The Van Buren Township Planning Commission is preparing to vote on the final site for a massive data center proposed by Google on Wednesday, Oct. 14.

Some residents fear the facility could harm the environment and raise utility costs for customers.

The township’s top official, Supervisor Kevin McNamara, says Van Buren has little choice but to consider the data center, since it meets the necessary zoning requirements.

But McNamara says that has not stopped people from giving him an earful about the plan.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Kevin McNamara: Every single day for the last ten months and every night. And every church parking lot and every elected official from Lansing to Washington to Wayne County.

Quinn Klinefelter, WDET News: Pressing you on both sides, or are they always for or against it?

KM: A lot of them just don’t seem to understand. The data centers are legal.

They say “Just say no.” You can’t just say no. If you do, you go to court like Saline did. And the court decides what to do and how to build it. As badly as maybe I didn’t want a data center, I’m not letting a judge in downtown Detroit build our data center.

We’re gonna build the best damn data center we possibly can. So you basically gotta take all the abuse and get what’s best for your community.

We didn’t get a great hand to be dealt with. We zoned data centers into industrial areas. We have one of the largest data centers in the state in J.P. Morgan Chase.

We have another one across the street. We knew what they were and we said we want them in industrial areas. They have morphed since 2018 when we said that into these hyperscales.

Still, if they were going to be in zoning it would be in an industrial area. You can’t not zone them. Saline did not zone them and that’s how they lost in court. The judge took over and decided how to build Saline’s data center. That wasn’t gonna happen here.

QK: Under the zoning laws, you really couldn’t turn down the facility if it met certain criteria?

KM: No, you can’t. Your best case scenario would be to have the judge broker a deal with all parties.

Your worst case scenario is that you go into a long legal fight, you lose, the property owner gets millions, the developer gets millions. Perhaps the data center people want money, too. But now you’ve lost and you’ve got to take the next data center. I darn sure love Google compared to any of the other ones out there. I don’t want BlackRock. I don’t want mergered ones. I don’t want highly leveraged ones.

QK: Why do you like Google?

KM: I’ve traveled the country. I’ve called the communities, I’ve called the schools. I think the best answer was a school in Virginia that said, “Which data center?” I said, “Google.” They said, “You’re fine, they’re great.” They’re already working with our schools. They own the Discovery Channel, they’ve just gifted the Discovery Channel curriculum K-12 over to our school system.

They had an open house for STEM day. I saw seven-year-olds creating wormholes in the middle of the classroom. I saw kids that were ten years old coding robots and they were being taught by discovery instructors and discovery videos how to do this. It’s just amazing the capabilities they have.

They’ve got robotics teams that teach and kids walk out of the classroom with their own robot that they built and they coded. We got the right partner. They actually do care about the community and they care about their reputation. And I believe that they’re gonna do a really nice job for us in Van Buren.

QK: There have been concerns raised in Van Buren, the same that you often hear about data centers in general, especially the use of electricity and water. How are you addressing those concerns?

KM: First of all, when we went through the process we got screamed at constantly. Probably like 40 meetings we’ve had where the public has come and spoke. What they don’t know is we listened to them. We heard what they said. And so we brokered a deal on what happens if they cause our water rates to go up. We believe they’ll go down because we have greater sales to disperse our fixed costs over. But there is a scenario where water rates for residents and businesses in our community could go up.

It’s brokered right into our agreement with Google that they will cover any of those cost increases.

As far as electricity, they’re off of our grid. We brokered a deal where they had a 150 generators for power outages. They’re down to 24 generators. They can only last three hours during a power outage and then they have to go dark. They’ve got two different lines that feed them from different sources.

I don’t know how that works, but I do know that the history of those two lines goes back ten years and they’ve never both gone down. We heard the population and we brokered those agreements into it. As for the cost of electricity, I don’t really know at all, but I believe that they have about $350 million dollars that they’re putting down.

They’re guaranteeing 19 years of billing. So when DTE goes out to build these plants, they know they’ve got a customer that has to pay them for 19 years.

QK: The Wayne County Commission had to override a veto from County Executive Warren Evans, which he rarely does, to approve tax incentives for the center. You guys had already approved them. The county exec said he felt Google was rushing the county to try to get the incentives approved. What’s your response to those comments?

KM: I’m not going to speak on behalf of Warren Evans. He made a determination that he thought was right. I can tell you that when a business builds anywhere in a community, they have to follow the zoning laws and they have to follow the codes and the ordinances that are in that community.

