Harwood Put Tax Revenue Ahead of Tighter Data Center Scrutiny
Harwood Put Tax Revenue Ahead of Tighter Data Center Scrutiny
Harwood’s fight began after Applied Digital broke ground in September 2025 on a 160-acre AI data-center campus, with Oracle identified as the end user. Residents say news of the project arrived only weeks before construction, after Mayor Blake Hankey and then-Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney had signed nondisclosure agreements with the company.
Michael Swartz, a software developer who had lived in Harwood for nearly two decades, helped form Voices of Harwood. The group worried about the campus’s possible expansion, noise near an elementary school and what it saw as a closed-door approval process. “People deserve a say in projects of this scope,” Swartz’s wife, Amanda, said. The group drafted a charter amendment requiring independent reviews and public hearings for large industrial developments, then gathered 91 signatures in three days to put it on the ballot.
The pushback was immediate. The Fargo Moorhead West Fargo Chamber of Commerce circulated material warning the proposal could cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hankey and other town officials said it would impose cumbersome obligations on a small city and could jeopardize the tax gains tied to the data center. Hankey projected $1.65 million in tax revenue by 2028.
The mayor also insisted the initiative was not a straight vote on the existing project, which would not have been affected. Its wording, he said, extended beyond data centers to other businesses and “would have been financially burdensome to a city our size.” He defended signing the NDA as necessary to stop Fargo from winning the development — and its revenue — instead.
On election day, that argument carried. Voters rejected the measure 325 to 105, making Harwood the lone pro-data-center result among 45 related ballot fights tracked nationally. For Swartz, the loss reflected squeezed household budgets as much as enthusiasm for the project; for officials, it preserved a chance to secure jobs and a badly needed tax base.
Applied Digital said it chose Harwood for its climate, energy access and “pro-business landscape,” maintaining that it had offered conversations and public forums beyond legal requirements. The divide, however, remains stark: residents sought a firmer veto over the next big build, while town leaders chose the promise of growth over another layer of scrutiny.
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