Why I Built MuniWatch: A Data Center, a Stolen Trust, and a Fight I Never Asked For
I'll be honest with you. When I first heard that a piece of land near my home had been annexed into the City of Sand Springs, I didn't care.
I'm a live-and-let-live kind of guy. I generally lean libertarian — if a landowner wants to do something with their own property, that's their business, not mine. So when the annexation news trickled out in June of 2025, I shrugged it off. Somebody else's land, somebody else's decision.
Even when I found out the land was slated to be rezoned for a hyperscale data center, I chose to stay out of it for the first week or so. Then I started paying attention to what it was actually going to mean for my friends and neighbors. And the more I dug — into hyperscale data centers, into how this one got annexed, into Oklahoma annexation law — the more something started to smell wrong. Not "I disagree with this" wrong. "Somebody broke the rules and is hoping nobody notices" wrong.
I couldn't sit back and watch my community get railroaded by a city council that had stopped answering to the people who elected it.
The Long Way Home
To understand why I couldn't let this go, you have to understand what that piece of land near my house actually represents.
The rural life we earned, built, and intended to keep — right down to the goats.
I started my adult life in deep poverty and climbed my way out into a career in residential construction project management, selling flooring and managing new-build projects for years, one job at a time, one hard-won promotion at a time. Every bit of it — the late nights, the grinding, the sacrifice — was in service of one goal: getting my family a slice of land out in the country where we could build our dream home. Where my wife and I could raise our kids away from the noise, where my daughter could raise her goats, where we could sit on the porch at night and watch the ducks on the pond in the moonlight under an endless sea of stars you can't see under the city lights.
We got there. We built it. It was the American Dream, executed exactly the way it's supposed to work — earn it, build it, keep it.
Six months after we moved in, our rural life was on track to be destroyed by a city council that saw an opportunity and took it, consequences to the neighbors be damned. That's not a policy disagreement. That's the antithesis of everything the American Dream is supposed to protect. I wasn't going to stand for it, and once I decided to fight, I decided I wasn't going to fight halfway.
Finding Out the Truth
We found out about the annexation right after it happened, back in June 2025, but at the time nobody thought there was anything to be done — there was a widespread belief that once land is inside the "fenceline," the city can annex it and that's simply the end of the conversation. Several of us asked people in city government why the annexation had happened. Every one of them claimed they didn't know. We later found out, through an open records request, that wasn't true. Some of them knew the end purpose at minimum, three months before the annexation and eight months before the rezoning notice went up.
It wasn't until November that the real purpose came out: a rezoning application for a hyperscale data center. That's when I started digging in earnest — not just into data centers, but into Oklahoma Supreme Court precedent on annexation, going back to a 2004 case that laid out exactly the kind of overreach we suspected we were looking at.
On Friday, November 14th, 2025, I spoke to a woman I knew from our community — she happened to be my son's fourth-grade teacher — and laid out what I thought our legal argument could be. She told me another neighbor wanted me at a small meeting of nearby landowners that Sunday, 2:00 p.m., at the volunteer fire station.
Over 400 neighbors packed the first community meeting — on less than a week’s notice.
I spent that weekend thinking through what it would actually take to fight this the right way. Not a bunch of angry neighbors yelling at a podium — a real, credible, organized effort. It would take real fundraising. It would take community trust. And trust meant transparency: a legitimate registered nonprofit, a board of directors, a business bank account, books anyone could ask to see.
When Sunday came, I laid all of that out to the group. Somebody in the room said, "Sounds like you know a lot about this — maybe you should be the one to set it up." So I went home and started drafting bylaws and articles of incorporation. I recruited board members from people at that meeting who had real stakes in the outcome. We held our first board meeting Monday night and adopted our bylaws. I filed the paperwork with the Secretary of State that same night.
By Tuesday morning, we had a website, a Facebook page, a GoFundMe, and an officially registered nonprofit organization — recognized by the State of Oklahoma and on file with the IRS — in time for our very first public community meeting that same night, November 18th, 2025. Over 400 people showed up on less than a week's notice.
That's how Protect Sand Springs Alliance was born. Not out of a plan. Out of necessity, at fire-station speed.
Digging In for the Long Haul
I'll admit — I went into that first City Council meeting with a naive hope that once we showed them the statutes, once we pointed out where the process had gone wrong, they'd course-correct. Instead, they dug in their heels. Not a single millimeter of give.
So we dug in too.
What followed was more than I ever anticipated when I sat in that fire station in November: lawsuits, a recall petition against the entire council, records requests that turned up things we suspected but couldn't prove, and a fight that has consumed more of my life than I could have imagined at the outset.
The recall effort came up short — not really a surprise, if I'm honest. Sand Springs' City Charter sets the bar for a successful recall astronomically high, seemingly by design, and a council that had already shown us exactly what it thought of transparency was never going to hesitate to disqualify every signature it could find a technicality for. I was disappointed for the volunteers who poured their hearts into that petition drive. I wasn't surprised by the outcome.
Through all of it, one thing has never changed: I couldn't be prouder to stand up for my friends and neighbors against a level of government overreach that most people never think to watch for — until it's parked a few feet from their front porch, built by people who don't even have to answer to the residents that will suffer the consequences of being forced to live next to it, none of whom even have a legal vote in the city's elections.
Why MuniWatch
Here's the thing that changed everything for me. In the middle of this fight, I started hearing from people all over the country — Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Idaho, more places than I can count. All asking some version of the same question: How do I find out if this is coming to my town? What are the signs? Who do I even talk to?
Real transparency lives where advance notice, open dialogue, and easy access overlap.
What sticks with me isn't any one phone call — it's the tone in almost all of them. Confusion. Dread. People who feel like they've been dropped into a fight for their own quality of life, blindfolded, hands tied, up against a heavyweight they never agreed to face. It's a David-and-Goliath story playing out in small towns across this country, over and over. We know how that story is supposed to end, and we're praying for the same ending here.
I couldn't personally show up in every one of those towns. But I could build something that would let people watch their own city government the way I wish I'd been watching mine before June of 2025 — before annexations and rezonings and secret meetings had already decided our community's fate without us.
That's MuniWatch. A service that monitors municipal and county meeting agendas and minutes so residents get notified the moment something worth their attention gets posted — instead of finding out eighteen months later, buried in the minutes of a meeting nobody knew to attend.
It's not separate from the fight against Project Spring. It's an extension of it. A portion of MuniWatch's revenue helps fund our ongoing legal costs here in Sand Springs, and if MuniWatch grows the way I believe it can, I want to see it help fund other communities' fights too.
Because the lesson out of all of this isn't really about data centers. It's this: transparency isn't a courtesy governments extend to citizens. It's the price of the authority we hand them. When they forget that, citizens have to remind them — with statutes, with lawsuits, with petitions, and now, with tools like MuniWatch.
Most rural ranchers like what we have here in our Rock Community are familiar with the adage, "You mess with the bull, you get the horns." MuniWatch aims to be one of those horns for communities across this country.