One thousand four hundred and forty acres of Effingham County, Georgia changed hands on a deed that recited ten dollars, and the people who live on the roads around it found out after the land was already committed. Three of them have now sued OpenAI, six county commissioners and the county’s industrial authority under Georgia’s racketeering statute, and the number that matters is not the ten dollars. It is the eleven counts, because a county that will not hold a hearing can still be handed a docket number.
The complaint was filed on November 6 in Effingham County State Court, runs 44 pages, and is the third lawsuit over Project Camellia and the second from the same plaintiffs. The campus is described in the filing as four buildings totaling roughly 4.4 million square feet on about 1,440 acres inside the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub, at a reported cost near twenty billion dollars, with power demand reported around 3.2 gigawatts. Effingham Herald
None of that is a crime. Secrecy is not a crime either, most days. What the plaintiffs allege is that secrecy was the mechanism, applied at every step, and that the county’s own paperwork shows the order of operations.
Raymond Carver — The Neighbor Who Learned the Price After the Deed Was Signed
Carver is a resident, a taxpayer, and the plaintiff who lives next to the site. He did not get a hearing. He got an election-night agenda item, a room, and a podium. WTOC
When commissioners met on the evening of November 3, they tabled the vote on the project’s plan rather than take it. Carver told the board he would keep coming back to that podium until somebody answered questions. His written statement afterward is the sentence that should be read slowly: residents have been left feeling underrepresented, dismissed, ignored, and lied to, with no real chance to be heard at the moment it counted.
That is not a zoning complaint. That is a description of a process that ran to completion while the public was still being told what the process was. His neighbors’ property is the collateral. According to reporting on the filing, offers to buy nearby homes have fallen or been withdrawn since the project was announced. Tom’s Hardware
A data center does not have to poison your well to cost you money. It only has to be announced next door.
Brandt Herndon — An NDA Signed Nine Months Before the Only Vote That Counted
The filing says the authority’s chief executive, Brandt Herndon, signed a nondisclosure agreement with OpenAI on October 27, 2025, and that OpenAI then circulated similar agreements to other local officials, including the county manager. Nine months later, on July 21, the authority met under an agenda that named only “Project Gateway.” It went into closed session for more than an hour and came out voting unanimously for a memorandum of understanding with Octans GA LLC, the OpenAI affiliate building the campus.
Three days after that, a deed conveying the 1,440 acres to Octans was signed, with the recited consideration of ten dollars. The signature on behalf of the authority came from Savannah Industrial Development LLC, acting under a power of attorney recorded in 2016 — a nine-year-old piece of paper doing the work of a public vote.
Ten dollars is not a sale price. It is a filing convention, and everyone in the room knew it. The point of the number is that it tells you exactly how much of this transaction was meant to be your business: none of it.
Damon Rahn — Six Commissioners and the Two Hearings That Never Happened
The complaint names the whole board — Chairman Damon Rahn, Forrest Floyd, Roger Burdette, Jamie DeLoach, Elizabeth Helmly and Phil Kieffer — along with County Manager Tim Callanan, the authority and its CEO, OpenAI, Octans GA LLC and Savannah Industrial Development LLC. Every name on that list is being sued in a civil case, which is not the same as being accused of a crime, and none of the allegations has been proven in court. The county’s answer to a request for comment was that it does not discuss pending litigation. County leaders have denied the underlying claims throughout.
What the filing hangs on is a date and a procedure. On August 4, commissioners adopted Ordinance 2026-352. The complaint says it was presented to the board as a technical correction and that it changed the table of permitted uses and the legal treatment of industrial land, including data centers, without the two public hearings that county ordinance and state law require. Eleven counts follow from that, including fraudulent concealment, civil conspiracy, breach of mandatory duties, and violation of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
A technical correction is the most expensive phrase in local government. It is how a county changes what you are allowed to live next to without anybody having to defend it out loud.
Eric Johnson — The Filing Puts the Quiet Part in the Record
Deep in the complaint is the part that will be read aloud if this survives a motion to dismiss. The filing quotes an authority director identified as Eric Johnson saying that putting the project in front of the public would have produced a “no data center” answer based on what he called misinformation, and that the county is not a democracy. He may dispute the characterization and the context, and he will get the chance. But the plaintiffs did not have to invent a theory of the case. They quoted the government.
The racketeering count is the one to watch and the one most likely to disappoint. Georgia’s civil RICO statute allows triple damages, but it requires a pattern of predicate acts, not merely a frustrating year of public meetings. Seven defendants are named in that count. Proving a pattern is a different job from proving bad faith, and bad faith alone is legal in most planning departments.
The rest of the case is ordinary and powerful: that officials used confidentiality to keep residents from objecting until the land was committed and objections could no longer matter. That is the allegation in one sentence, and it is why the plaintiffs want a jury rather than a judge reading a file.
OpenAI — Two Million for a Trail While the County Argued About a Deed
The company has been generous in the county: two million dollars toward the Atlas Park trail system in October, and an agreement to cover school meal costs for students in the 2026-27 year. Good works are good works. They are also not a hearing, and the plaintiffs’ argument is that the charity arrived on a schedule that suited the secrecy rather than the other way around.
Roughly 3.2 gigawatts is a generating plant’s worth of demand aimed at one rural county, and four buildings are a permanent change to what that land is for. WJCL The AI-mekna build-out is not arriving as a product. It is arriving as land use, and land use is where ordinary people actually feel it.
Axel’s Take — Ten Dollars Is What a County Charges When It Does Not Want You to Ask
Here is the arithmetic nobody puts in a press release. Carver lives next to the site. His house is worth less today than it was before somebody signed a piece of paper in a closed room, and his only remedy is a civil complaint in state court that will take years to resolve, cost more than the equity he just lost, and may end in a settlement he is not allowed to discuss. That is the price of being early to a boom you were not invited to.
The structural failure is not that OpenAI wanted a data center. Every hyperscaler wants one, and counties across the South are competing to hand them over. The failure is that the deal was structured so the public could only respond after the commitment was irreversible — land deeded, incentives set, ordinance amended — and the people who designed that sequence knew exactly what they were doing, because they wrote it down in a private agreement first.
Watch the motion to dismiss rather than the headlines. A court will decide whether a nine-year-old power of attorney, a ten-dollar deed and an ordinance labeled a technical correction add up to a pattern of racketeering, or merely to competent lawyering on behalf of a very large client. Either answer teaches the same lesson to every county in Georgia: the paperwork is the policy, and a hearing you hold after the deed is a hearing you held for the record, not for the people.
Carver said he would be back at that podium every week. That is what a citizen looks like when the process has already closed, and the ten dollars is what the process thought he was worth.
Sources: Effingham Herald, WTOC, Tom’s Hardware, WJCL.