Those things aren’t maximum ordinances. Your house might have to be half brick, but you could build all brick if you want.

You don’t have to but you have to at least build half brick. What you end up with if they follow the minimum standards of your community is a baseline data center.

We don’t want that because those are the ones that can cause problems. We want a maximum data center.

We want the next generation quiet cooling towers. We want the next generation generators that run on sulfur-free diesel and they have their own scrubbers on each one of them. We want wildlife corridors, that’s what our people have told us.

They told us they don’t want noise, so we want sound barriers, sound walls, we want maximum setbacks of 450 feet, not the 65 feet they probably would have to do under the minimum.

We want 15-foot-high berms, a $30 million landscape package. You will not see the data center unless you have a drone to get over the 15-foot-high trees that they have to plant that are gonna grow 30 feet.

But you have to understand that you don’t get any of that unless you negotiate the tax incentives. That’s the only thing that a community is left to negotiate. And the Wayne County Commission understood that. They don’t want a baseline data center in their community either. They want the best darn data center they can possibly get that’s quiet, pollution free, and does all those things.

QK: Have you felt rushed at all by Google?

KM: No, in fact this process is longer than usual. Usually a major project would take as long as six months. This has been probably 10 months right now. Every single detail has been gone over and over and over because the population really doesn’t want it.

We’re kind of having to deal with the cards that are dealt to us. You can’t just say no. Every day we are dealing with another issue. We have to take everything they say seriously because God help us if they tell us something that could happen and we didn’t write it into the agreement. Then we are at fault. We have to take everything seriously. Every day we’re working on this.

QK: The major party gubernatorial candidates here in Michigan have both said that they would call for moratoriums on data center development. If you guys have this all approved before any new administration would get into Lansing, would that cover you guys at all?

KM: They can’t have a moratorium on an existing project. Since these people already came in, they couldn’t stop it.

Van Buren Twp. actually has a moratorium on data centers at this time. We put the moratorium after Google came in because we realized that there are a lot of aspects of this that we need to sit down and really hash out. Right now there is a moratorium in Van Buren Twp. on new data centers, but it does not affect any data center that already applied. Which is one.

People just don’t seem to understand how locals look at tax captures sometimes. Yes, we are giving up some of our money. But we’re giving up some of our money to build a premier facility that’ll have low impact on our community. That’s why we gave up some of our money. People in the state think that these tax captures are about competing with other states. To us, that’s not the way it is.

It also adds something that people completely miss that locals understand. If I have a problem with a person that takes a tax capture, Google, for example, because they know it and they’ve even had speeches on it. Say they decide that they’re not bringing quiet cooling towers. Or say they start operating and they’re quiet and all of a sudden they start getting loud.

We’ve negotiated that they have to have continuous sound monitoring on the perimeter. And if it’s coming in loud, the only thing the local community can do is write an ordinance ticket for $500. That’s a joke. I mean they’ll just pay the $500 and they may or may not fix the problem. But if I call them up and tell them, “You’re breaking the ordinance for sound and I’m calling back your $100 million in tax incentives and you’re gonna have to pay it now,” they’re going to fix the problem.

QK: And you would have the authority to do that, to call back the tax incentives?

KM: I have the authority to petition the state. And right now data centers are not exactly loved up there, are they?

The food rescue nonprofit Forgotten Harvest is working to harvest 1 million pounds of food by the end of the year.

Mike Yancho, the farm manager at Forgotten Harvest Farms, has been working at the farm for 13 years. He says farm staff till and prep the fields, but most of the planting is done by volunteers.

“There’s not a lot in the vegetable world that can be harvested by a machine, and so we do a lot of hand harvesting,” he explains. 

Last year 3,100 volunteers came out to the farm. Yancho says volunteers plant, weed and harvest plants. 

Lori Setera, assistant farm manager at Forgotten Harvest Farms, says several crates have already been filled.

“We’ve already loaded the trailer once and sent it back in with seven crates of cabbage. Those crates run anywhere from about 750 to 950 pounds,” she says. 

The farm’s funding comes from grants and donations. Setera says the space is donated by a previous board member.

“She leases it to us for $1 a year… the farm property itself is about 1,500 acres. But we only farm 100 of that, and then they lease out to other farmers in the area,” she explains. 

The farm supplements healthy foods people need or request, like hot peppers, which are popular. 

“I think about 20 different crops, and our main, our total harvest goal this year is about a million pounds. So that’s taking everything, you know, the cabbage, the corn, the broccoli, everything, and adding it up and getting to a million pounds,” she says. 

