Today's throughline: three stories about accountability — who can demand it, who can foreclose it, and the windows that open and close. Virginia residents won theirs in court — and a Virginia public university just put a number on how often localities sign agreements that keep developer dealings out of public view. Indiana residents have three weeks to demand theirs at a council vote that has not yet surfaced peak load, water demand, or permanent headcount for a 1,200-acre hyperscale campus next door to one already under construction. And Louisiana's legislature, acting unanimously in committee, is moving to close the courthouse door on an entire category of climate-liability lawsuits before any of those cases has produced a verdict.
The Virginia Court of Appeals' March 31 ruling voiding the Prince William Digital Gateway rezonings is now final at the local level — Prince William County passed an April 7 resolution and an April 14 unanimous formal vote not to appeal — and a separate UMW research finding documents that 25 of 31 Virginia localities with proposed or existing data centers have signed non-disclosure agreements with developers, roughly 80%. The court ruling is generally applicable case law on data-center rezoning procedure: a locality must follow its published advertising rules even when residents knew about and attended the hearing. The UMW finding, by Eric Bonds and student Viktor Newby, converts what had been anecdote into measured practice. Together they make Virginia the empirical reference state for any other jurisdiction writing its first comprehensive data-center law. Read the full story →
Microsoft has filed for a second 1,200-acre data-center campus on farmland directly adjacent to the LaPorte, Indiana site it is already building — and the LaPorte city council has scheduled the annexation vote for May 18, with peak load, water demand, and permanent on-site headcount for the second campus all not yet on the public record. Councilman Tim Franke is on record arguing the city will likely never be in such a favorable position again. Indiana's annexation process gives the council formal authority to require disclosures as a condition of approval — but only before the vote, not after. The May 18 window is what residents have. The first campus's actual property-tax-abatement schedule, available via Indiana APRA, is the public-record check on Franke's “tens of millions” projection for the second. Read the full story →
The Louisiana House Committee on Natural Resources and Environment cleared HB 804, the “Louisiana Energy Protection Act,” unanimously on April 24 — a bill that would prohibit anyone from suing oil and gas companies for damages, injuries, or deaths attributed to pollution-driven climate change. Sponsor Rep. Brett Geymann said the language is drawn in part from the federal Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026 (Cruz-TX, Hageman-WY); similar laws have already passed in Utah and Tennessee. The reference case the bill is built to foreclose is in Washington state — the death of Juliana Leon, 65, of heat stroke during the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome, with seven fossil-fuel companies named as defendants. The unanimous bipartisan vote signals where the political center has settled in Louisiana on fossil-fuel liability. Whether the bill conflicts with Article IX, Section 1 of the Louisiana Constitution — which makes the state's natural resources a public trust the state has a constitutional duty to protect — is a question Louisiana courts have not yet ruled on. Read the full story →