a draft annexation agreement in May, our attorney rejected it. Nothing was signed.
I looked at this to lower your taxes, because nearly all of Linn Valley’s tax burden falls on residents. But many of you made clear you don’t want this kind of development, so on August 5 I withdrew my support.
Nothing is approved or being built. The Council is only researching the policy question, and any project would still require annexation, zoning, a conditional-use permit, public hearings, and a Council vote.
I own the fair criticism that I should have acknowledged the annexation discussion sooner. What I won’t accept is being called dishonest or corrupt without evidence.
I’m changing how I communicate, not the commitment behind it. Official updates now go on the city website, by text, email, and mail, with meetings on YouTube, instead of Facebook.

I want to use my report tonight to lay out the record on the Youthfront conversations, the Technology and Advanced Industry (TAI) overlay, and the data-center and battery-storage question. I’ve prepared a written narrative with the dates and documents behind everything I’m about to say, and I’d encourage anyone who wants the detail to read it rather than rely on what’s circulating online.

Three things: the timeline, several claims that are not accurate, and where I stand going forward.

Part one: the timeline

January. On January 13, shortly after I took office, Councilmember Mike Hemphill and I attended a Linn County Planning and Zoning meeting. We went for one reason: the agenda included whether people can live in campers full time, and we have several residents who do. It was never discussed that night, but afterward we spoke with one of the members of the P&Z board and confirmed it would not affect the incorporated City of Linn Valley.

While I was there I introduced myself around, to an attorney there on an Evergy matter, and to Topher Philgreen, who was there for Youthfront. That was the first time I ever met him. Not a friend, not a business associate, not a prior contact. When I emailed him six days later, his reply said he hadn’t even caught my name when he handed me his card.

I want to be precise, because it’s been said I first met him in April after the county denied Youthfront’s rezoning. That’s backwards. That night, P&Z voted to recommend approval. The County Commission didn’t deny it until April 20.

We had lunch on January 22. That same afternoon, I contacted the city attorney to tell him that Youthfront had approached me about possible annexation. I described the conversations as preliminary, said no commitments had been discussed, and asked for guidance on process, legal risk, and when informal conversations would need to become a formal process under the Open Meetings and Open Records Acts. The first substantive thing I did with this was put it in front of our attorney.

February. Youthfront asked that key participants sign an NDA. I told the city attorney. He questioned whether such an agreement could legally be signed, since it would violate a City Council member’s right to voice his or her opinion and restrict the public’s right to know; and he separately rejected a proposal that Topher sit in on an executive session, which would have violated KOMA. We followed his direction. No NDA was ever signed.

I did honor an informal request not to publicize another organization’s undeveloped plans while they informed affected parties. That’s discretion, not secrecy, and it commits this city to nothing.

I want to explain how I’d handle this with anybody who walked through my door, because I think that’s the fairest test of whether I did something improper.

Suppose someone comes to me next month about building a car wash. Before that’s public, that person may need to talk to the landowner, to investors, to an engineer, to the utility, to the businesses next door. They might ask me for some time to find out whether the idea even works before it’s in the paper. I’d give them that time. So would most of you.

Or suppose a developer comes to me about ground outside the city limits, maybe an affordable-housing subdivision, maybe three-to-five-acre residential lots, and says that if it pencils out, they might eventually ask to be voluntarily annexed. At that stage they still have to evaluate the land, the financing, the infrastructure, whether there’s a market, and what annexation would even require. Announcing it the next morning could wreck their property negotiations, start speculation about land nobody has bought yet, and stir up a fight over a project that may never happen.

In either case I would respect the preliminary nature of that conversation. Now, here is what that does not mean. It does not mean I promised anybody annexation. It does not mean I promised zoning, infrastructure, incentives, or approval. And it does not take one minute away from the public’s right to participate before this council decides anything, because nothing can be decided without a public process.

It means only this: I am not going to announce somebody else’s half-formed idea before there is something concrete for this city and its residents to actually consider. That is exactly how I treated the early Youthfront conversations. The same way I’d treat a car wash.

May. On May 12, Youthfront submitted a draft of an annexation agreement. That draft was not accepted by the City attorney as legally appropriate, nor would any draft be considered until proper legal safeguards are put in place. Our attorney rejected Youthfront’s terms. Nothing was signed. No annexation was approved.

