Last night, we heard the Township Planner state that Project Flex was approved without a public hearing or need for Board approval because “Data Centers” have been an approved use since 1992.

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Let that sink in.

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A vague definition written 34 years ago, is being used to justify the largest industrial development in the history of this Township.

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A definition established at a time when you used your phone line to connect a 50‑pound computer to America Online or CompuServe with a 9,600-kbps modem. A time when maps were folded up paper, banking and shopping were in person and if you wanted to know when a movie was playing, you called Movie Phone from the landline physically attached to your wall.

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So, when the Township says “computer processing has been an approved use since 1992,” what they are really saying is that zoning rules written for the fax machine, dial‑up modem, and floppy disk era are being used to justify a utility‑scale industrial campus.

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That's not regulatory continuity.

That's regulatory malpractice.

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And claiming that “our hands are tied” is not just inaccurate, it is a choice. A choice to hide behind outdated language while approving infrastructure with risks and consequences the original authors of those rules couldn't possibly have imagined.

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There are real issues and concerns that the township residents have, and in the heavily moderated softball Q&A session we got to participate in, Verrus claimed that many of those worries are non-issues, in fact it’s a super good thing.

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But that framing itself should concern everyone. If the company were truly confident in how well those issues (like noise, and the storage of massive banks of lithium-ion batteries) were being handled, the sound study wouldn’t read like a piece of marketing material and would instead be an independent, rigorous analysis that addressed all the concerns with dB(A) and dB(C) noise. Proving that all this equipment really will generate no perceptible noise.

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Additionally, the official plan submitted to the township would not treat the on‑site battery energy storage as a secondary detail.

Battery energy storage is not an accessory to this project. It is a principal operational component. It is fundamental to how FLEX is apparently supposed to function, how grid interaction is supposed to work, and how resilience and peak‑load management are supposed to be achieved. Yet it has been presented in a way that minimizes its role, which raises serious questions about transparency and completeness, especially if this yet-to-be-proven technology strategy fails to perform as needed and the developer decides to “FLEX” into diesel backup generators, which the Township indicated is another simple procedural process.

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When core elements of a project are downplayed, soft‑pedaled, or wrapped in overly optimistic studies, it shouldn't inspire confidence. It signals that unresolved risks are being reframed as future intentions. That's not a responsible basis for approving an industrial facility of this magnitude, especially when the long‑term exposure will fall on the Township, not the developer.

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And that’s the bigger issue that hasn’t been thoroughly discussed and it’s the one every resident, board member, and local business owner should be focused on. Because, unlike most industries, technology is not evolutionary.

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It’s revolutionary.

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It reinvents itself in short, violent cycles. What “computer processing” and “data center” meant in 1992 is not just different from what it means today, it is completely unrecognizable.

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And that matters, because the Township is not being asked to approve a modest, office‑style data facility. It's being asked to rubberstamp a 1.8 MILLION square foot hyperscale industrial campus, built around technology that has not yet been deployed at this scale, by a company that has not yet successfully constructed an operational data center of this type, in the middle of our township, nestled between homes and an elementary school.

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Remember, this is not only a “first of its kind” for all the parties involved. It’s a development several times larger than any physical structure that has ever been built in this Township.

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“This has been an approved use since 1992” is a specious justification that exploits a vague zoning grey area. In every other industrial construction over 100,000 sq ft there is a requirement for public hearing and board approval. A conceptual language loophole is being leveraged by Verrus and Walbridge to cram a modern hyperscale industrial facility into zoning rules that were never designed for anything remotely like this.

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Just because computers exist in a building, and just because computers perform “processing,” does not mean the Township ever intended that a 1992 definition of a data center would be used to justify a 1.8 million square foot, utility‑intensive, purpose‑built industrial campus in 2026. Unless of course the township wants to restrict the data center connectivity to a T1 or ISDN data connection.

To understand how upside down this is, you have to understand what the Data Center landscape looked like in 1992. A normal mid‑sized corporate data center might take up 3,000 square feet. Even the largest data centers imaginable at the time were measured in tens of thousands of square feet, not millions.

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And that’s where the real risk lies. Obsolescence.

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Today, a modern smartphone carries more raw processing power than an entire mid‑sized data center could deliver in the early 90s.

That’s right, your cell-phone has significantly more raw processing power than a 1992 data center.

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In just 30 years, the physical footprint of computing collapsed from an office building full of servers and huge teams of support personnel, to a small rectangle of glass you carry in your pocket and lose between your sofa cushions.

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And hyperscale data centers aren't just bigger server rooms, they are industrial‑scale energy machines. The real footprint is not the servers. It is the substation. The battery systems. The cooling towers. The transmission lines. The nonstop mechanical infrastructure required to feed dense compute at all costs. It’s an industrial backbone that rivals a small city.

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Using a 1992 zoning definition to approve a 2026 hyperscale facility is like using maritime law to regulate a spaceport. Some of the terminology overlaps. But the practical reality does not.

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And this is where the Township’s risk becomes unavoidable.

Technology doesn’t age gracefully.
It doesn’t become charming or reusable.
It becomes obsolete.

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Data center designs become economically outdated in 10 to 15 years, sometimes faster. New chips. New cooling. New density. New power economics. New network architectures. New transmission methodologies.

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Tech companies follow efficiency. They follow incentives. And they quickly and easily move on.

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What towns are left with is a massive, purpose‑built industrial structure that is extremely difficult to repurpose. With substations baked into the site and cooling infrastructure sized for a small city.

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Their layouts are bonkers and make no sense for anything else, which is how communities end up with zombie facilities.

Still standing.
Still technically owned.
But economically dead.

No jobs.
No meaningful activity.
No easy path to redevelopment.

Just a massive concrete reminder of yesterday’s technology.

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If this project is truly as stable, long‑term economically beneficial and safe, as promised, then binding financial guarantees should be easy:

• Surety bonds.

• Guarantees.

• Letters of credit.

• Escrowed decommissioning and remediation funds.

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Real money. Third‑party backing. Callable if operations stop, shrink, fail to deliver what was promised, or create safety and environmental impacts we have been told are non-issues.

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Because approving a purpose‑built, hyperscale industrial campus using more poured concrete than all the homes in the township under zoning logic written before most people had an email address isn't prudent governance.

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Technology evolves exponentially.
Zoning does not.

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And if Lyon Township insists on using 34‑year‑old definitions to approve 21st‑century industrial infrastructure, then it owes residents iron‑clad financial protection for when, not if, this facility becomes obsolete.

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Progress is fast.
Obsolescence is faster.

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Taxpayers should not be the ones left holding the bill because our township cannot keep up with modern zoning standards.