Washtenaw County, Michigan

Section 1

The verdict

Everything that follows is evidence for this page. If you read nothing else, read the table.

Section 2

What this county has been through

A county that has been burned on water does not evaluate a water commitment neutrally. This section is the record of contested industrial and environmental events over roughly fifteen years, because those are what set a county's reflexes.

Gelman: the defining contamination event

Every water promise made to a Washtenaw audience is heard against this one.

• 1963-1986: Gelman Sciences discharged 1,4-dioxane wastewater at its Wagner Road facility in Scio Township, through soil, surface water, seepage lagoons and deep-well injection.
• 1988: the Michigan Attorney General sued. 1992: consent judgment entered. Amended in 1996, 1999 and 2011.
• 2001: Ann Arbor closed the Montgomery Wellfield, a municipal drinking water well. Private wells were abandoned and residents connected to municipal supply.
• 2020: Ann Arbor built a sentinel well monitoring program at city expense. It still does not treat source water for dioxane; there is no installed barrier.
• 12 March 2026: the EPA added Gelman to the Superfund National Priorities List. The plume runs roughly three miles by one mile and has migrated into aquifers that supply drinking water.

Arbor Hills Landfill, Salem Township

The county's live nuisance case, and the reason "permitted" does not reassure anyone here.

• Ownership ran BFI/Allied → Advanced Disposal → GFL Environmental, which took control 30 October 2020 as a divestiture from the Waste Management-Advanced Disposal merger.
• 2016-2018: eight EGLE violation notices; EPA notices September 2016; an EPA administrative consent order 4 May 2017 and a consent agreement 28 September 2018.
• 2016-2017: class action Lawrence and Salmon v. Advanced Disposal, Wayne County Circuit Court No. 16-005209-NZ. Settled for $750,000 to the class plus roughly $5m in odor-reduction works, no admission of liability.
• 2019: designated a PFAS site; a hydrogen sulfide monitor installed at Ridge Wood Elementary.
• 15 December 2021: Clean Air Act consent decree against the landfill gas plant, $750,000 penalty. 10 November 2021: Northville Township sued.
• March 2022: consent judgment with the Attorney General and EGLE: $355,109 penalty plus $1,955,000 in supplemental environmental projects, and a real-time methane and hydrogen sulfide monitoring network.
• May 2023: Part 115 administrative consent order, including mandatory PFAS sampling.
• July 2023: Cell 6 opened. Odor complaints went from 190 in the first half of 2023 to 769 in the second. EGLE documented 31 areas exceeding state methane limits.
• 2026: GFL seeks to expand onto ~90 acres it already owns. The Washtenaw County Environmental Council voted unanimously against in January 2026; Senate Bill 818 would bar landfill construction within a mile of homes. The county committee vote has slipped toward 2027.

The Huron River

Two contamination events in five years, neither of which touched a drinking water supply. Which is why the river is a mobilizing word here rather than a scenic one.

• 2018: PFAS "do not eat the fish" advisory below the Norton Creek confluence, traced to Tribar Technologies via the Wixom treatment plant. A fish consumption advisory, not a drinking water one.
• August 2022: hexavalent chromium release from the same company. Feared at 4,100+ lbs; the actual release was under 20 lbs, with 3 of 144 samples showing detectable chromium at safe levels. No-contact advisory lifted 12 August 2022.

The direct-democracy record

Unusually active, and freshly exercised.

Read the same-day results together and you have the electorate's actual shape: it will tax itself to preserve farmland and to keep the fire service running, and it will refuse to pay more than that. It is conservation-minded and tax-sensitive at once, and it distinguishes cleanly between the two questions.

What the jurisdictions did afterwards

This is the part that matters most, because it tells you what the county already believes it learned.

