I attended Tuesday night’s special meeting regarding the Quiet Data Center proposed for the industrial park outside Enfield, and I am deeply concerned by the lack of transparency surrounding this project.
After reviewing the contract signed between the county and Quiet DC, it is clear the reality does not match the promises being made by lobbyists.
The economic development agreement requires only 50 jobs paying a baseline of $20.54 per hour. For context, I earned $32 per hour at a server farm in 1998 — which equals over $65 per hour today.
Even a retail cashier at Costco often earns comparable or higher wages. These are not the high-paying tech jobs our community was promised.
The contract includes no local hiring preference for Halifax County residents. Worse, the non-compliance penalty is negligible: just $2,500 per year for each uncreated job. If the facility operates with only five full-time employees, the company pays a measly $112,500 annual penalty. That is a toothless enforcement mechanism, not a good deal for taxpayers.
The contract also stipulates that its final execution depends on the completion of environmental impact and electrical load studies.
With the sale scheduled to close on September 18th, these studies should already be complete. Yet when I requested copies, county staff claimed not to have them. When I asked the Quiet DC representative directly, County Attorney Glynn Rollins and Chairman Vernon Bryant intervened to state the developer had no obligation to share them.
This raises critical questions for our commissioners:
Why did you fail to include language requiring these studies to be delivered to the county for public review?
Do you not care to understand the potential consequences for our local environment and electrical grid?
Why are county officials actively shielding a private developer from basic public accountability?
Following the meeting, I spoke with a Halifax EMC representative regarding potential overage charges if external power must be purchased to support the data center.
The representative assured me that Quiet DC’s power draw would be hard capped at what the substation can produce, currently 100 megawatts. I asked him if we could review the signed contracts that explicitly state this and he told me that their company is privately held and not required to share contracts with the public, and that they would not be sharing any such contract.
We should take their word for it, right?
Corporations never lie to us, right?
This is not how our elected officials should operate.
Every resident of Halifax County deserves better.
Show up on November 3rd and vote every single standing commissioner out.
Ephraim Brodsky
Roanoke Rapids