Election Results: Wrightstown Rejects Datacenter

On Tuesday, voters in the Village of Wrightstown told a datacenter company chasing a gigawatt of power no.¹ The advisory referendum asked whether the village should use its infrastructure, utilities, or public facilities to help build a large-scale data center. Of the 1,184 people who showed up, 1,033 said no.² That's 87%, the kind of margin most candidates only dream about.

The vote doesn't bind anything. But it puts a hard number on the village's opinion of the project, something they had been dodging for months. Turns out, Wrightstown wants nothing to do with Cloverleaf Infrastructure's roughly one-gigawatt data center.³ That puts the project in the ballpark as the data center now under construction in Port Washington, the one Cloverleaf helped get off the ground and has used as a sales pitch to other Wisconsin towns.⁴

Open records showed Cloverleaf and Village Administrator Travis Coenen had been talking since January, months before residents heard so much as a rumor.⁴ Once they did hear, the complaints sounded familiar: heavy water use, constant noise, and farmland that doesn't come back once it's paved over.⁵ The same list keeps showing up in data center fights across the state. A Marquette Law School poll from earlier this year found 70 percent of Wisconsin voters think data centers cost more than they deliver.⁶

Enough signatures landed on the village clerk's desk that trustees passed a one-year moratorium on data center projects in July, unanimously.⁷ They did it the same night board members discussed a legal challenge from NetChoice behind closed doors. NetChoice is a Washington DC trade group representing Amazon, Meta, and TikTok, and it had tried to keep the referendum off the ballot altogether, arguing it broke state law.⁸