‘Project Blue’ opponents accuse Pima County of violating open meeting laws

Pima County officials allegedly violated Arizona’s open meeting law by failing to “provide accurate and meaningful notice” before approving the rezoning for Project Blue, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday.

Last June, the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to approve the purchase of 290-acres of land near the Pima County Fairgrounds to two linked LLCs —Humphreys Peak Properties and Beale Infrastructure—both controlled by the national firm Blue Owl to build a “hyperscale” data center known by the codename “Project Blue.” 

The project is one of at least two data centers in the region, including a planned project involving two 300-acre properties approved by the Marana Town Council last week.

On Wednesday, the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest filed a
lawsuit against Pima County officials on behalf of the No Desert Data
Center Coalition, arguing the county approved the “major rezoning without
providing the public with accurate or meaningful notice.” 

“Under
state law, public bodies must clearly disclose the specific actions they
intend to consider or decide so the public can properly participate in
the decision-making process. Arizona courts have consistently held that
actions taken without sufficient notice are null and void,” the group
said announcing the lawsuit.

They argued Pima County’s planning and zoning commission
violated Arizona’s open meeting law because the agenda for an April 2025
meeting was “misleading and failed to disclose the true purpose” of the
rezoning.

“By the time of the meeting, key terms for the sale of
the county-owned property were already finalized, and the rezoning was
merely a necessary step to complete a prearranged deal for the
development of a large-scale data center,” the group said. “However, the
meeting’s agenda portrayed the request to rezone as a routine or
ordinary activity, asserting that the county merely wanted ‘flexibility’
to allow for more uses.” 

The group said the county “went so far
as to list a grab-bag of hypothetical or potential uses for the rezoned
property (hotels, coffee shops, office buildings, etc.), thus burying
any data center references and obscuring the fact that the rezoning was
purely intended to consummate a specific sale.”

As part of the suit, the group asked for a declaration the rezoning violated state law and
render the commission’s decision null and void. They also asked for
attorneys fees.

While the county supervisors voted with little outcry, in the following weeks, public sentiment shifted against the massive data center project as worries over water use and water quality, as well as the industry’s massive power needs, swamped the facility’s potential economic benefits.

Opponents to the project quickly formed the No Desert Data Center Coalition, a grassroots group that successfully fought the plan in the City of Tucson and has repeatedly threatened legal and political action to halt the construction of data centers in the area. 

Beale has promised the project will include $3.6 billion in “total capital investment,” and provide $152 million in total tax revenue over 10 years, including $58.8 million to the county, and $93.5 million to the state. The company also said the project will involve at least 3,000 construction jobs from 2026 through 2028. Once completed, the facility will create 180 full-time permanent jobs by 2029, with an average salary of $64,000, according to an agreement published last year as the company moved to close the sale on Christmas Eve.

After the June vote, the county and Tucson City officials tried repeatedly to present their case during a trio of public meetings, however, they faced fractious crowds.

In August, City of Tucson leaders unanimously rejected a plan to annex the property into Tucson, which would have given the company access to city water.

Despite that vote, Beale Infrastructure forged ahead even though the city’s vote required the project move from water-cooling to air-cooling.

The company behind the controversial Project Blue was Amazon Web Services, but now sources say the end-user may be Meta (formerly Facebook). AWS seemingly backed out when the developers shifted their plans to a more power-hungry cooling system after the city refused to provide them with the large amount of water their initial cooling plans would have required. That means the complex will have about 20% less power available to run the giant banks of servers inside.

“We find ourselves in the unfortunate position of initiating legal action against the county,” said Rye Whalen, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.

“It pains me deeply that this has become necessary, as it was not my intention to arrive at such an outcome. But it is necessary,” Whalen said in a published statement. “Being a resident of the area, caring for the nature here is important, we don’t want a large scale computer, we want walkable spaces and pathways that let us enjoy the desert.” 

Whalen accused county officials of “favoritism” toward Project Blue which “resulted in a flawed and unfair process that has ignored the genuine concerns and opinions of the community. As a result, we have been left with no other option but to pursue legal action against the county.”

“You don’t sneak a massive desert data center development past the public unless you know it wouldn’t survive open debate. This was a backroom deal, plain and simple,” said Antonia Langowski, a legal fellow with the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest.”

As part the lawsuit, attorney Adriane Hofmeyer argued county staff from 2023 to early-2025 “secretly negotiated the sale” of 290.3 acres of county-owned land to Beale Infrastructure. As part of this process, when staff submitted the rezoning, they did not tell the commission the property was destined to become a data center campus.

“Arizona’s Open Meeting Law mandates that the Commission must consider and act upon a rezoning application in a public meeting, with accurate advance notice to the public of the specific matter under consideration,” wrote Hofmeyer.” Rather than comply with those mandatory requirements,” the county published an agenda in advance of the commission’s April 30, 2025 meeting that “was materially inaccurate and misleading as to the purpose of the rezoning application.” 

She said neither the agenda nor the reports attached to the agenda “gave any notice that the rezoning was being sought for the sole purpose of selling the property to be developed as a data center.” 

“As a result of this misleading agenda, the rezoning application was approved by the Commission without meaningful public notice or scrutiny, depriving the public and plaintiffs of their right to comment on the serious public health and environmental threats posed by locating a data center in Pima County.”

Hofmeyer wrote that while county staff knew data centers “routinely provoked massive public opposition.”

“Not withstanding this knowledge, and in order to avoid public opposition to the first step required to effectuate this plan,” Hofmeyr wrote county staff “failed to include the application’s true purpose in the agenda, thereby misleading the public and concealing its intended course of action.”

Whalen and others would have fought the rezoning had they known what was coming, voicing their concerns and submitting written comments before the April 30, 2025 meeting, Hofmeyer wrote.