AI Data Centers: Community Engagement, Agreements, and Accountability

As data centers, expand into communities, state and local governments are increasingly involved in conversations about project impacts, community priorities, and potential benefits. Many lessons can be learned from other longer-term infrastructure developments, such as energy facilities, transportation projects, and carbon dioxide removal programs.  

This three-part series will help public professionals support communities throughout these processes, from preparing residents to participate in early conversations to negotiating and implementing commitments and assessing results. Using data centers and other infrastructure developments as practical examples, participants will explore community benefit agreements and related tools, approaches to meaningful community engagement, and the roles public agencies can play in keeping commitments transparent, workable, and responsive to local needs.

The goal of the series is to help state and local government staff navigate relationships among developers, government, community organizations, and residents while supporting informed participation and accountability throughout a project's life.

By the end of the series, participants will be able to:

• Identify approaches for helping communities understand proposed AI Data Center and other infrastructure projects, including the potential impacts, benefits, and tradeoffs.

• Design engagement processes that enable residents and community organizations to articulate priorities and participate meaningfully in discussions with government and developers.

• Distinguish among community benefit agreements, good neighbor agreements, host community agreements, and other approaches to documenting community commitments.

• Identify the roles public agencies can play in shaping, negotiating, implementing, and overseeing community commitments.

• Assess how different types of benefits can be administered, monitored, and evaluated over the life of a project.

• Identify approaches to maintaining transparency and accountability as projects, ownership, and community conditions change.