Pinal County AZ Rejects the 3,300-Acre La Osa Data Center 4-1 Even After an 80% Scale-Back and Self-Imposed Water Limits

Pinal County supervisors voted 4-1 on August 26, 2026 to reject Vermaland’s proposed La Osa data center campus south of Eloy — a 3,300-acre site that would have been the largest data center project in Arizona.

What makes this the useful case is that the developer had already conceded almost everything. Vermaland cut the project from 59 buildings and two gas-fired power plants to 11 buildings and one — roughly an 80% reduction — and pledged self-imposed limits on water use. The county rejected it anyway.

Supervisor Jeff Serdy gave the reason without dressing it up: “When 90% of the people are against it, I’m going to vote the will of the people.”

That is a different mechanism from everything else in this lane. The moratoria this timeline records — Dougherty, Walker, Hall, Levy, Pierce — are procedural: a county pauses because it lacks the rules or the information to decide. Pinal had a specific application, an amended one, with concessions on the two constraints counties most often say they cannot get. It decided on the merits and said no. Residents’ concerns were water, air quality, noise, wildlife, and property values.

The concession pattern is worth naming. An 80% scale-back is a large move, and it reframes what a data-center negotiation is: the opening proposal functions as an anchor, and the “concession” returns to something nearer what the county might have accepted first. A county that treats the amended proposal as a victory has been moved from its own baseline. Pinal did not, and the vote suggests the scale-back was read as evidence the original was unreasonable rather than as good faith.

Set this beside Barber County, Kansas, which approved Google’s Project Helium four days later with written terms on taxes, water, and noise. Two rural counties, two weeks, opposite outcomes — and the difference is not the presence or absence of concessions but whether the county’s own residents were persuaded. Barber’s chairman said the county would “continue to die” without it; Pinal’s said 90% of people were against.

Arizona is also where this corpus records the Surprise ICE warehouse environmental-review fight. The state is absorbing both buildouts at once, in the same counties, competing for the same water.

Sourcing note. The 4-1 vote, the August 26 date, the 3,300-acre size, the Eloy location, the 59-to-11 building and two-to-one power plant scale-back, the self-imposed water limits, and the enumerated resident concerns are carried by KJZZ, with AZFamily and KTAR corroborating the rejection and the concessions. Serdy’s quote is from AZFamily’s September 8 follow-up, not from the meeting coverage. The “90%” in his quote is his own characterization of public sentiment, not a measured figure — no survey or count is cited, and it should never be reproduced as a statistic. The 80% reduction is the reporting’s arithmetic on the building counts, and the ordinance and staff report were not read. A detention “heat score” for the county appeared in the capture’s enrichment metadata and is not carried — it is an internal scoring artifact, not a sourced fact, and is unrelated to this vote. No tier-1 outlet covering this was found.