• 17 Sept 2025: County Board resolution urging caution: water and energy reporting, environmental impact statements, setbacks, noise studies, and at least two accessible public hearings. It expressly acknowledges that townships, not the county, hold zoning authority.
• 1 Oct 2025: the county Resiliency Office reported three active projects and at least seven further negotiations underway, and named the core problem: much of the work "happens in the blind because this is considered restricted information."
• Late 2025: a Preliminary Toolkit for Municipal Data Center Planning, recommending data-center-specific zoning provisions, PUDs, and community benefits agreements.
• 18 Mar 2026: County Board resolution supporting local moratoria.
• 22 Apr 2026: YCUA imposed a 12-month moratorium on water and sewer service to data centers.
• 18 Aug 2026: Ypsilanti Township imposed a 180-day moratorium on the electric infrastructure that would serve one.

Not one Washtenaw jurisdiction has adopted a data center zoning ordinance. Every instrument deployed in eighteen months delays. Resolution, moratorium, utility refusal: none of them decides.

Section 3

The decision machinery

Who actually votes, and what happens when they cannot.

The county has no zoning authority

Michigan Zoning Enabling Act, MCL 125.3209:

Except as otherwise provided under this act, a township that has enacted a zoning ordinance under this act is not subject to an ordinance, rule, or regulation adopted by a county under this act.MCL 125.3209, PA 110 of 2006

It is not concurrent, not an overlay, not a floor. County zoning in Michigan is a gap-filler for unzoned townships only. Washtenaw County has no county zoning ordinance and all twenty of its townships zone themselves. The Saline litigation proves it in practice. The developer sued the township, and there was no county defendant and no county overlay to attack.

What the county does hold is friction, not veto: soil erosion and sedimentation control under Part 91 of NREPA, county drain permits under the Drain Code, road approach permits through a separately constituted Road Commission, and septic and well permitting through Environmental Health. Air permits, wetlands and large water withdrawals sit with the state.

Board of Commissioners: nine members, all single-member districts, currently nine Democrats. Chair Katie Scott; Vice Chair Justin D. Hodge, whose district contains Augusta Township. Shannon Beeman holds the Saline Township district. Terms are four years following PA 122 of 2021, confirmed by the absence of any commissioner race on the August 2026 primary ballot. Next election November 2028.

The referendum mechanism: MCL 125.3402

The most important instrument in this county, so the mechanics matter precisely.

1. Notice of intent within 7 days of publication of the ordinance. Miss this and the right is gone regardless of how many signatures could have been gathered. This is the most common failure point.
2. Petition within 30 days of publication, not 30 days from the notice, so step one eats the clock.
3. 15% of the total vote cast in the jurisdiction for all gubernatorial candidates at the last election at which a governor was elected.
4. Verified by the township clerk, under the Michigan Election Law.
5. Filing the notice suspends the ordinance. A challenged rezoning is legally inert until the window lapses, the petition fails, or voters approve it.
6. If the referendum succeeds, the ordinance never takes effect and the prior zoning stands.

Referendable: rezonings, including conditional rezonings under MCL 125.3405. Not referendable: special land use permits and site plan approvals, which are administrative applications of standards already in the ordinance and are reviewable by the zoning board of appeals and circuit court instead. Unverified at case level. The statutory argument is strong and reflects settled practice, but no controlling published Michigan appellate decision was located.

The escalation field

Where the fight goes when the county has no veto. In Washtenaw the answer differs by township, and all three answers are instructive.

Augusta: the veto existed and the voters exercised it. The planning commission recommended denial 5-1 on 28 May 2025. The board approved anyway, 7-0, on 22 July 2025, conditionally rezoning 522.2 acres. Residents gathered 957 signatures in 35 days against a 561 requirement. Voters reversed the board 89.5-10.4 on 4 August 2026 and the parcels reverted. The fight stayed local and ended. A board overruling its own planning commission is the divergence signal this section exists to catch, and it appeared twelve months before the reversal.

Saline: the veto existed, was exercised, and was circumvented. The board denied the rezoning 4-1 on 10 September 2025. Two days later Related Digital and the landowners sued alleging exclusionary zoning: on the theory that the township unreasonably barred a legitimate use because it had no industrial district at all. In October the township settled by consent judgment rather than litigate. The project proceeds by court-approved agreement instead of a zoning amendment, so no ordinance was published and the referendum right never attached. Construction began in November 2025, ahead of a final air permit, under a state construction waiver. A resident's motion to intervene, alleging Open Meetings Act violations, was denied in February 2026 on timeliness grounds.

