Wendell Griffen celebrates birthday with data center win

A piece of legislation that the Pulaski County Quorum Court passed on Tuesday night has its roots in a chance get-together between Arkansas’ unlikely data center activist, Wendell Griffen, and a 90-something-year-old law professor.

Griffen, the Democratic nominee for Pulaski County judge — now known among many as the driving force behind an ordinance designed to put some controls on a data center headed for the Wrightsville area — was doing a little happy dance on Wednesday, he said, in the wake of legislation that passed on Tuesday night on an 11-to-4 vote. 

But Griffen, a retired circuit court judge who admits he had much to learn about data centers in the early going, also reflected on how getting the legislation written and passed required several months of grueling effort to accomplish and was made all the more difficult because of the secrecy surrounding the project.

“It’s a big deal,” he said. “It’s a big deal for the county, for Central Arkansas and for Arkansas. It shows that at the county level, we have the bandwidth to regulate the biggest industrial development projects — some would call them boondoggles — in the history of our state.”

Griffen first became concerned last year when hints of the project started becoming apparent.

At that time, a proposal for a countywide zoning ordinance, “with no warning,” was sent to the Planning Board by County Judge Barry Hyde. But the board balked, saying they had not had enough time to consider the plan, and the public protested because of a lack of transparency.

“The red lights started flashing in my head,” Griffen said. “I could see the dots, but I couldn’t see how they went together.”

Hyde was unavailable for comment on Wednesday.

The state in 2025 passed Act 851, which prohibited cities and counties from passing laws that single out  data centers, although legal experts have noted since then the law, as written, narrowly applies to crypto-mining facilities, not the hyperscale facilities taking root in Pulaski County and elsewhere in the state. It nevertheless has been used as a defense by pro-data center regulators. And two years before, the Legislature passed Act 314, which prohibited cities from exercising land use regulations beyond their borders. Combined, the two laws helped clear the runway for data center advancement. 

“That’s when it all sank in,” Griffen said, referring to the passage of the state laws and the effort to get the zoning ordinance passed. “I turned to page 14 in the zoning ordinance and it said data centers would be allowed as a permitted use in areas zoned as industrial. That’s when I knew I needed to talk to Mort Gitelman.”

Morton “Mort” Gitelman was Griffen’s law professor at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville decades ago. The professor’s expertise was land use, and he co-authored books in the 1970s and 1980s on the subject that became popular with law students trying to navigate property rights, planning and zoning. 

Griffen, a pastor, said he was talking to one of his church members about the puzzle he was piecing together and mentioned Gitelman’s name. The church member’s eyes widened as he explained that Gitelman was married to his wife’s aunt and that the man was in Rison at the family’s hunting lodge. “I’ll drive you there,” the man told Griffen.

And the next morning, away they went.

“We arrived early,” Griffen said. “They still hadn’t come down for breakfast. When they did, we hugged. And after I showed him what I was seeing, he said, ‘Well, yes, you have an issue. This is a serious issue.’ And if Professor Gitelman says there’s an issue, by jove, it’s a sho-nuff issue. It was like seeking out Master Yoda and having him say ‘A problem you have.’”

Over the next several months Griffen said he and other elected officials and the public became more and more knowledgeable about data centers, their impact on the environment and communities and how they, many times, are ushered into existence through secrecy and the use of non-disclosure agreements that public officials have signed. Such scenarios have played out across the country, and Griffen says he believes it’s what happened in Pulaski County. In January of 2026, it was announced that AVAIO Digital was the company behind the Wrightsville data center, which was initially billed as a 150 megawatt facility with plans now to expand it to 1 gigawatt. 

He praised all parties – public and private – for their diligence in passing the ordinance, saying that several of the justices of the peace who eventually supported the measure that he penned and that was passed on Tuesday night were not liberal. “They grew to understand the enormity of what is facing us,” he said. “And they listened to their constituents who showed up week after week to ask them to protect them from data centers.”

Griffen also heaped praise on Justice of the Peace Julie Blackwood.

“I sent information to all of the justices of the peace months ago,” Griffen said. “And she got back to me. She said, ‘I want to sponsor that.’ Then other JPs started picking up on what was going on.”

He also highlighted the involvement of one private citizen.

“Bless Jessica Kivell’s heart,” he said. “She was filing FOIs right and left and we had no idea what she was showing us, but then over time, we did come to understand.”

Kivell’s name was in the news recently when she filed Freedom of Information requests with the state Public Service Commission about Entergy’s financial arrangement with Google, its data center in West Memphis and a solar farm in Jefferson County that will supply the power to the data center. Kivell disseminated the information, leading to a federal lawsuit filed by Entergy against the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Arkansas Times, but the utility eventually dropped the case.

Even in the past few weeks, the awareness of the particulars involving AVAIO data center has continued to expand. Griffen said that because of the changes going on — AVAIO recently bought almost 300 acres in the Wrightsville area as part of its $6 billion data center project — Blackwood pulled her legislation back to add an emergency clause, meaning that if it passed, it would go into effect almost immediately. She would need at least 10 votes to get that passed, but the votes proved to be there. And if Hyde, who has voiced opposition to any legislation that would slow down the AVAIO project, vetoes the ordinance, only nine votes are needed to override the veto, Griffen said.

Griffen said the combination of public involvement by interested citizens and elected officials showed the system is in good shape.

“We saw democracy working in real time,” Griffen said, adding that Wednesday was his 74th birthday. “This is a pretty good birthday present for me.”