North Dakota lawmakers debate data center NDAs

A local government signs an NDA with a company building a massive industrial facility next door to actual voters, and the people footing the water bills and living next to the substations aren't allowed to know the terms. That's the situation in Harwood, and it's why lawmakers are hauling themselves back to Bismarck for a special session. Good. This is exactly the kind of thing a special session should be for.

Data centers are the new gold rush, and every state wants the tax base and the construction jobs that come with them. Fine. But the trade-off North Dakota keeps making is that the companies get secrecy and local officials get to sign it away on the public's behalf. Nobody elected a county commissioner to keep secrets from the county. If a project is good enough to build, it's good enough to defend in the open, water usage, tax abatements, land deals and all.

The instinct to protect "proprietary" corporate information is understandable, up to a point. Companies don't want competitors seeing their blueprints. But there's a difference between protecting trade secrets and shielding basic facts about how much power and water a facility will draw from a rural county that might not have much of either to spare. When the NDA becomes a tool for keeping constituents in the dark about decisions made in their name, it stops being a business protection and starts being a governance problem.

This bill won't kill data center development in North Dakota, and it shouldn't try to. What it should do is force local officials to negotiate like they work for the town, not the corporation. If a company walks away because it can't get total secrecy, that tells you something about the deal it was offering in the first place.