Ypsilanti: there is no local veto to begin with. The applicant is the University of Michigan. Article VIII, §5 of the Michigan Constitution gives the Regents "general supervision of its institution," and U-M's own published design standards state the position plainly: "It is exempt from local building and zoning ordinances." U-M bought roughly 144 acres on Textile Road outright, closing 18 March 2026. There is no application, no site plan, no permit and no township approval to grant or deny.

The township has not attempted to assert zoning jurisdiction. It has used the levers it holds: three resolutions, a request that the water authority impose a moratorium, and a moratorium of its own on the electric infrastructure that would serve the site. Its attorney: "The township has a say-so on how power transmission will reach U-M's data center."

No state preemption pathway

PA 233 of 2023 gave the Michigan Public Service Commission override authority over local zoning for generation and storage only: solar at 50 MW, wind at 100 MW, storage at 50 MW and 200 MWh. It does not cover data centers or any other electrical load.

So a data center developer cannot go to the Commission to override a township denial the way a solar developer can. That asymmetry is why Saline's developer used exclusionary-zoning litigation instead. Removing the administrative override does not make the fight disappear. It moves it to a venue with no public participation at all.

Section 4

Water

The highest-scoring concern category across every market scored to date. In Washtenaw the three projects have three completely different water stories, and the press has repeatedly mixed them.

The closed-loop test

Across the markets scored to date, an early written closed-loop commitment correlates with survival. It is one of the few concessions that is specific, checkable and cheap to state early. Washtenaw is the strongest evidence for that anywhere in the index, because all three variants occur simultaneously under one electorate.

Saline: the strongest commitment, in the most binding instrument, at the lowest volume. Consent judgment §3(g) limits water use to restrooms and domestic uses, humidity, landscaping, fire protection and general maintenance, and expressly prohibits high-water-use evaporative cooling. That is not a press release. It is a term in a court-entered judgment, enforceable by a party.

Ypsilanti: no commitment, and the language moved the wrong way. Every university source uses evaluative verbs, never binding ones:

That August shift is material. Open-loop is evaporative: it consumes rather than recirculates. The language now keeps alive an option the earlier phrasing appeared to exclude.

What U-M has committed to is real but narrower than it reads: the facility "will not draw water from or discharge water into the Huron River, nor will it use local groundwater," and municipal water "will be purchased through" the utilities authority. Those commitments constrain the source, not the volume and not the consumption rate. Detroit River water can still be evaporated at scale without violating a single one of them.

Augusta: the largest draw against the smallest allocation. Augusta holds a 0.80 MGD wastewater allocation. Every published estimate of the project's demand exceeds the township's entire contractual allocation.

The system, and the numbers that need care

YCUA was formed in 1974 by merger of the City and Township of Ypsilanti water and sewer departments and is jointly owned by them. Five commissioners. Two of them are Ypsilanti Township officials, including the Township Supervisor. It is not a conflict finding; it is how the authority was built. But it does mean the moratorium described below was not an arm's-length regulatory act.

Water is purchased wholesale from the Great Lakes Water Authority, sourced from the Detroit River, under a contract running to 2038. YCUA's own well-based plants went out of service in the 1990s.

Wastewater: design capacity 51.2 MGD, current average daily flow 27.5 MGD, and a maximum daily flow last year of 59.1 MG. Peak day already exceeds design average. Contractual allocations total exactly 51.20 MGD, so on paper there is zero unallocated headroom. Officials cite roughly 4-5 MGD available in press coverage; that is not 51.2 minus allocations, and no source reconciles the two. Unreconciled. Treat it as wet-weather constrained headroom, and say which number you mean.

The NPDES permit expires 1 October 2026 and its renewal terms could independently constrain capacity. The technical crux of the whole dispute is a spread nobody has tested: YCUA projected data centers return about 50% of water to the sewer; industry estimates 20-30%.

