Residents push back on Teresa Earnhardt's rezoning request for data center in Mooresville

Our Take

Credit to WCNC and reporter Walker Lawson for putting a face on a pattern we track nationwide: a landowner with name recognition, a developer pitching "hundreds of millions" in tax revenue over 20 years, and a rural zip code suddenly staring down an industrial-scale build. Teresa Earnhardt's Mooresville Technology Park is a local story, but the script is familiar — quiet farmland gets rezoned, neighbors find out late, and the promise of jobs and tax base gets weighed against noise, traffic, water draw, and property values that don't show up in the developer's deck.

Two hundred jobs and a fat 20-year tax projection sound good in a press release. What's missing from most of these pitches is the other side of the ledger: how much power the facility will pull off the local grid, whether ratepayers end up subsidizing new substations and transmission lines, how much water cooling systems will consume in a county that isn't guaranteed endless supply, and who actually signed the incentive deal versus who has to live next to the fence line. Mooresville's rural character isn't a sentimental detail — it's the thing zoning was supposed to protect, and it's exactly what gets traded away when a rezoning request gets framed as inevitable.

This fight is still in front of local officials, which means public comment and county votes still matter here. If you want to see how this compares to other data center proposals moving through your state, check our facility map, and if you want to push back on a project near you, our take-action resources walk through how to actually get heard before the vote happens, not after.