A data-center development company spent $250,000 pitching the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Now it is suing the Technical.ly team to keep you from reading it.
TECFusions is building a data center campus on the site of a closing aluminum plant in Western Pennsylvania. Our editor Katie Malone filed a routine open records request for what the company told state officials. She won partial release through the Office of Open Records. The company went to court, arguing the deck contains trade secrets.
The project has since received $2 million from state government. The case is still pending, and our reporter is named in it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DdUQmSoBGj1
I want to be clear that this is not a complaint. It doesn’t even necessarily need to be adversarial. Technical.ly has routinely reported on the mixed bag of data centers — we are neither intransigently opposed nor industry apologists. We’re journalists trying to better understand this proess. A newsroom our size getting pulled into court by a developer means the request landed somewhere that mattered. That is the job working.
(Thank you to Reporters Committee for supporting our legal defense, their link below too; Also credit to my colleague and editorial director Danya Henninger for her support and leadership)
But the reason to care has nothing to do with us. It is the missing baseline.
When a developer’s projections stay sealed, no one can go back in three years and check whether the jobs, the tax revenue and the power draw matched what was promised. The community gets the ribbon cutting and never gets the scorecard. Sealing the pitch is what makes the promise unfalsifiable, and the missing baseline is quietly becoming standard practice in every state competing for these campuses.
Louisiana Economic Development secretary Susan Bourgeois described the dynamic plainly: “The last thing that they want to have happen in the beginning of the discussions, or in any part of the discussion, is for their information that they’re sharing to be disclosed publicly.”
Our newsroom is going deeper in our beat just as we also expand to more communities. We’re following entrepreneurship, jobs of the future and the local effects of technology for the communities we serve.
(This was originally a Linkedin post)