The moratorium, and why it is exposed

YCUA Resolution 26-08, adopted unanimously 22 April 2026, bars the delivery, commitment, reservation, extension or approval of water and sewer service to data centers and AI computing facilities, including will-serve letters. Not less than twelve months, with six studies required before lifting.

U-M's counsel wrote to commissioners before the vote arguing the resolution "would be legally invalid because, among other defects, it would be unrelated to any documented utility or public health needs," and was "discriminatory in its singling out of data centers." The board adopted it anyway.

Watershed and withdrawal law

The Huron River Watershed Council has a formal, published position on data centers, unusual and useful to know before approaching this county. It says data centers should not be approved in the watershed unless the developer proves no net increase in water stress, stormwater and hydrology mitigation, wetland avoidance, and that electricity use will not increase fossil generation, plus a commitment to preserve three acres for every acre developed and to build renewable capacity of at least 120% of maximum load. It opposed the 2024 state tax exemptions and files project-specific permit comments.

Conservation instruments exist but none restricts withdrawal. The Ann Arbor Greenbelt has protected roughly 7,600 acres of farmland since 2004; the newer Bluebelt covers the watershed upstream of Ann Arbor's intake. Both are acquisition and easement programs.

Under Part 327 of NREPA, registration is required above 100,000 gpd of capacity and a permit above 2 million gpd. The applicability point matters: projects buying finished municipal water never trigger Part 327. The utility's intake is the registered withdrawal. Only Saline, with its own production well, is a candidate, and its registration status is unconfirmed.

Section 5

Power, rates and who pays

DTE Electric, investor-owned, regulated by a Commission whose members are appointed rather than elected.

Rate history

Every base-rate order from 2020 to 2026 was an increase. The Commission has held return on equity at 9.9% in every case since 2020, rejecting the utility's request each time. The Attorney General states the Commission has approved over $1 billion in combined annual revenue increases since 2020.

The cadence is the political story. DTE noticed its next case on 24 February 2026, five days after the previous increase took effect.

It's astonishing that our current system allows DTE to announce their next rate hike case less than one week after locking in a $242 million rate hike.Attorney General Dana Nessel

The US average residential price was 18.34¢/kWh in June 2026, up 5.0% year over year. A Michigan comparison from the same series is pending. Note a genuine measurement dispute: DTE says its residential bills sit in the first quartile nationally, while critics cite rates per kWh. Both can be true, because DTE customers use less power than average. The Commission's own benchmark is 500 kWh a month, not 1,000. Anyone arguing either side without naming the metric is arguing past the other.

The large-load tariff

A third case is instructive. In U-21986, decided 27 August 2026, the Commission ordered Indiana Michigan Power to create a dedicated data center rate class in its next general rate case. And in U-22059, decided the same day, DTE's qualifying large-load customers must be disconnected before other customers in a grid emergency.

Who bears the stranded-cost risk

The Saline contracts, roughly 1,383 MW to an Oracle subsidiary, were approved on 18 December 2025 ex parte, with no contested case, on heavily redacted contracts. Minimum term nineteen years against a standard five.

• Commission and utility: risk sits with DTE shareholders. A commissioner: "if the safeguards included in the contract fail to protect customers, those risks will fall on DTE."
• Attorney General: the protection is only a written representation, unverified, on redacted contracts, and the wording changed. The Commission required a representation that the customer's payments would cover its costs; the utility's acceptance letter instead said "aggregate revenues … will cover the costs to serve them," which the AG argues permits near-term cost-shifting.
• Consumer and environmental intervenors: a structural mismatch: 15 to 20 year contracts against 30-plus year depreciation lives on the generation built to serve them.

The Attorney General petitioned for rehearing on 9 January 2026, moved to reopen on 5 February, was denied on both on 27 March, and appealed to the Michigan Court of Appeals on 17 April 2026. Briefed 7 August. Still pending.

The manufacturing question

Large-load tariffs apply to industrial customers too, and existing manufacturers are a lobbying constituency no sentiment measure captures. In Michigan they are organized, and they were shut out.

