A $6 Billion Data Center Chose One of America's Poorest Counties. The County Has No Zoning Code to Weigh In.

Bassfield, Mississippi, counted 192 people in the 2020 census. A $6 billion number is now sitting next to its name in headlines across the state. Eagle Rock Partners, a private real estate developer based in North Carolina, wants to build a three-building, roughly 2-million-square-foot data center campus — called Big Woods Technology Park — on 800 acres of private farmland just outside town, off Gum Swamp Road near the Covington County line. The company says it will not ask for a single tax abatement to build it. That detail matters more here than almost anywhere else: more than a quarter of Jefferson Davis County's residents live below the poverty line, and the median household earns about $38,500 a year, roughly two-thirds the statewide average, in a county reporters keep describing, accurately, as one of the poorest in the country.

Todd Jackson, executive vice president of the Area Development Partnership, the regional group that's been making the case to residents, doesn't hedge about what the project would mean. He told reporters the campus would "throw off around 70 million dollars a year to Jeff Davis and Jeff Davis County School District," and called it "life-changing." That's a developer-derived projection, not an audited figure, but it's the number driving most of the local support. Eagle Rock expects to hire about 200 permanent employees and put more than 1,000 people to work during construction, which the company says could start as early as 2027.

A county with nothing to vote on

Here's the part that should interest anyone who does this kind of diligence for a living: Jefferson Davis County has no zoning ordinance. None. The 800 acres Eagle Rock wants sit on private land, and county officials have told residents, plainly, that they have little legal authority to intervene in what gets built there. There's no rezoning hearing to attend, no conditional-use permit to appeal, no planning commission vote to lobby. The county's only real levers are the ones that happen to attach to the land some other way — a wetlands permit, a road-use agreement, an air or water permit filed with a state agency. That's a different kind of fight than the one playing out in Memphis, where the zoning code simply had no category for a hyperscale data center and the city spent a year arguing over a moratorium to close the gap after the fact. Jefferson Davis County doesn't have a gap to close. It never had the tool in the first place.

What the company says it won't need

Eagle Rock's pitch leans hard on the idea that the campus won't ask the county, or the grid, for much of anything. The company says the complex will generate its own power with on-site natural gas generators, permitted through the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, with no new transmission line and no interconnection request to the regional grid. On water, it says cooling will run on a closed-loop, non-evaporative system that uses essentially none for cooling itself, with the facility drawing instead on the deep Catahoula Formation Aquifer for domestic and irrigation use, backed by a hydrogeological study the company commissioned.

Every one of those claims would be real progress if they hold up — a project that solves its own power and water problems is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't show up in the capacity-auction and water-litigation stories we've covered all year. But right now, that's exactly what they are: claims. No MDEQ air permit has been issued yet. No independent hydrogeologist has reviewed Eagle Rock's study in public. On the evidence ladder we use to grade this kind of diligence, a company's own commissioned study sits several rungs below a permit an agency has actually signed — and in a county with no zoning department to even ask the question, there's no local body positioned to push it up that ladder either way.

950 signatures, no vote

On October 5th, residents showed up to the county board of supervisors meeting with a petition carrying 950 signatures asking for a pause on data center construction countywide — a real number in a county of roughly 11,000 people.

[With] something of this magnitude, we feel like we should have had a voice.Samantha Pruitt, Bassfield resident

We are looking to move forward while imposing the safeguards needed to protect the community.Michael Evans, Jefferson Davis County Board of Supervisors President

Evans didn't commit to the pause residents asked for, and pointed to the board's ability to discuss economic development matters in executive session — which is largely why residents are learning the scope of this deal in pieces, after decisions have already started moving, rather than at a public hearing built for the purpose.

The honest read is that nobody in Jefferson Davis County, for or against this project, is actually litigating the data center itself. There's no hearing where that argument could happen. What residents are litigating, with a petition instead of a vote, is whether a company's own numbers — on power, on water, on tax revenue — deserve to be taken on faith just because there's no local office with the authority to demand proof. For a county this poor, that's not a small question to leave unanswered before the first generator ships.