WHARNCLIFFE — For 49 years, Sue Cantrell has lived up the right fork of Ben Creek, at the edge of Mingo County, a couple of mountains east of the Kentucky state line.
Her house backs up to the foot of the mountain, where a long shuttered coalmine once bustled.
That old mine is the site where New York developers are proposing a data center that would have 117 turbine engines and tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel.
In Wharncliffe, details surrounding the project became public as lawmakers and Gov. Patrick Morrisey removed any local authority from people who would live next to them.
For residents like Cantrell, the fallout from that law is a big issue in the upcoming election, and they want to know if candidates for office support data centers.
“It is definitely an issue. Because if they are saying they are pro, people are not going to vote for them, because the people here don’t want it,” said Candaice Sowers, a resident and EMS worker.
Four other communities around the state are raising opposition as well. Citizens in Tucker County have organized and filed lawsuits after they learned about a proposed local data center through a legal ad.
Concerned citizens in Berkeley County grilled their officials after the governor announced a project for their area during this year’s legislative session. At least five projects have been announced across the state.
Sowers said the water supply in the Wharncliffe area is already stressed, with frequent outages and boil water advisories.
Data centers are notorious for the massive water consumption needed to cool the computers inside them. While developers have said the proposed project will draw all its water out of the old mine, Sowers still has concerns.
“There is water there. However, it’s not clean enough for them to draw it out of. It polluted all the streams around here for years, and when you’re running nothing but gray sludge out of that mine, how are you gonna draw water for a data center?” she asked.
During the 2024 election, Mingo County voters cast ballots 3-to-1 in favor of Morrisey. But at that time, data centers weren’t a topic of discussion. Morrisey changed that during his first State of the State address when he called for lawmakers to embrace data centers to rejuvenate the economy.
Janet Gibson has lived in Wharncliffe all her life. She’s an active community member. When she isn’t distributing food and clothes at the Wharncliffe Park, she serves as a volunteer firefighter at the station down the road, or as a poll worker come election time.
In her estimation, the pushback against data centers could be politically costly, at least in her community.
“If a couple officials that were just previously, or are in office now, are coming up for reelection, I don’t think they’ll get it from this community,” she said. “Morrisey? Don’t think he’ll get any votes down through here.”
Morrisey’s office said the project proposed in Mingo hasn’t yet received the “high impact” data center designation that would remove local authority under the state’s data center law.
“It’s too early to make assumptions about what any development would look like. The Governor remains committed to listening to local communities and taking their input seriously on any issue,” wrote Lars Dalseide, a governor’s office spokesman.
However, developers are expecting the project to produce 2.4 gigawatts of electricity, which would more than qualify it for the designation, which lawmakers set at a threshold of 90 megawatts.
Bill Gilkerson and his wife Bonnie own the country store serving Wharncliffe. Gilkerson made his money doing contracting work for the mines, from mowing the grass to laying pipes to building structures.
Like Gibson and Sowers, he too is intent on hearing what candidates have to say about the data center.
“I just would like to hear that if it’s going to happen, that it’s going to be maintained and checked out to make sure everything’s on the safe side,” he said.
But Gilkerson, along with a number of other residents, isn’t just searching for candidates who will block or regulate data center development. He’s taken the developers and federal regulatory agencies to court to block the project in a case that is still pending.
Back when she moved into her home near the mine 49 years ago, Cantrell was a young mother and didn’t have many options. Today, she and her boyfriend, Lawrence Sammons, said they plan to move to Tennessee if developers build the data center.
Sammons said he is concerned about the noise from the data center, a common complaint heard in many communities.
“The noise is going to drive us plum crazy,” he said.
But not all lawmakers have left communities like Wharncliffe at the mercy of developers.
During the 2026 Legislative session, some tried to restore measures of local control and transparency to data center projects. A couple Democrat-led proposals would’ve removed language barring communities from imposing ordinances on data centers. Another would’ve required data center developers to disclose how much water they expect to use. A Republican backed proposal would’ve opened an avenue to allow people living near a data center to put it up to a vote.
But the GOP-controlled Legislature blocked all of those proposals.
With elections coming up, candidates are campaigning on this issue. In Berkeley County, where a $4 billion data center is slated, both Republican and Democratic candidates have voiced their opposition to data center development.
Incumbent Chris Anders, a Republican, said he’s concerned about the impact on water tables for surrounding properties. Lucia Valentine, his Democratic challenger, said she is totally against cutting the authority of local communities over the projects.
Gibson said voters in her community will be looking hard at what the candidates are saying about data centers, rather than party affiliation.
“We’re going to look for the ones that are going to do us the best interest down here,” she said.
