Neutral facilitation for contested infrastructure
Trust is earned, never given.
CommonWatts runs honest, well-designed community processes around proposed data centers. We are not for or against these projects. We are for decisions communities can live with and developers can build on.
Where we stand
We do not represent developers. We do not represent communities. We run the process between them.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A firm that argues for whoever hired it produces a better argument. A firm that runs a fair process produces a better decision — one that survives the vote, the lawsuit, the next election, and the twenty years of operation that follow.
Either side can engage us. Neither side can buy the conclusion. Our fee is never contingent on approval, denial, or any substantive outcome, and our terms are published before we take the work.
Know What’s Still Open
Neutral facilitation for local governments and residents facing a proposed data center.
- Establish what is actually still open
- Standards adopted before an application arrives
- Technical capacity, funded by the applicant
- Conditions that outlive the ribbon-cutting
Approvals That Actually Hold
Neutral facilitation for applicants who need an approval that survives its first year.
- Pre-announcement review before the window closes
- Joint fact-finding, not dueling studies
- Contingent commitments instead of contested projections
- Fees that never move with the outcome
The four tenets
Everything we do runs on four principles. They are simple to state and expensive to hold, which is the point.
Listen first
Lead with curiosity. What is the history of this community? How does it see itself? What does it want for its future? Who are the voices it has actually chosen to represent it — which is rarely the same as who is loudest at the microphone?
Be an open book
You should know us as well as we know you. Why we took the work, how we see our role, what we are trying to produce, who is paying us and how much. All of it published before the first public meeting, not disclosed when asked.
Put in the work
Good results don’t come without serious effort. The complex only becomes simple when every stone has been unturned. Understanding the brass tacks is what determines the art of the possible — and most of the value we add is unglamorous homework nobody else has done.
Be helpful
Go above and beyond what’s expected. Gather information, chase down the unknowns, and connect the dots so people can make good decisions for themselves.
What we do
On neutrality
We don’t represent developers. We don’t represent communities. We run the process between them — on published terms, with no fee contingent on any outcome.
On the work
Most of what we do is unglamorous homework nobody else has done: finding out who actually decides what, which numbers hold up, and what a community was never asked.
On the standard
At the end of our process, both sides should feel they were heard, respected, and able to work toward an outcome most thought was fair and thoughtful. That’s the whole measure.
Numbers
Across the data center projects that have stalled since 2024, the pattern is not that communities were told too little. It is that they were told too late, by someone with an obvious stake in the answer, about decisions that had already been made. That is a fixable problem, and fixing it is what we do.
The window in which a project’s political trajectory is set. It closes long before your first hearing.
A 2,100-acre Virginia campus, approved after a 27-hour hearing, then vacated on appeal. The courts never reached the merits.
Approvals have also been reversed by courts, successor boards, referenda and recall. The vote is not the end of the process.
Tracker data puts the national count at roughly 321, led by New Jersey (72), Ohio (35), Michigan (35) and Georgia (28).
The cost of a bad process is not one project. It is the local legal regime for the next decade, plus the litigation, plus the successor board that inherits the grievance.
Insights
Notes on the work, published as we go.
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From Red Carpet to Pitchforks
Six years ago communities competed for these projects. Now they organize against them. Scale explains part of it — and not the most important part.
Start a conversation
Tell us where the project is, who is involved, and what stage it has reached. A short conversation is usually enough to work out whether this is the kind of thing we do.
info@commonwatts.com