Four hometown men want 1,735 acres of Enid ready for data centers. They have not said who will own them. On Oct. 27, the city decides whether that matters.
Angeleen Woolf did what most people do when they learn a data center campus may rise beside their neighborhood.
"At first I kind of freaked out about it," she told KOKH FOX 25.
Then she did something harder. She calmed down, read what the city was actually being asked to do, and found the problem nobody at the podium had explained.
"One of the neighborhood concerns is it gets rezoned and then the protections don't come in until a data center moves in," she said. "So we would kind of be living with this newly zoned industrial parks. And no protections in the meantime."
That is the whole story of Project Thunderbird, told by a woman who owns property next door to it.
Everything else, the gigawatts, the billions, the jets, the patriotic names, sits on top of that one sentence.
The Hallway
On the night of Sept. 15, Enid's City Commission chambers filled, and then the hallway outside them filled, too.
The Enid News & Eagle reported that the vast majority of the people who came opposed the project. They had come to talk about land at the edges of their city: fields along Phillips Avenue between 42nd and 54th streets, ground along Rupe between 16th and 30th, acreage south of Southgate on 30th Street.
Katie Kittel stood before the commission and said what a lot of the people pressed against the walls had come to say. "You guys have the opportunity to do good," she told them. "Listen to your residents."
Another opponent put it in five words that could hang on a banner: "People over power."
Not everyone in the room agreed. Stacey Norwood, who said he had spent more than 30 years in information technology, told the commission, "I am so excited about the data centers coming to Enid."
Thirteen days later, the crowd came back for the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. Again, many could not find seats. The commission recommended all three rezonings anyway: 7-1, 6-2, 6-2.
And then the city did something telling. It pulled the vote off the Oct. 6 City Commission agenda and moved it to the Grand Ballroom of the Stride Bank Center, Enid's downtown events center, "to accommodate the large crowd expected."
When a city has to rent its biggest room to hold the people who want to object, the city already knows something about how this is going.
The Boys From Enid High
The men behind Project Thunderbird did not parachute in from Silicon Valley. That is the first thing they want you to know, and it is true.
Plainsmen Holdings, LLC belongs to four Enid natives who, News 9 reported, all attended Enid High School: co-managing members Jason Singer and Chad Dillingham, and members Aaron Singer and Troy Phillips. When they invited the public to see their plans on Sept. 24, they held the open house in the Enid High School gym.
"We're actually people who are born and raised here," Singer told KFOR.
They named the project after the Air Force Thunderbirds, News 9 reported, the demonstration team whose jets perform at air shows at Vance Air Force Base. They promised 600 permanent jobs. They promised the project would cost taxpayers nothing.
And the scale they described is almost impossible to picture in a city Enid's size.
Four campuses on about 1,735 acres. Up to 3.3 gigawatts of electricity from a private natural gas plant north of town. Capital investment that News 9 reported at up to $35 billion in September, and the Enid News & Eagle reported at $38 billion in October.
Three billion dollars of difference, in a month, in the public description of a single project.
"Enid is very, very uniquely positioned for this type of a development," Dillingham said.
Nobody doubts these men love their hometown. The question is what happens to their hometown's land after they are done with it.
The Sentence in the Middle
Buried in News 9's launch-day story sits the most important fact in this entire fight.
After zoning and water agreements, News 9 reported, Plainsmen would talk with potential hyperscalers and power providers.
Read the order of operations. First, Enid changes its zoning. First, Enid commits its water. Then the developers go shopping for the company that will actually build and run the data centers.
The Enid News & Eagle reported that Plainsmen's members said no contracts had been signed. The City of Enid's own Project Thunderbird page confirms the gap in plain language:
"The developer, site plans, infrastructure design, timeline, and any required development approvals have not been finalized."
The developer. Not finalized.
Jacob McNew, director of No Data Centers in Enid, said out loud what that sentence implies. "They're trying to play it as a locally grown thing," he told KOKH. "But in the end, they're just going to sell it to Google or Meta or someone like that."
Plainsmen has announced no buyer. But by its own described sequence, the four men from Enid High are the opening act, not the headliner.
What the Zoning Remembers
The city has repeated one reassurance more than any other. Its project page puts it this way:
"This request is not an approval to construct or operate a data center."
