A Massive Data Center Helped Topple a Mayor. What’s Next?

For the past 16 years, Kenneth Gulley has been the mayor of Bessemer, Alabama. Gulley had his eye on winning a fifth term, but he was beaten handily in a runoff election last month by a former City Council member. 

Now, Louise Alexander is officially the city’s first female mayor, having been sworn in Oct. 5. She won the office, in part, because of her far more measured approach to Project Marvel, the controversial, $14.5 billion data center development planned for just outside of the majority-Black city.

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Gulley not only backed the project but also signed a non-disclosure agreement with the developers — a move that left Bessemer residents almost entirely in the dark about a vast industrial project with a massive environmental footprint.

“There was no transparency with this particular site — the data center,” Alexander, who also formerly served in the Alabama House of Representatives, told the local ABC television affiliate. The lack of transparency, she said, gave her real momentum against Gulley, and she promised that, if elected, she would shine a light on city contracts with the data centers.

In addition to electing a new mayor, residents elected three new councilors to Bessemer’s seven-member City Council. All three had voted earlier this year to rezone the 1,600-acre parcel of land where the data center is set to be built. The rezoning from agricultural to light industrial helped Project Marvel clear a major procedural hurdle.  

The project, and the secrecy surrounding it, rankled Bessemer residents, who have vocally opposed Project Marvel based on what little they know. The data center, comparable in size to 17 Walmart Supercenters, would consume 90 times more electricity than the entire city of about 25,000. 

Beyond the energy use and air pollution from generating that much power, other environmental concerns emerged, including the threat of extinction for a freshwater fish that lives in local waterways. 

Construction of the data center also could last a decade and cost as much as $14.5 billion. 

Frustration among city residents and people in unincorporated areas around the proposed site has been significant and cuts across partisan lines. As such, the wave of change in Bessemer doesn’t follow any neat socio-political line. 

Both Alexander and Gulley are Democrats, though the mayoral post is nonpartisan, and both are Black. The three new members of City Council, also nonpartisan, are all Black; they defeated Black incumbents. 

While various policy differences separated all of these candidates, Project Marvel stands above them all.  The new mayor has a clear mandate she plans to fulfill: She ordered a review of all contracts related to Project Marvel as one of her first official acts. She also decided to replace Aaron Killings Jr., the city attorney who signed the non-disclosure agreement with Gulley and his chief of staff and the Project Marvel developers.    

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“In my first five days in office, we are going to revisit the contracts on the data center,” Alexander told the local news station.

“And we’re going to make sure that everything is right, the T’s crossed and the I’s dotted. If not, we’re going to bring that back to the public, and then we’re going to go forth that way.”

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