There is a moment — a very specific, very American moment — that I have witnessed more times than I can count in my years covering local news. It goes something like this.
A couple is driving down a road they’ve driven a thousand times. Maybe it’s a Saturday morning. Maybe they’ve got coffee. And then one of them looks out the window and says, “Honey, what in the world is going up over there?”
And the other one squints at the construction equipment and the cleared land and the steel skeleton of something enormous rising up where there used to be a strip mall or a field or a perfectly unremarkable patch of Georgia dirt, and says, “I don’t know, but it looks a little big to be a burger joint.”
And thus begins the civic awakening.
In Marietta, that moment has apparently arrived. Residents near 1751 Bells Ferry Road are now organizing, rallying, and showing up to city hall — which is wonderful, genuinely, good for them — to oppose a hyperscale AI data center that will draw 108 megawatts of power, stand 105 feet tall, and employ somewhere between 5 and 40 people, depending on who you ask and how optimistic they’re feeling that day.
The Marietta City Council voted unanimously to approve this project.
In June.
Of 2025.
That’s not a typo. That’s not a misprint. That is a full calendar year ago.
Now, I want to be fair here. I want to be measured. I want to extend grace to my fellow Georgians who are only now discovering that a building taller than an eight-story structure is going up in their neighborhood.
I cannot do that. But I want to.
The city of Marietta has a local newspaper. I know this because once upon a time, I worked for them. The Marietta Daily Journal covered this data center last year. When it was still a proposal. When residents could have walked into that council chamber and said their piece into a microphone while elected officials were legally required to sit there and listen. To be fair, some residents did speak out against it, but not the masses that are upset about it now.
The newspaper did its job.
The community slept.
And I say that not to be cruel, but because I have been watching this exact movie for my entire career and I know every line of dialogue, including the part where someone calls the newsroom after the fact and says, “Why didn’t anybody tell us about this?” And the reporter has to very carefully not say what they are actually thinking, which is: “We did. Page A-3. Last March. You were busy hitting the laughing emoji on news stories about vaccines.”
This is not a new phenomenon. This is not a social media problem or a pandemic problem or a symptom of our fractured modern attention span, though all of those things have certainly made it worse.
I covered local government for years. And one of the stories that used to drive me absolutely up the wall — up the wall, across the ceiling, and halfway out the window — was the cell tower story. Specifically, the cell tower proposed for school property.
It would go like this: a cell phone company wants to put a tower on school grounds. The school system gets lease revenue. The company gets a tower. The school board takes it up. There are multiple public meetings, all of them legally noticed, all of them open to every parent, taxpayer, and mildly curious citizen in the county.
You know how many parents show up?
Zero.
Not one. Not a concerned mother with a folder of printed research. Not a skeptical father with his arms crossed and a lot of questions. Nobody. The meetings happened. The votes happened. The tower got approved.
And then the construction crew showed up.
And then — oh, and then — the parents materialized. Fully formed. With petitions. With matching t-shirts, sometimes. With a Facebook group that had somehow already accumulated 1,400 members despite being 48 hours old. With a burning desire to know why nobody had told them about this.
I have had to explain, more times than I care to remember, that the school board did not conduct this vote in a submarine. That there were meetings. That the meetings were public. That the meetings were covered. That the local news media had, in fact, published the date, time, and location of every single one of those meetings, and that the information had been sitting there like a patient golden retriever waiting for someone to notice it.
Now, I understand why people don’t go to government meetings. I do. I have sat through enough of them to tell you, with complete honesty, that they are not a riveting evening of entertainment. They are not Hamilton. They are not even a mediocre episode of a procedural drama. They are a roomful of fluorescent lighting, an agenda that was printed in a font size designed to discourage reading, and a level of parliamentary procedure that makes you feel like you accidentally enrolled in a very boring law school.
And the attendance reflects this.
On a typical night, your average city council or county commission meeting has approximately five people in the audience. One of them is a reporter who has made peace with their life choices. One of them is a guy who comes every single week and has very strong opinions about a drainage ditch on his street. The other three work for the government body that is meeting and it is a job requirement they be there. So, in total, four people are there serving a professional purpose and only one citizen is in the audience.
