It is not, he makes clear, a server room. A hyperscale AI data center requires voltages ranging from standard 240 volts up to 35,000 volts. It can require a dedicated electrical substation covering five to twenty acres, miles of cabling, industrial chillers, diesel backup generators, and a continuous water supply for cooling. It requires, in the case of a facility drawing 100 to 300 megawatts of power, the electrical equivalent of what it takes to power a small city — in perpetuity.

“This is not a building,” Cliche says. “This is permanent electrical infrastructure.”

He also addresses a question floating in the room: why here? The answer, he explains, is frustratingly simple. Large flat parcels of rural land near transmission corridors — the kind of land Citrus County has in abundance — are exactly what data center developers are looking for. They are cheap, flat, cleared, and connected. The agricultural or rural residential zoning that currently protects these parcels is the last line of defense. Once rezoned to Heavy Industrial, that protection disappears.

The Water

Bruce Kaster is a civil trial lawyer from Ocala who spent years on the St. Johns River Water Management District’s Ocklawaha Basin Board and currently serves on the board of the WAR organization, which is active in Citrus and Levy counties. He has testified in water disputes. He has read the monitoring reports. He has watched Florida’s water table drop, season by season, over four decades. He is not alarmed because he read something alarming. He is alarmed because he has watched it happen.

He does not use slides. He speaks from notes and memory, the way someone does when they have known a subject long enough that the facts have become part of how they think. When he takes the podium, the room senses the difference.

Kaster’s subject is the Floridan Aquifer — the vast underground reservoir that supplies much of Florida’s drinking water — and his assessment of its condition is not reassuring. The aquifer is already under documented stress, as shown in long-term monitoring by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Across parts of west-central and coastal Florida, groundwater withdrawals driven by rapid population growth, agriculture, and recurring drought have contributed to measurable declines in groundwater pressure — what hydrologists call the potentiometric surface — which in turn reduce spring flow and alter connected surface-water systems.

Lake Tsala Apopka — the chain of shallow, spring-influenced lakes that defines much of the natural character of this region — has increasingly experienced extended dry periods, parts of its lakebed now exposed where water used to stand. The springs that feed the Withlacoochee River are diminished during dry cycles, a pattern consistent with reduced aquifer pressure documented across the broader Floridan system. This is not a future projection. It is a present condition.

Then Kaster turns to something most people in the room have not thought about: saltwater intrusion. As freshwater pressure in the aquifer declines, seawater can migrate inland through underground pathways, gradually contaminating groundwater supplies that communities depend on.  In some areas, once a freshwater aquifer zone becomes saline, the change is effectively permanent on human timescales.

The closed-loop cooling myth, he continues, is one of the first things communities facing data center proposals need to understand. Developers often promote closed-loop systems as the water-responsible option. The reality is more complicated: these systems still consume significant quantities of water, and they contaminate what they use. Cooling water circulating through industrial piping picks up PFAS and PFOS — a class of persistent synthetic chemicals linked to cancer, thyroid disruption, and immune system damage. When that water becomes waste, at a rate that can reach tens of thousands of gallons per day, it must go somewhere.

Under Florida law, deep well injection is classified as a “beneficial use” of wastewater disposal. What that means in practice, Kaster tells the audience, is that contaminated water is injected back into the ground — into the same aquifer the county draws its drinking water from. He is not speaking in hypotheticals. He is describing the regulatory framework as it currently exists, applied to a facility of the kind being proposed a short distance from where they are all sitting.

He pauses before his closing line. “The aquifer doesn’t know about our growth plans,” he says. “It just knows how much water we’re taking out.”

The room is very quiet.

Noise, Light, and the Things That Stay

John Wray, a former U.S. Air Force Major and Florida Department of Transportation fleet manager, takes a different approach. He opens by noting that noise ranks second only to air pollution as the environmental exposure most harmful to public health — a finding from Harvard Medical School — and then explains why data center noise is particularly insidious.

The problem, he says, is not simply volume. It is frequency. Standard noise measurement tools use what are called A-weighted decibels — a scale calibrated to how the human ear perceives sound at higher frequencies. Low-frequency noise, which data centers produce in abundance from their cooling systems, generators, and transformer hum, is captured by a different scale: C-weighted decibels. Most county noise ordinances in Florida measure only A-weighted decibels.

“A data center can fully comply with every noise limit on the books,” Wray says, “and still generate low-frequency sound that makes life miserable for residents miles away.”

The largest backup generators, he notes, run at close to 100 decibels. Multiple generators often run simultaneously. Low-frequency sound penetrates walls and windows. It is felt as vibration as much as heard as noise. According to a study from North Carolina that Wray cites, chronic exposure to this type of sound is associated with a 27% increase in dementia rates, as well as elevated rates of stroke and heart attack.