June. On June 8, in open session, I presented the TAI overlay and said plainly that no project had been proposed, none approved, and this was a framework, not a deal.

By May 28 I was studying Minooka, Illinois’ data-center and battery-storage zoning, and on June 15 I traveled there to meet with Village officials. The city paid all fees associated with the trip. Minooka had finished its approval process and had a project under construction. I wanted to test whether our safeguards were good enough. On June 22 I publicly reported the Minooka trip, and on June 23 asked for the site to be linked from the city’s main page.

Part two: correcting the record

Some claims being repeated are not accurate, and I’ll answer them directly.

No nondisclosure agreement was ever signed by me or by the city.
No data-center application was ever submitted to Linn Valley.
No approval was ever promised to anyone.
No annexation agreement was signed. No annexation was approved.
I received no money, no promise of money, no job, no ownership interest, no lodging, no meals, and no compensation of any kind from Youthfront, any data-center developer, Silverton Power, or anyone connected to these issues.

A recent accusation refers to me and a “buddy.” If that means Councilmember Hemphill, he attended a public governmental meeting with me. And Topher was someone I had met briefly for the first time that same night.

It’s also been said that I’ve been hiding things and working in secret. The draft ordinance went up on a public website in June, before this council had adopted anything, and before anyone asked me to. Every word of it is still there tonight. Anyone in this room can pull it up and read the whole thing. I’d only add that publishing a full draft before adopting anything is a standard I’d recommend to anyone doing this kind of work. That’s my answer to that, and I’ll leave it there.

There’s one more thing I want to address, and this one isn’t about me. When we published that overlay in June, we published it as a draft, before adoption, before this council had voted on anything. And we asked for feedback on it. That is what a draft posted for public comment is for. What came back was criticism for having published it at all. What did not come back was a suggested change. Nobody sent an edit. Nobody wrote to say the setback was too short, or the decibel limit was wrong, or that we’d missed a provision. The document sat open for comment, and no comment on the document arrived.

And among the things that were said was that this city couldn’t match wits with the lawyers a data-center company would bring. I take offense at that, and not on my own behalf. Linn Valley is a community of people who have run businesses, raised families, served in the military, built things, fixed things, and made hard decisions with real consequences attached to them. There are people on this council who know more about water systems and roads and municipal budgets than any attorney flying in from somewhere else ever will. The notion that this community isn’t capable of reading a zoning ordinance and protecting its own interests is not something I’m willing to let stand unanswered.

But I’ll take the underlying concern seriously for a moment, because beneath the insult there is a real question, and it deserves a real answer. If someone genuinely believes this city would be outmatched, then the answer is not to stop thinking about it. The answer is to get help. Hire a consultant who does this work for a living. Retain specialized counsel. Put professionals on our side of the table. That is precisely what I intend to recommend to this council later tonight.

There’s one more thing, and it’s less about what’s been said than about how it got decided. Nearly all of it has come from people who don’t know me. It’s been assembled from secondhand and thirdhand accounts, from a document read in isolation, from a meeting somebody heard about afterward. Intent has been inferred, and then repeated as fact. And in eight months, nobody asked what the overlay actually required. Where there was a gap in what someone knew, it got filled in, but not by asking.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not saying anyone owed me that. Nobody has to check with the mayor before criticizing him. That is not how this works, and it should not be. But there is a difference between forming a view and confirming one. When you have a gap in what you know, you can fill it with a question or you can fill it with an assumption. And when the assumption is about somebody’s character, it’s worth being certain which one you used.

My phone number and my email are available to anyone. I’m at city hall all day most Mondays and Thursdays, and my door is always open for questions or to help someone. That is not a rhetorical offer. Anyone in this room who believes I’ve done something wrong can ask me directly, tonight, or any day after, and I will answer. I would rather answer a hard question than a rumor.

And if what someone genuinely wants to know is what kind of person I am, not what I did in this one matter, but what I’m actually like to work with and to work for, that information exists, and it isn’t hard to find. I’ve spent over thirty years in my profession. People who worked alongside me, some of them across multiple companies, have put their names to public recommendations on my professional LinkedIn profile. They didn’t write those for a council meeting. They wrote them years before any of this, and they signed their real names to them. I’m not asking anyone to weigh that against a conclusion they’ve already reached. I’m saying it’s there, if character is genuinely what’s at issue.

