Kelly Manning: The Company Store Argument
One of the plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit against the Mason County data center is Kelly Manning, who operates a farm supply wholesale business. His legal claim is that the rezoning will hurt him because some of his farmer customers might relocate away from an area that has a data center imposed on it.
Read that again slowly. A business owner is asking a court to block what neighboring landowners do with their own property — because it might affect his customer base.
There is a word for a business model that depends on controlling what the people around you can do with their land in order to protect your own revenue. In the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, they called it the company store. The coal company owned the land, owned the housing, owned the store, and made sure nobody had options that didn’t run through them first.
The Yearners don’t own the land their customers farm. But the legal theory is the same: your neighbors’ property rights are subordinate to my business interests.
Mason County’s farmers have been watching their neighbors sell land and their own incomes decline for forty years. Tobacco is gone. Dairy is gone. The data center offers thirty landowners a different future. Mr. Manning’s lawsuit asks the court to take that future away from them — to protect his customer list.
The folks behind this lawsuit have deep pockets and can afford to base their future on yearning for a time before Mason County lost tobacco, dairy, and several major industries. This second lawsuit proves large legal bills don’t faze them as they yearn for an economic foundation that was — but is no more. Will you speak up and let them know not everyone in Mason County can afford to live in the past?
Lets review the relative size of the data center project to keep the size of the project in perspective
