What should you be asking?

McCormick is still carrying 1992 water-line debt, and there is no fund to replace the pipes. Who pays?

Pull the county's own records and a picture forms. On June 24, 1992, County Council approved a 40-year Farmers Home Administration loan and grant of $220,500 to extend water lines along Highways 378 and 114, Fishing Village, and into a portion of Edgefield County, repaid through water-user fees. A 40-year term approved in 1992 runs to about 2032. A loan term is not a pipe's working life, and we won't pretend they are the same thing, but it means ratepayers are still paying on lines from that era today.

And this is not a future problem; the failing is happening now. Residents in the township already see brown water at the tap, a question asked in those exact words at the August 11 meeting. When lines break, the result is boil water advisories. The County Administrator stated in a written response to a resident, shared publicly in August 2026, that the county has approximately 250 miles of water lines and 50 miles of sewer lines, most more than 40 years old.

Now look for the repair money. There is none. The county's own Water and Sewer budget says it plainly: "Historically, the County has not set aside funding for long-term line replacement." The department is running at a deficit; that same budget describes itself as only "the first of several steps needed to place the Water and Sewer Department on a fiscally sustainable path," and says usage fees "will likely need to be increased in the near future." The Administrator's written statement goes further: without a significant new source of revenue or substantial state or federal assistance, "the cost of addressing our aging infrastructure will ultimately fall on our ratepayers and taxpayers."

Put it together: the pipes are failing today, zero dollars are set aside to replace them, and the only plan currently on paper is higher fees on the people reading this. The brown water is not caused by any data center, and it does not get fixed by stopping one either. The real question is where the replacement money comes from.

Columbia County just landed Google and expects over $118 million a year. Why not McCormick?

In July 2026, Columbia County, Georgia announced Google as the sole operator of an 8 million square foot data center campus: 23 buildings on 1,900 acres, valued at roughly $11.6 billion at build-out. The county expects to collect more than $118 million annually in estimated local tax revenue, and Google committed to cover 100 percent of its power costs. For scale: that one project's annual revenue is nearly eight times McCormick County's entire budget.

These projects are being placed all over the region. The question worth sitting with is not whether data centers are coming to the two-state area; they demonstrably are. It is why the money should keep landing one county over while McCormick's water lines age out.

McCormick's whole budget is $15 million. Where does the money for roads, downtown, and pipes come from?

The county's adopted budget for fiscal year 2026-27 is $14,991,231, and it still carries a $786,435 deficit after the largest spending decrease in the county's history (down from $1,853,701 the year before). More than half the revenue (53 percent) comes from real estate and vehicle taxes, meaning residents. Emergency services, the Sheriff's Office, and the jail take 44 percent of everything spent. That is a county surviving, not investing.

The community document circulating says a built-out data center has the potential to double or even triple that budget. That is a potential, not a promise, and we label it as one. But run the thought experiment on your own house: if something could double your income, you would at least demand to see the real numbers before saying no. The real numbers here arrive with the fee-in-lieu-of-tax schedule, which should be public before approval.

The County Administrator put it in writing. Read his words, not the rumors.

In a written response to a resident, shared publicly in August 2026, County Administrator James Upchurch laid out what is actually in front of the county: the only application received is a rezoning request. No site plans, no engineering drawings, no development proposals. In his words: "Rezoning is simply the first step in a lengthy process. It does not mean a data center will be built." He also confirmed what CPW has stated (up to 1,000,000 gallons per day available if a data center were approved) and named the county's two loudest issues in his time here: water infrastructure and jobs.

One more line from that statement deserves its own case file: "The lack of natural gas has been the biggest barrier to economic development in McCormick County." He says several interested companies in the past year alone walked away because there is no gas. Whatever you think of this project, that barrier is real and it predates it.

Who is actually helped if the tenant is named early, and who might be harmed?

The identity question is the most asked and least answerable on this site, and we have logged every version of it. But here is the question underneath it, worth asking honestly: what would the name actually buy you? Data centers hold banking records, medical records, and government systems. Publicly mapping exactly whose data sits inside which building is a security question, not just a curiosity, which is one reason operators stay unnamed until agreements are signed everywhere these projects are built.

Government transparency and corporate confidentiality are different things. Every county action here (the rezoning vote, the ordinance, any fee agreement) happens in public regardless of the name. And none of the protections that matter depend on it: water caps, noise limits, and emission limits bind the land and whoever operates on it. Ask for enforceable conditions, not a logo. The name gets disclosed the moment it can be.

The county's draft data center ordinance is not posted online. Get your own copy.

The draft ordinance is where the real protections live: a 55 dBA sound cap at the receiving property line of any school, church, park or residence, a 7 dBC limit on low-frequency hum, and generator testing restricted to weekday working hours. But you should not take our summary of it. It is a draft until adopted, and the version that gets adopted is the one that counts.

The gas pipeline's filings are public federal records. Read them.

The pipeline connected to this project is filed under FERC docket CP25-517-000 (South System Expansion 4) by Southern Natural Gas, L.L.C., a Kinder Morgan company. Everything in that docket is public: the route direction, the certificate issued July 31, 2026, the landowner procedures. Anyone telling you the pipeline is a secret has not looked it up.

Marion County, SC approved a data center, then lost it. What happened?

Marion County approved a $2.4 billion data center in January 2026. Residents felt blindsided and the backlash was intense. By June the developer had walked away because power could not arrive on their timeline, and the county lost an estimated $28 million a year in payments against a roughly $25 million budget. The lesson cuts both ways: secrecy costs trust, and delay costs the deal. Read it and decide for yourself which mistakes McCormick should avoid.

Loudoun County, Virginia has run data centers longer than anyone. Their books are public.

If you want to know what decades of data centers actually do to a county's finances, don't ask us and don't ask a Facebook group. Loudoun County publishes its adopted budget every year. It shows $26 collected in data center tax revenue for every $1 of county services required, and a residential tax rate that fell from $1.285 in 2008 to $0.805 today. Their situation is not McCormick's, but their numbers are real, audited, and free to read.