One more. That overlay has been described as a giveaway. It required a thousand-foot buffer from the lake, prohibited cooling towers outright, and barred a single dollar of infrastructure cost from being shifted onto our ratepayers. I’ll walk through the rest of it when we reach the TAI item under old business, but I’d ask people to read it before describing it.

People are entitled to disagree with my decisions and to say I should have communicated better. I understand the argument that I should have publicly acknowledged the existence of the annexation discussion sooner, particularly once a draft was on the table, and I could have drawn the line between an exploratory conversation and an actual city proposal more clearly. That’s fair criticism, and I’ll own it. What I won’t accept is being called dishonest or corrupt as a statement of fact.

I want to say something here that I’d rather not have to say from this chair. Outside this office, I work as the chief technology officer of a company. That is how I support my family. Work like that runs entirely on trust. People hand you their systems, their data, and their money, and they do it because they believe you’re honest. Accusations don’t stay in the room where they’re made, and they don’t stay on a Facebook page. They get indexed. They come up in a search. A customer doing due diligence on a vendor, a business partner, my employer, a future employer, any one of them can type my name and find the word corruption sitting next to it.

What they will not find, in that same search, is the consultation with our attorney to protect the city, or the NDA we refused to sign, or the annexation draft our lawyer rejected, or tonight’s explanation. They find the accusation, with no evidence attached and no context around it. In my line of work, that is often the end of the conversation. Nobody has to prove anything. There’s no hearing and no chance to respond. They simply move on to the next vendor, or the next candidate. And there is no record anywhere that the thing was ever resolved, because a resolution doesn’t travel the way an accusation does.

So when someone states as fact that I was scheming, that I acted underhandedly, that I was secretly committed to a project, or that I tried to profit personally, that is not ordinary political rough-and-tumble. Those statements can follow me for years. They can cost me my job. They can affect where I’m able to work after that. And while I’m still sitting in this chair, they make it harder for me to do the job you elected me to do, because every hour I spend answering them is an hour I’m not spending on the city’s business.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not asking anyone to stop criticizing me. Criticize the decisions. Say I moved too slowly. Say I should have told you sooner, and I agreed with part of that a minute ago. Question my judgment. That is the job, and I accepted it when I ran. But there is a difference between “I think the mayor handled this badly” and “the mayor is corrupt.” The first is politics, and it’s fair. The second is a factual claim about my character, and when it’s made without evidence, it does damage that no retraction ever fully undoes. I do not accept that as the unavoidable price of public service.

I’ll keep answering questions, providing records, and admitting mistakes. I will also keep correcting claims that are factually false, not to win an argument, but because the record is the only defense I have.

Part three: where I stand

I started out believing a carefully regulated project might strengthen our finances without harming the community. Linn Valley leans heavily on what residents pay in property taxes, and I thought it was responsible to look at broadening that base so that every citizen and property owner’s property tax would be lowered, and utility bills would be lowered.

But residents made clear the issue was not limited to whether a data center could be made quiet, safe, dark-sky compliant, or financially beneficial. Many of you simply don’t want that kind of development in Linn Valley’s future.

On August 4 I posted two informal Facebook polls. On data centers east of US-69, the displayed results were six percent yes and eighty-four percent no. On battery storage near the Evergy substation, seven percent yes and eighty-five percent no. Not scientific surveys, not binding votes, but the opposition was unmistakable, and it matched what people were telling me face to face.

On August 5 I withdrew my support. That same morning I contacted the newspaper editor who had agreed to moderate a public forum on data centers and BESS and canceled it, because I had decided to recommend the council stop considering these projects and move toward a ban. If I’d intended to keep quietly pushing this, I would not have canceled a forum I had already begun organizing.

At the August 10 meeting I said: I do not believe the city should move forward with the TAI overlay for data centers or battery storage. I also said no formal movement was intended that night because Richard was absent. Those aren’t contradictory. Waiting for a full council before asking for a vote is about timing. My position had not changed.