Soon they will plant carrots and spinach in a greenhouse to harvest later in the winter months.

Volunteer harvest

Abu Bangurah came out with his company, Midland Credit Management to help out. 

“Trying to save some cabbages from some pesky raccoons, one cabbage at a time,” he laughs. 

This year the cabbage has a disease. Volunteers strip away the outer affected layers.

Deborah Mahomes is also with Midland Credit Management. She comes out every year with her children and grandchildren.

“Last year we planted broccoli, and then we always planted zucchini, zucchini, lots of zucchini. We’ve done that several times. It’s just every year is something different,” she explains.

Mark Eskola is a senior trainer with ITC Holdings Corp., which manages high-voltage power lines in Southeast Michigan. He’s putting a cabbage in one of the large bins.

“I’ve never done this before, so it’s awesome to be working with all these other volunteers today, and it’s been a lot of fun,” he shares. 

Eskola says it was an opportunity to give back.

“This is all about helping people who are hungry and need food, so that’s why we’re here today, just to help people out,” he says. 

Steady progress

Yancho says the farm grows produce with plastic mulch , using drip irrigation tapes. “It’s a super efficient way to water the crops,” Yancho says.

Setera says the food grown in the field goes to the Forgotten Harvest warehouse, where it’s later dispersed.

“Mostly our stuff here goes farmers market style, just how you see it here in these crates. A lot of our brick-and-mortar pantry partners don’t have the equipment or the space to store these giant crates, so most of our things go to the mobile pantries,” she says.

Yancho says the food is the highest quality.

Volunteers were harvesting the food on a Thursday afternoon, but Yancho says the food could get to people in days. 

“Well, one thing that we know about the food that comes from the farm is it’s the freshest of the fresh. The cabbage that’s being picked today will leave here tomorrow, and it could be on somebody’s plate as early as Saturday,” he explains. 

Setera says volunteers harvested over 10,000 pounds of cabbage that Thursday.

“It’s really important for us, for everybody, to know what the weight is of what they harvest because one pound equals a meal,” she says. 

And for families in need, that could make all the difference.

Jerome Vaughn will tell you it all started with a Panasonic ball-and-chain radio gifted to him by his mother. He was hooked on the voices and foley art that created clear pictures in his mind, all through sound alone.

 ”I was one of those kids who slept with a radio on my nightstand. And even now, I’m one of those people, if I’m driving around late at night, I’m flipping around on the AM radio to see what station I can get from how far away.”

Now, Jerome looks back on a celebrated career in radio news on the brink of retirement. He’s spent 34 years at WDET, where he got to tell the real stories of his hometown. During his time at the station, he’s been an intern, an underwriter, a producer, a reporter, senior news editor, assistant news director…

And he’s spent over 20 years as WDET’s news director.

“WDET is really a special place,” said Jerome. “And Detroit is my favorite place on the face of the Earth.”

Detroit born and raised, Jerome has always held his hometown close. He recalls how media once depicted only the worst of Detroit—sometimes fabricating things altogether to push the narrative of it being a dangerous place, beyond redemption. He worked to set the record straight.

While he covered insightful stories about the metro Detroit region, he worked to make sure that people of color had a voice in news. As a part of that mission, he founded WDET’s Detroit Evening Report Program that tells news for and by people of color.

His dedication to ethical, accurate reporting has earned him many recognitions over the years, including awards from the Michigan Association of Broadcasters, Michigan Associated Press, and Society of Professional Journalists. In 2018, he was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame.

Jerome is also a passionate mentor for WDET interns and beyond. He’s helped kickstart many careers in broadcast, and is always ready to help more young journalists build the skills and networks needed to enter the field.

“I knew that I wasn’t gonna be here, working at WDET in my 90s. I want to make sure that there’s quality public radio being created, you know, so that I can enjoy it after I’ve retired,” Jerome said with a wry smile.

“Jerome’s impact on WDET is deep and lasting. Futhermore, the whole Detroit journalism industry owes a lot to this man, who lives and breathes news. WDET will do its best to continue along the path Jerome helped set while missing his wisdom and humor,” said General Manager Mary Zatina.

Jerome’s final broadcast on WDET will be Monday, Aug. 17 for All Things Considered – Detroit, from 3-7 p.m.

A lasting legacy

At a retirement celebration on Aug. 14, Jerome was surprised with the creation of a permanent internship in his name, honoring his decades of mentorship and the many WDET interns he has helped launch into their careers. The Jerome Vaughn Internship was made possible through gifts from generous WDET donors and members of the newsroom.