Open Letter to the Manhattan Mercury
This article was originally published by the Manhattan Uranus on May 12. It is an open letter to the Manhattan Mercury’s Publisher, Ned Seaton, as a response to his editorial “FROM THE PUBLISHER| Get the Facts on Data Centers” dated May 9th, 2026:
Dear Ned,
When it comes to “getting the facts,” consider taking your own advice before bestowing it on others. Of course the public backlash seems like “emotionalism” to someone who hasn’t done any research.
The residents who are trying to protect the future of their county have full-time jobs and they’ve still looked into this harder than two entire teams of people you pay to do news for a living.
Meanwhile, The Manhattan Uranus started out as a joke page. We’re literally just a few goofballs with a go pro and we’re working circles around you. Let us give you a few pointers:
Investigate this company’s interactions with Pacific, MO like we did. We found that Beltline overuses NDAs to prevent government officials from being transparent with the public. That they are using a modular configuration of their buildings to skirt regulatory burdens and that this “regulatory arbitrage” is legal but widely considered unethical. That they have a small staff and very little capital— and that as a result, their business model is to scout land, put in a contingency offer, negotiate regulations, buy the land, then sell it off. That when presenting to Pacific residents, they touted using reclaimed wastewater (black water), but that the actual plans use graywater—only one of a long pattern of inconsistent statements.
Look into Beltline as a company like we did. We found that they’re actually a solar farm developer that has pivoted very recently to AI data centers—in a timeline that matches up with the loss of grant funding and tax incentives for renewable energy and the meteoric rise in those same funding mechanisms for AI data centers. We also found that that they have zero experience with a hyperscale facility. Zero, zip, nada, none. You’ll see that they’re courting a lot of counties at the same time, including El Dorado, KS, and their residents are lodging the exact same complaints about the exact same company regarding a lack of transparency, ethics, experience, funding/investors, end user disclosure, and environmental / quality of life concerns.
Speak to the residents like we did. 99% of them have done more research than The Manhattan Mercury staff. We listened to their experiences and learned that Beltline has allegedly been using high-pressure sales tactics by going to nearby landowners and telling them that if they don’t sell now, their land will be worthless. We spoke to Mily at KSNT 27 and learned that Ryan forbade her from recording the meeting. We learned from Ellen, a Pott County resident, that Ryan told her point blank after the meeting that the county has to put all the regulations in place up front, because afterwards, they’ll (paraphrase) do whatever they want within those boundaries. We learned that even though they are technically correct in saying that they “haven’t bought any land yet,” they already have a contingency offer on the land and the sale is contingent upon the zoning change—as soon as the regulations go into effect, the sale will go through. This is the same speculative development strategy that was used on 300 N 11th last year in Manhattan.
Study closed loop cooling systems like we did, like residents did. We learned that what they save in water usage, they make up for in electrical usage. Turns out that closed loop systems rely heavily on HVAC to make up the difference, and the pumps used to circulate water through the system gobble up a lot of energy: water is very heavy and moving it is energy intensive. Oh, and the water picks up coolants, heavy metals, and descaling agents— a hazardous material that must be cycled out of the system and replaced with new water. Nothing is truly a “closed loop.”
This is some of the biggest news this region has seen in the last 5 years and you are the owner of our newspaper and radio: you should have attended the meeting yourself. If you had, you would have walked away with some of the same concerns. You would have heard the Beltline reps say that generators only needed to be tested once a month to much of the crowd’s relief. And then heard them walk that claim back only after a very direct question from an audience member, saying that there would be so many generators that testing would be near-continuous between 9-5. You would have noticed that their estimates are so broad that they are almost unusable. That they can’t give us straight numbers. That at one point, they told us the facility would produce “zero discharge,” only to later concede that the HVAC and cooling systems would produce biohazard discharge.
Study other data centers in other counties like we did. You’ll learn that a project in Fayette County, Georgia stole 29 million gallons of water using secret, unmetered wells and that the county is doing literally nothing about it. You’ll learn that in Saline County, Michigan, after the facility was voted down 4 to 1, Related Digital (working for OpenAI and Oracle) buried the county in lawyers over “exclusionary zoning” and the project proceeded anyway. You’ll learn that a March 2026 study of over 6,000 AI data centers showed that hyperscale facilities produce heat islands with surface temperatures up to 16.4 degrees F higher than the surrounding landscape.
After you do all that, you may want to print a retraction."