On paper, that holds. Under Ordinance No. 2026-17, a data center still needs a separate Intensive Use Review and a signed Intensive Use Agreement before Enid issues a building permit.
But zoning does not remember promises. Zoning remembers land.
The Sept. 28 requests sought to move the north and west campus parcels from agricultural to industrial zoning, including heavy industrial, with a southeast slice of the west campus going to light industrial.
Once that happens, the change belongs to the ground, not to Plainsmen. If the four men sell, the buyer gets the zoning. If that buyer sells, the next one gets it, too.
And the list of intensive uses that Enid's new ordinance routes through that same review reads like a tour of the industrial age: data centers, yes, but also petroleum refining, hazardous industrial uses, hydrogen energy, battery energy storage, biomass power, nuclear facilities.
Each still needs its own review. But the rezoning puts the farmland in the room where those reviews happen.
That is what Angeleen Woolf saw. The fields change first. The protections arrive later, if they arrive at all, and only after somebody files an application.
Twenty-One Days
On Aug. 18, 2026, Enid's Mayor and Board of Commissioners adopted Ordinance No. 2026-17. It rewrote the rules for the city's heavy industrial district and named data centers among the uses that need special review.
On Sept. 8, 2026, Plainsmen Holdings introduced Project Thunderbird to the public.
Twenty-one days.
By the time most of Enid heard the words "Project Thunderbird," the rulebook for it already existed. KFOR reported at the launch that Enid "passed data center ordinances in August," and Dr. Marcie Mack, executive director of the Enid Regional Development Alliance, pointed to those rules as a safeguard. "They have specific guidelines that must be met for their application to move forward," she said.
Some of those guidelines carry weight. Noise capped at 65 decibels by day and 55 at night at the nearest residential property line. No structures or substations within 500 feet of residential land. A required plan for tearing the whole thing down someday.
But the timing leaves a question the public record cannot yet answer: what did city officials know about this project when they wrote the rules that now govern it, and who helped them write those rules?
Rules written before a project arrives can shield residents. They can also be tailored to a project before residents ever hear its name. Only the drafts and the emails can say which happened in Enid.
And look at who the rulebook talks to. For the data center review itself, it requires a "public meeting," mailed notice to owners within 300 feet, and a comment period of at least 10 days. It saves the phrase "public hearing" for later phases.
Three hundred feet is the length of a football field. Live one field and a little farther away, and the ordinance does not require Enid to put a letter in your mailbox.
The Hottest Day of the Year
Plainsmen deserves credit for one thing. It published its water numbers, in detail, for anyone to check.
The project would draw raw water from the Kaw Lake Pipeline, not the treated water that comes out of Enid's taps. Its website estimates 562 million gallons a year at full build.
562 million gallons ÷ 365 days = about 1.54 million gallons a day.
But averages do not cool computers in August. The developer's own site says that on the hottest day, demand peaks near 7.3 million gallons. The plan calls for a steady draw of about 2 million gallons a day, with roughly 31.8 million gallons waiting in tanks on site.
Now picture the kind of week every Oklahoman knows: the heat that does not break, the wind that feels like an oven door, day after day.
Using the developer's own figures, a peak day leaves a gap of about 5.3 million gallons between what the project needs and what its steady draw supplies.
31.8 million gallons ÷ 5.3 million gallons = 6 days.
Six peak days, by our arithmetic, before full tanks run dry and the project must pull harder on the city's Kaw Lake pipeline. The developer's site describes its water figures as estimates, "not a permit limit." Ordinance 2026-17 lets the city write a daily cap into the final Intensive Use Agreement.
Later. After the rezoning.
The Sentence They Wrote Themselves
The most stirring part of the pitch involves Vance Air Force Base.
Plainsmen proposes hardened backup power and fiber for the base, citing 10 U.S.C. § 2920, the federal law on energy resilience at military installations, and promising help meeting a 2030 target at "no cost to the federal government." The project would rest on what its developers call a "Patriot Utility District," described on their site as "a municipally-owned public utility" funded by fees from the data centers.
The city says the district's design, ownership, operations, funding and approvals have not been finalized. We found no public record of the Air Force committing to the plan.
But the developers' own website explains what the military connection could do for them. In their words:
"Future moratoriums, taxes, and regulatory changes would face this argument."