ABATE, the Association of Businesses Advocating Tariff Equity, petitioned to intervene in the Saline case on 19 November 2025 and moved for a contested case. Its intervention was formally denied on 27 March 2026, alongside the Attorney General's. Its substantive arguments never entered the record.

Those arguments are on the record in the Indiana Michigan Power case: data centers are categorically different from existing industrial customers, running above 90% load factor against ordinary industrial load factors and forcing generation, transmission and distribution upgrades that customers below 50 MW never trigger. Blending them into one class distorts cost-of-service and risks other classes subsidizing them. The remedy sought is a separate standalone rate class, with existing large-power tariffs closed to new large loads. The Commission substantially granted it in August 2026.

Regulator and generation

The Michigan Public Service Commission has three commissioners, appointed by the Governor with Senate consent, on six-year staggered terms, no more than two of the same party. Chair Dan Scripps (term to 2029), Katherine Peretick (2027), Shaquila Myers (2031). Appointed, not elected: which removes the electoral lever entirely, in contrast to states where commissioners stand for election. Michigan Democrats proposed electing them in March 2026.

On generation: 1,332 MW of storage was approved on 31 March 2026, of which 332 MW directly serves the Saline load, with the customer bearing development costs and DTE owning the assets. DTE has proposed 2,100 MW of new gas in two combined-cycle plants, saying Saline itself needs no additional fossil generation because it is storage-backed. The gas is for the next tranche. Its chief executive: "each additional 1-gigawatt data center could necessitate a new natural gas plant."

DTE reports a 6 GW data center pipeline. The first deal alone grows its electric load by roughly 25%.

Section 6

What has been promised here before

The benefits ledger. Build this once per county and it becomes the most cited section you have, because an unverifiable number costs more than silence.

American Center for Mobility, Willow Run

The public here is being asked to accept job promises for a data center on the same site type, in the same township, from the same promotional apparatus that produced that outcome, and the outcome is documented in the state's own compliance report, not by critics.

The instructive contrast

A 2006 technology office in Ann Arbor promised 1,000 direct jobs in five years plus 1,200 spinoff jobs, backed by a written, performance-contingent state tax credit worth up to $38m over twenty years.

Actual: 163 jobs in the first year, 224 cumulative by the second, roughly 400 at peak. The company claimed only about $800,000 of the credit and then stopped.

The ledger

What the three current projects promised

Saline. The jobs figures, 2,500 union construction, 450 permanent, 1,500 additional community jobs came from the Governor in October 2025 and are press statements. The community benefits, by contrast, are a written court-entered instrument: roughly $14m against a township budget of about $1m, including a $4m farmland preservation trust, $2m community investment fund, $8m for area fire services, 200 acres preserved, 47.5 acres of wetlands under conservation easement, a 55-decibel noise limit, and a prohibition on expansion. It is the strongest enforceable package in the county's history, and it exists only because a developer sued.

Ypsilanti. Roughly 300 construction jobs and 200-plus research positions at around $200,000, plus 30-50 support roles. The township contends the realistic on-site figure is closer to 35. Both sides are technically right: the 200 are researchers who may or may not sit in the township; the ~35 are the jobs the site itself generates. There is no written agreement between the university and the township, and the university pays no property tax, so a $1.25bn facility produces roughly 35 on-site jobs and no local tax base, in a township whose per-capita income is about $36,000 against $53,000 countywide.

Augusta. The developer never publicly stated any jobs number or tax figure, only "quality jobs" and "meaningful tax revenue." The regional economic development organization projected "millions in tax revenue" without figures. The township clerk made the most specific public claim, and it was still unnumbered. No written development agreement appears in any public source.

Section 7

Who organizes here

Civic capacity, not sentiment. Code the neighbor's capability, not the distance. An institution with staff, a mailing list and a communications function is a completely different neighbor from a quiet preserve with no employees.

