RINCON, Ga. – When OpenAI announced plans for a $20 billion data center campus in Effingham County, many residents had the same question: How did a project of this size get this far before the public knew about it? Project Camellia, a planned 1,400-acre data center campus at the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, was announced July 22 and followed by a public information open house the next day. Transparency concerns dominated that meeting, with residents saying they felt blindsided and questioning why there had been no public meetings or votes before the project was announced. “This would have been helpful six months ago,” Rincon resident Diane Kreinbrink said. “Now it seems back-handed. Like they are saying, ‘Suck it up and deal with it.’ Transparency is terrible like they are hiding something.” The answer lies in decisions made over the past two decades — beginning with the Effingham County Industrial Development Authority's purchase of the land in 2006, a 75-year development agreement approved in 2016, longstanding industrial zoning and confidentiality agreements that kept the project out of public view until its announcement. The land that now makes up the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub was first identified by the ECIDA in 2004 and acquired in 2006. The ECIDA purchased the property near Rincon for about $31 million from International Paper after condemning it for industrial development. Over the following years, the authority considered several concepts for the property…
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