Five people. And the fate of your neighborhood getting decided in that room.
I spent years telling newsrooms — begging newsrooms, really — never to lead a story with the words “city council” or “county commission.” Never. Under any circumstances. And God help you if you put those words in a headline, because readers see “City Council Votes On” and their eyes glaze over faster than a donut at Krispy Kreme, and they are gone. They have clicked away. They are now watching a video of a dog who learned to open the refrigerator, and honestly, who can blame them.
The words “public meeting” in a headline function as a reader repellent. We might as well write “FREE COLONOSCOPY — DETAILS INSIDE.”
And yet…
Those meetings are where it happens. All of it. The zoning. The contracts. The school budgets. The road projects. The data centers. The cell towers. The decisions that will determine what your neighborhood looks like, what your property taxes are, what your kids’ schools have and don’t have, and whether a 105-foot industrial building goes up next door to your house.
All of it. In that boring room. With the bad lighting. And the agenda nobody reads.
Here is something I have observed over many years of sitting in those rooms: A reporter in the back of the room, after a while, becomes furniture. We’re expected. We’re accounted for. We are a known quantity who will write a story that approximately 12 people will read before scrolling to the sports section.
You know who politicians actually notice?
You.
A constituent. A voter. A real live human being who drove to city hall on a Tuesday night, found parking, walked past the weird statue in the lobby, figured out which conference room it was in, and sat down in one of those chairs that was clearly designed by someone who has never sat in a chair.
That person — you — changes the temperature of the room. Because you are not furniture. You are not a known quantity. You are someone who showed up, which means you might tell your neighbors, which means your neighbors might show up next time, which means suddenly the elected official is doing math in their head about what this means for their next election.
Georgia law requires all government meetings to be open to the public. It applies to you, to me, to your neighbor who vacuums his driveway every second Tuesday and whom you have always found slightly unsettling. All of us. We are all legally entitled to walk into that room and watch our government work.
Most of us never do.
I am not here to lecture you about civic duty in the abstract. I am not going to quote the Federalist Papers at you or tell you that democracy is a garden that requires tending, though it is and it does. I’m going to tell you something more practical.
The people making decisions about your community are not, as a general rule, the most visionary and selfless individuals your county has ever produced. They are people. Regular people, with regular blind spots and regular incentives and a very human tendency to do what is easiest when nobody is watching. The data center in Marietta got a unanimous vote. Not one council member dissented. One of them heard the developer acknowledge that the facility would produce “a lot of heat” and voted yes anyway.
Would the vote have been different if two hundred residents had shown up? Maybe not. Probably not, honestly. But maybe one council member asks harder questions. Maybe the developer has to make more specific commitments. Maybe an independent environmental study gets requested. Maybe the permanent job count of five to twenty people gets a little more scrutiny before the vote instead of after.
You don’t always win. But you are always more likely to win when you show up than when you don’t.
The public hearing in Marietta is Tuesday, June 10th, at 7 p.m., at City Hall, 250 Lawrence Street. The rezoning has already been approved. The ship has largely sailed. But there is still a public record to be made, and the people who live near that site deserve to have their voices in it.
And for everywhere else, regardless of what city or county you live in, I would ask you to consider something.
You follow national politics. You know the polling numbers. You know who said what on cable news last Tuesday. You have opinions about people in Washington who will never know your name and whose decisions, while important, are filtered through approximately forty layers of government before they affect your daily life.
Meanwhile, five people are sitting in a room two miles from your house deciding what gets built next door to it.
The boring meeting is where your life actually happens.
Show up before the bulldozers do.
B.T. Clark is an award-winning journalist and the Publisher of The Georgia Sun. He has 25 years of experience in journalism and served as Managing Editor of Neighbor Newspapers in metro Atlanta for 15 years and Digital Director at Times-Journal Inc. for 8 years. His work has appeared in several newspapers throughout the state including Neighbor Newspapers, The Cherokee Tribune and The Marietta Daily Journal. He is a Georgia native and a fifth-generation Georgian.
- B.T. Clark
- B.T. Clark
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