Going forward. I’ve done early research on alternatives that could protect the Youthfront property from industrial use: acquisition, conservation easements, deed restrictions, a land trust, purchase options, park and recreation uses, and a coalition of governmental, tribal, nonprofit, and conservation partners. I want to be honest about the status: it is preliminary. I have not contacted the Tribe, a land trust, or any other partner, and I have nothing developed enough to bring to this council. Since August 10 most of my time has gone to assembling the record instead.

On Facebook. I’m also changing how I communicate. I will no longer use Facebook as an official channel in my role as mayor. I want to say something about this, because I don’t want anyone thinking the decision came easily, and I don’t want it mistaken for something it isn’t.

When I ran for this office, I ran on being open, honest, and transparent. That wasn’t a slogan I picked because it sounded good. It’s how I believe local government ought to work, and Facebook was a large part of how I tried to deliver it. It’s where I posted updates. It’s where I answered questions at five o’clock in the morning. It’s where people who would never come to a council meeting could still see what their city was doing. For a town our size, it was the closest thing we had to a front porch.

So let me be plain: I am disappointed to be giving that up. I’m not doing it comfortably and I’m not doing it gladly. It’s a loss, and I feel it as one. But that space has stopped doing the thing it was good for. It is no longer somewhere this city can work through a hard question together. What gets rewarded there is the sharpest comment rather than the most accurate one, and every correction I make just feeds the next round. I’m not willing to keep pouring the city’s business into something that turns it into a fight.

And I’ll be honest about the rest of it. It has been detrimental to my own mental health, and to my family’s. My family didn’t run for anything. They never put their name on a ballot. They’ve been dragged into this anyway, and they’ve had to sit and read things about someone they love, written by people who don’t know him. I can accept a great deal as the cost of holding this office. I am not willing to keep exposing them to that, and I don’t believe anyone in this room would ask me to.

So the platform changes. The commitment I ran on does not. Official updates will go on the city website. Residents can get updates by text or email, and critical notices by mail. Meetings and longer explanations stay on YouTube. You can call me, email me, text me, visit me at city hall, or stop me in the street. Council meetings and every legally required public process remain open, exactly as they always have been. I’m changing the platform, not ending the conversation.

Closing

That’s the whole of it. I explored an opportunity, investigated how to protect this city, sent the terms to legal review rather than accepting them, built a framework for public discussion, listened, changed my position, and started looking for alternatives.

I want to say one more thing, and then I’d like us to move on. This is the last time I intend to walk through this timeline from this chair. The record is written. It’s public, it has dates and documents behind it, and it will stand on its own whether or not I keep defending it. Anyone who wants to know what happened can read it. If a new claim is made about me that is false, I’ll correct it once, in writing, and then I’ll leave it there. But I am not going to keep re-arguing what is already in the record. Doing that has already cost this city months of attention it needed for other things, and I’m not willing to spend any more of it that way.

As for the overlay itself, it is not mine to drive. What happens with the TAI question is at the discretion of this council and of the Planning and Zoning Commission. I’ve given you my recommendation, it’s in the minutes, and I will administer whatever this body decides.

After tonight, I’d like to get back to what I ran on. I ran on transparency, fiscal responsibility, economic development, and accountability, and I’d ask people to measure what I’ve done against those four things, rather than against what’s been said about me.

Transparency is why the entire framework went up on a public website, the draft ordinance included, before this council had adopted anything at all, and why I reported that trip publicly rather than waiting to be asked about it.
Fiscal responsibility is why I looked at whether this city could broaden a tax base that currently rests almost entirely on what our own residents pay. It’s also why that draft required a net-fiscal analysis before any project could proceed, and barred a single dollar of infrastructure cost from being shifted onto our ratepayers.
Economic development is why I was willing to examine the question in the first place.
Accountability is listening to residents, changing my position when they made it clear, and standing up here to tell you the parts I got wrong.

I’m not asking anyone to score that in my favor. I’m asking that it be weighed on those terms. There is a great deal of work in front of this city, and I’d like to spend the rest of my term on it.

The August 10 and August 24 meetings are available in full on the City’s YouTube channel. For plain-language, sourced background on the data-center and battery-storage question, see the TAI information site. As always, you can reach out to City Hall or ask the City a question.