Measured mobilization speed

Augusta went from a board vote on 22 July 2025 to 957 signatures filed by 26 August, 35 days, against a 561 requirement, and then to an 89.5% referendum win. The Ypsilanti formation went from a December 2024 announcement to monthly assemblies of 50-100 people, township meetings with 80-150 public speakers, and 6,000-plus letters to state officials. That is fast, and it is repeatable.

The five layers

The template that should worry a developer

The county's oldest environmental organization did not merely win campaigns. It ran an anti-sprawl campaign that was instrumental in creating the Ann Arbor Greenbelt, a dedicated thirty-year millage that has since protected 7,600 acres of farmland. That is a land-use fight converted into a permanent, funded institution. It is the most relevant precedent in the county, and it is why the Saline settlement's $4m farmland trust did not have to be invented. It plugs into an existing, staffed, appraisal-capable system.

Note the political economy underneath: Augusta Township is already a greenbelt partner. The county's conservation apparatus and the data center developer were bidding for the same land.

The gaps, which matter as much

• Litigation capacity is supplied externally. The grassroots formations are unincorporated, and no legal personality means no lawsuits, no grants, no staff. A regional defense fund supplies the litigation capability across county lines. That dependency is the single point of failure in the opposition's structure.
• The electoral-pressure actor has not engaged. The state conservation voters' league is the only actor in the set with a political action committee: meaning it could make a yes vote cost an official their seat. It did not appear in any coverage of these fights. That is itself a finding.
• Beneficiaries become stakeholders. Area fire services and school districts are allocated $8m each under the Saline consent judgment, which structurally converts likely opponents into parties with an interest in completion. Worth coding explicitly as a co-optation mechanism.
• Capacity mismatch. Saline Township has a population of 2,277 and an annual budget around $1m. It faced a developer with $16bn in financing. Its 4-1 denial showed will; it could not sustain litigation.

Local media: who actually covers township meetings

Ranked by demonstrated coverage of these specific fights: a public radio station licensed to the regional university is the most consistent, with standing topic pages and an environment segment; a nonprofit environmental outlet produced the deepest reporting on all three projects; a statewide nonprofit runs an incentives-accountability franchise; and a small western-county weekly is the only outlet that directly asked the Augusta developer for jobs and tax numbers and reported the refusal, and now runs a recurring data center column.

The legacy daily is structurally diminished. Its print edition ended in 2009 after 174 years and circulation is now in the single-digit thousands. The county's best accountability record, a gavel-to-gavel civic blog, no longer publishes. That absence is the county's biggest media gap, and it is the pattern to look for in any county: not whether media exists, but whether anyone still sits through a township meeting.

Section 8

The parcels

Per project rather than per county. Who the seller is changes the politics: a government body, a railroad, a family trust and a speculator are four different fights.

Note what the Ypsilanti row shows: the land was already zoned light industrial. Even without the constitutional exemption, there would have been no rezoning, and therefore no referendum. The exemption and the existing zoning independently produce the same result.

Proximity is measured from the parcel boundary, not the centroid, to the nearest school, park, place of worship, hospital, residential subdivision, protected land, watercourse and cemetery. Parcel geometry comes from county GIS services where they exist; the proximity layer comes from a single open dataset applied identically in every county, which is what makes this section comparable across markets rather than merely descriptive.

Section 9

Sentiment

The Local Sentiment Index, where the county has a scored project. "Not scored" is a legitimate entry. Most counties in a pipeline have no public project yet, and Sections 1 through 8 do not need one.

What the digital layer says, and why it is not the answer

Search and social demand in this county belongs decisively to Saline, by roughly ten to one on search volume and twenty-seven to one on social. The Saline project name went from zero searches to roughly a thousand a month in six months, a project name entering public vocabulary in real time. Augusta's demand peaked in August 2025 and declined through its own referendum, producing no search spike at all on the day it won.

The corollary for anyone buying a listening product: in most rural and exurban counties, opposition that will arrive at a hearing with signatures is invisible to every listening tool on the market until it gets there. Washtenaw is the county where that is demonstrable, because one of its three simultaneous fights was loud, one was quiet, and the quiet one won.