The Permit That Disappeared: How a 2023 Court Ruling Let Dozens of Data Centers Skip Public Review

When Krista Meredith, a nurse practitioner who has lived in Canton's suburbs for two decades, spotted construction equipment going up near her home last winter, she searched for the public-comment period that should have preceded the work. There wasn't one. The only federal permit the AI data center needed had been issued the previous August with no notice to her or her neighbors, and Meredith was one of hundreds of residents who signed a petition against the project after the bulldozers arrived.

The permit in question is a Section 404 dredge-and-fill authorization under the Clean Water Act, the long-standing mechanism that requires developers who disturb wetlands or streams to file with the Army Corps of Engineers and open a public-comment window. Canton did not get that window because the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA narrowed the legal definition of "waters of the United States," the threshold that decides which sites fall under federal jurisdiction at all. Many data-center campuses sit on uplands that no longer touch "waters of the United States" under the post-Sackett test, so the permit step that would have triggered a public review has disappeared for them.

Reporting from E&E News documents a national pattern: dozens of energy- and water-intensive data centers proposed across the country have cleared federal review without the same public process Canton missed. The Society of Environmental Journalists' summary of the E&E News piece frames them bluntly as the time-consuming permits data centers are skipping. The AI buildout is moving through the gap the Court opened, faster than any state-level response has been able to close.

EPA's WOTUS implementation page walks through the post-Sackett rulemaking in tranches. The practical effect is specific: a federal review window that used to be routine in large industrial siting is now optional for many of the largest energy users being proposed anywhere in the country. With it goes the chance for residents to flag water-supply, noise, traffic, or cumulative-impact concerns before a project locks in.

The city's Rust-Belt context matters: it sits on a steel-mill legacy that left behind a patchwork of brownfields, mixed affluent and working-class neighborhoods, and a power grid already priced for heavy industry. A new generation of AI data centers, orders of magnitude larger in electricity draw than the warehouses the city has absorbed before, is now arriving in towns like it, and the public-comment stage that once gave residents a seat at the table is no longer triggered by the federal review. Meredith's petition gathered hundreds of signatures after the bulldozers arrived. The Army Corps public-comment period, had the post-Sackett test left it in play, would have run before any concrete was poured.

The pattern runs through industrial cities regardless of state politics. Smaller towns with the land, the grid headroom, and the political slack to absorb large power users are the ones now absorbing them without the federal process. State environmental agencies, county zoning boards, municipal water and utility boards, state public utility commissions, and the courts on appeal are all still in the game. In several states, state-level wetland permits, water-withdrawal approvals, and rate-base proceedings now carry the procedural weight the federal review once did. The leverage did not vanish; it migrated.

For readers tracking this in their own towns, the question to ask at the next county or state hearing is straightforward: did this project file for a Section 404 dredge-and-fill permit with the Army Corps, and if not, on what basis was it determined that no "waters of the United States" were affected? If no federal permit was filed, the public-comment window that Canton did not get is also not coming from Washington. It will need to be set at the state, county, or utility level, or carved out at the state legislature, before the next bulldozer shows up.