No agreement prevents disputes from reaching court. The goal is to resolve routine problems in days and to have money and legal authority already in place for the serious ones. ## 1. Give the town its own qualified team, paid for by the applicant Before making any commitment, retain a land use and utility lawyer, plus independent engineering, acoustical, hydrological, and financial advisers as needed. Where state law allows, require the developer to fund reasonable review costs through an escrow the town controls. The town selects the advisers, directs their work, and receives their conclusions. The developer funds the review and has no say in its findings. This is routine for pipelines and mines and nearly absent from data center practice. Assign one official to coordinate, with a named backup. Keep a public calendar of notices, hearings, and deadlines. Verify statutory notice in writing before every action that requires it. In one Virginia county, the largest data center rezoning in the country was voided by a court for defective notice after roughly twenty-seven hours of hearings; the county spent more than $1.7 million defending it and then withdrew. Notice failures destroy more deals than opposition does. Identify the landowner, the developer, the intended operator, and the proposed financial guarantor. If the tenant is unknown, that is an unresolved condition, not a detail to be filled in later.

# A town's first data center: what to require before saying yes A data center can bring construction employment, tax base, and infrastructure investment. It can also impose demands on electricity, water, public services, and nearby neighborhoods that last for decades and outlive the equipment inside. Two facts should frame everything. The industry produces very few permanent jobs relative to its cost — one watchdog analysis of eleven major projects found subsidies averaging about $1.95 million per job. And in a survey of data center owners, only three percent named tax credits and local incentives as the biggest siting factor; land and power availability drive the decision. You are usually not paying for something that would otherwise not happen. **The basic rule:** every important promise needs a stated limit, a reliable way to check it, a responsible party with money behind it, and a practical response when it is broken.