St. Louis County leaders blasted for signing data center-related NDAs

DULUTH – Several St. Louis County commissioners are under fire from constituents for signing nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) related to a massive Hermantown data center proposed by an unknown company.

Commissioner Ashley Grimm attempted to raise the issue at Tuesday’s board meeting but couldn’t get a second motion to bring it to discussion and to vote on a proposed ban on signing such agreements.

Board Chair Annie Harala and commissioners Keith Musolf and Keith Nelson all signed NDAs with Mortenson, the construction and engineering company exploring development of a 1.8 million-square-foot data center, the county said. Hermantown city officials for months had declined to say what the project was, having also signed NDAs. That it would be a proposed data center was first reported in September by the Minnesota Star Tribune after obtaining public records it requested last spring.

Signing NDAs isn’t transparent, Grimm said, noting she was “ashamed of what just happened here.”

The proposed ban would have “stopped politicians, elected officials, from being able to start building political will months or years before the public has any chance to give any input, for the billionaire class, no less,” she said.

Several people spoke at the meeting in support of the ban.

Hermantown resident Bob Kohlmeier said he was “losing faith and trust in government over these NDAs.”

But when he asked the company what the project would be, the company wouldn’t tell him.

“I put 50 years into this” property, Kohlmeier said. “We planted 10,000 pine trees on our property, and we’re investing in the land, and now no one will talk to us? I feel betrayed by these NDAs.”

Musolf, who represents Hermantown, said he doesn’t know any more about the project than what’s been publicly released, despite signing the agreement.

But, he said, “if actions are made to stop some of these things, we might as well hang a sign in St. Louis County that says we’re not here for business. Your taxes will continue to go up.”

Harala, who wasn’t at the meeting because of a family obligation, said in a statement that she signed the agreement “because of the county’s role in growing the economic viability of our region.

Sometimes that happens before a company has decided to build in the region and before the public governance process begins, she said.

City officials elsewhere in Minnesota have signed NDAs related to data centers.

A data center researcher told the Star Tribune earlier this year that NDAs are typical when it comes to such projects.

“Sometimes the NDA is to minimize the information the community knows, so that the activists can be slowed down,” said Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University in Germany who researched the ecological impacts of data centers while earning his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But sometimes, cities and developers come to these agreements to safeguard data centers from security breaches and conceal plans from competitors, he said.