Marana split over its data center. The slate that fought it still came up short.
Voters nearly divided down the middle on the $5 billion Luckett Road project — proof of how contentious it has become — but the mayor and the council members who approved it all kept their seats.
For months, the fight over a massive data center rising from Marana's farmland was supposed to get its verdict on July 21.
Residents had tried to put the project directly on the ballot; the town clerk rejected their petitions and a court upheld that decision in May, closing off a public vote. That left the town council election as the only place left to register an opinion. In May, The New York Times — which traveled to Marana to chronicle how a data center and a proposed immigration detention facility had convulsed a town of 60,000 — described the race as "a de facto referendum on the project and the leaders who have supported it."
The referendum is now in. And its answer is two things at once: Marana is genuinely, closely divided over the data center — and the slate that ran to stop it still lost almost everything it was reaching for.
In preliminary, unofficial results from Pima County — the county's latest count as of early Wednesday, with 99.2 percent of precincts reporting — Mayor Jon Post, who championed the project, defeated challenger Greg Johnsen by about 54 percent to 46 percent. In the four-seat council race, the three incumbents who were on the council when it approved the rezoning — Herb Kai, Teri Murphy and John Officer — took the top three spots and won new terms. The fourth and final seat went to Jackie McGuire, the only member of the anti-data-center "Marana for the People" slate to prevail. Her two slate-mates, Sue Ritz and Julie Prince, fell short. Under Arizona's majority rule for town elections, the results settle the seats outright; there is no November runoff.
A town that split almost evenly
That the establishment won should not be mistaken for consensus. By nearly every measure, the vote was close.
Post's eight-point win was the widest margin of the night, and it was still a minority of the town that dissented. In the council race, the three anti-data-center candidates together drew about 48 percent of the votes cast for the six named contenders; the three incumbents drew about 52 percent. Write-in candidates — including former councilwoman Jackie Craig, who had taken a wait-and-see position — pulled roughly 9 percent more, a sizable "none of the above."
The division held across the map. In the mayor's race, the cleanest one-vote-per-voter measure, Johnsen carried six of the town's thirteen in-town precincts to Post's seven. There was no single pocket of opposition; the discontent was spread across the town, not concentrated in one corner of it.
For an issue that a year ago barely registered, that is the story in itself. "It's a bigger issue for people than their parties," McGuire told the Times in the spring, describing door-knocking conversations that opened with residents asking what she thought of "this stupid data center." Ritz, an engineer who has lived in Marana two decades, framed the mood to the paper as one thing after another: "Detention centers, data centers, what's next?"
The rest of the slate was just as plain. Reporting on a July candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters, Arizona Public Media said Greg Johnsen, the challenger for mayor, did not consider a large-scale data center a good fit for Marana, and quoted Julie Prince, running for council, saying she did not "see a lot of benefit for the town of Marana from that project" and wanted to "slow it down a little bit." Ritz, at the same forum, had called for a moratorium until the impacts could be studied.
Why a near-even vote produced a lopsided result
If the town was split roughly in half, why did the opposition end up with a single council seat?
The answer is arithmetic more than persuasion. Marana elects its council at large, and voters cast up to four votes each for a single pool of candidates; the top four finishers win. A cohesive minority — even one approaching half the electorate — can be shut out of most seats if the majority's votes hold together and its own support is spread across several candidates. That is close to what happened. The three incumbents finished first, second and third. McGuire slipped into the fourth and final seat, edging Ritz by roughly 430 votes with nearly all precincts counted. The reform coalition won something near half the vote and one seat in four.
How it got here
The council approved the rezoning that made the project possible on Jan. 6, voting 6–0 after hours of testimony from more than 50 residents. Councilman Herb Kai did not attend or vote, having declared a conflict of interest: his family trust owns the southern of the two parcels involved. The northern parcel belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The developer, Beale Infrastructure — managed by the private-credit firm Blue Owl Capital, and the same company behind the Project Blue data center that Tucson's City Council rejected last year — has pitched the roughly 600-acre "Luckett Road" campus as a $5 billion investment that would generate on the order of $150 million in tax revenue over a decade, thousands of construction jobs and about 400 permanent ones. Beale has pledged that its cooling systems will not draw local water.
What it will draw is power. Each of the project's two campuses could use up to 750 megawatts at full capacity — as much as 1,500 megawatts combined, Beale representatives told the town, more electricity than most power plants in Arizona generate. The northern campus would be served by the Trico Electric Cooperative and the southern by Tucson Electric Power, which is building new transmission lines and substations to carry the load. Opponents who packed the January meeting warned about energy costs, strain on the grid, and noise and emissions from backup generators. They booed when the vote was called.
The town's leaders framed it as a matter of survival for the local economy. "We need jobs," Post told the Times. "We want to let people know that Marana is open for business." Officer, one of the returning incumbents, has said the project would be "great for schools" and the fire department.
What the result means
Read narrowly, the outcome is a win for the people who brought the data center to Marana: the mayor holds his office, and the council that approved the rezoning returns nearly intact, now with one skeptic — McGuire — at the table.
Read more carefully, it is a warning as much as a mandate. An at-large election flattered the incumbents' seat count; the underlying vote was close to even, and a project its own developer's executive conceded was "potentially scary" now moves forward in a town where something like half of the voters who turned out wanted it stopped or slowed. Whether that division fades once construction begins, or hardens into the next election, is the open question the certified results won't answer.