He pauses here and points, without drama, to a fact he wants the room to hold: Citrus Springs Middle School and Citrus Springs Elementary School are located approximately two miles from the Holder Industrial Park site. More than 900 students attend those schools.

“Only one of the five county commissioners,” he adds, quietly, “lives within five miles of the site.”

The Environmental Record

Karen Baldwin taught kindergarten and first grade for many years and has been married, she notes cheerfully, for 57 years. While her perspective is grounded in lived experience rather than formal credentials, she is among the most devastating presenters on the stage.

Baldwin has researched the documented consequences of data centers in communities across the country and assembled them into a presentation that is, by turns, clinical and alarming. A 2024 joint study by CalTech and UC Riverside projects that data centers could contribute to 600,000 new asthma cases per year and 1,300 premature deaths by 2028. After Elon Musk’s xAI data center began operating in Memphis, the peak nitrogen dioxide level in surrounding neighborhoods rose by 79%, according to researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In eastern Oregon, residents near an Amazon data center built over their aquifer have documented rare cancers, miscarriages, and kidney disease.

“This is not fear mongering,” Baldwin says, looking directly at the audience. “These are documented cases.”

She describes the light pollution that follows industrial-scale security lighting — the disruption to bird migration, bat populations, sea turtle navigation, and the nighttime sky that rural Citrus County residents have always taken for granted. She describes heat islands: a Cambridge University study found that data center operations raised surface temperatures by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in surrounding areas, with extreme cases reaching 16 degrees — effects extending up to 6.2 miles from the perimeter.

And then she says something that hangs in the room long after she finishes.
“If you remember nothing else from my presentation, remember this: The long-term health risks of proximity to a data center have yet to be determined.”

She lets that sit. Then: “Not here. Not now. Not ever.”

The Economics of a Promise

Dede Wray, a former dental office manager of twenty years, takes the stage after a short break and wastes no time. She holds up the developers’ projections: 2,500 construction jobs, 825 permanent jobs, $105 million in property tax revenue. Then she begins to dismantle them.

“Private investment is NOT the same as public tax revenue,” she says, enunciating each word with a precision that suggests she has said it many times and intends to keep saying it.

“When commissioners say ‘billions in investment,’ ask one question: who is that going to?”

She cites a study by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, commissioned by 1000 Friends of Florida, finding that data center tax incentives are frequently net losses for the municipalities that offer them. She offers the example of Quincy, Michigan — a small town that hosts several large Microsoft data centers — where the local fire department is so chronically underfunded that it struggles to replace outdated equipment. She notes that Florida Administrative Code Rule 12A-1.108 does not require data centers to create or report any jobs as a condition of receiving their substantial tax-exempt status.

Then she plays a video clip of County Commissioner Jeff Kinnard, recorded in February, speaking about the potential economic benefits of a data center in Citrus County. When the clip ends, she looks at the audience.

“Either the commissioners are ignoring their own data from 1000 Friends of Florida,” she says, “or they’re not being honest.”

The Company Behind the Application

Cheryl Curtiss, a retired educator and counselor who hosted a weekly current-events radio show for thirteen years, presents the section of the evening that most resembles an investigative brief. She traces the history of the Deltona Corporation — from the Mackle brothers’ 1969 land assemblage of 27,000 acres in Citrus County, through its 1992 purchase by Antony Gram, a Belgian national who acquired it through two offshore companies registered in Curaçao, to its current status as a privately held Delaware corporation operating in Florida.

“I probably don’t need to tell you why companies register in Delaware and Curaçao,” Curtiss says, to knowing laughter.

Gram controls 73% of the company. When he took Deltona private in 2004, the remaining 27% ownership became permanently undisclosed — a detail that Curtiss notes is relevant when public officials are being asked to vote on a rezoning that would permanently alter the character of the county.

She describes the timeline: the December 2025 application for 813 additional acres; the March 2026 Planning and Development Commission continuance, during which Deltona’s own lawyers first denied having received any data center inquiries, then admitted to “a few,” then acknowledged they had never recorded the names of any interested parties; the April 1 letter from Deltona’s attorney demanding a final decision within 180 days.

“So the PDC votes on June 18th,” she says. “And no matter what they decide, it goes to the BOCC for a final vote on July 14th.” She looks up. “That is the window. That is it.”

She closes by addressing the claim, occasionally advanced by data center proponents, that opposition to this type of development is driven by foreign interests — specifically China. She cites the numbers: the United States currently has approximately 5,000 data centers with 3,000 more in development. China has approximately 500.

“We have ten times more data centers than they do,” she says. “So that argument seems ridiculous to me.”

A Surprise Moment — and Statewide Attention