Sit with that sentence.
The people asking Enid for permission wrote, in public, that tying the project to a military base would help it withstand the very tools a city uses to protect itself later: a moratorium, a tax, a new regulation.
The pitch at the podium says: help us help the base. The pitch on the website says: once the base needs us, try telling us no.
Both Enids
It would be easy to tell this as a story of villains. It is not one.
Robert Marker owns property next to the planned west campus, and he wants it. "It's economic growth for the city and the surrounding communities," he told KOKH. "I don't understand why you wouldn't be."
Jesse Wallace sits somewhere in the middle, like a lot of Enid. "The pros are the economic stuff for sure," he said. "And the cons, people are worried about the noise, the pollution, the water intake. You know, all that stuff is very valid."
Then Wallace said the thing every commissioner should tape to the dais on Oct. 27:
"I believe that honesty is key. And I believe being forthright and doing what you say you're going to do and not having any hidden clauses or agendas or anything like that is the best way to go."
No hidden clauses. That is not an anti-growth position. That is the minimum a town should demand before it hands over its land, its water and its future leverage to a company whose name it does not know yet.
What to Do Before Tuesday
Tuesday, Oct. 27, 5 p.m. Special City Commission meeting on the Project Thunderbird rezonings, Stride Bank Center, Grand Ballroom. Arrive early. Sign up to speak. The city had not yet published the final agenda as of Oct. 23; watch the City of Enid's meeting portal for it.
Ask your commissioners, on the record:
- If Plainsmen sells these parcels after the rezoning, what in the zoning stops the next owner from seeking any other intensive use listed in Ordinance 2026-17?
- Will you attach binding conditions to the rezoning itself, so protections arrive with the zoning instead of after it?
- When did city staff first communicate with any Plainsmen member about a data center, and did anyone outside city government help draft Ordinance 2026-17?
- Who would carry the debt of the Patriot Utility District, who would control its revenue, and who pays if the data centers leave?
- What, in writing, has Vance Air Force Base or the Air Force committed to?
- Does any commissioner have a business or personal relationship with a Plainsmen member, and will that commissioner disclose it and abstain?
Records any resident can request from the City of Enid under the Oklahoma Open Records Act, 51 O.S. § 24A.1 et seq.:
- All drafts of Ordinance 2026-17 and communications about them, Jan. 1 through Aug. 18, 2026.
- All communications between city officials and Jason Singer, Chad Dillingham, Aaron Singer, Troy Phillips or Plainsmen Holdings, LLC, Jan. 1, 2024 to present.
- Any term sheet, draft agreement or presentation concerning the Patriot Utility District, Kaw Lake raw water, or the 66th Street Industrial Park.
- Any correspondence with Vance Air Force Base or the Department of the Air Force about backup power or fiber.
On Oct. 27, the commissioners will sit in the Grand Ballroom, and the people of Enid will line up at a microphone.
The developers will talk about jobs and jets and gigawatts. All of it may come true.
But the vote in front of the commission does not ask whether Project Thunderbird will keep its promises. It asks whether Enid will change its land before anyone can tell it who will be keeping them.
Angeleen Woolf already answered that question. Somebody on the dais should listen.
More From Our Data Center Series
- They Already Told You Where They Go If Piedmont Says No
- 1.7 Gigawatts on Wheat Fields: How Two Hyperscale Data Centers Are Forcing Piedmont Into an Existential Fight
Editor's Note
Quotations attributed to Angeleen Woolf, Robert Marker, Jesse Wallace and Jacob McNew come from KOKH FOX 25 (Oct. 6, 2026). Quotations from Katie Kittel, Stacey Norwood and the "People over power" remark come from the Enid News & Eagle (Sept. 16, 2026). Quotations from Jason Singer, Chad Dillingham and Dr. Marcie Mack come from KFOR and News 9 (Sept. 8, 2026). Project figures and quoted language from the developer come from projectthunderbird.com and the City of Enid's Project Thunderbird page, retrieved Oct. 19, 2026. Water calculations are Guerrilla News arithmetic using the developer's published figures.
No allegation of unlawful conduct is made against Plainsmen Holdings, its members, or any Enid official. Seeking a rezoning is lawful. Adopting zoning rules is lawful. That is why the public needs to see how both happened.
This article discusses law and public records requests. It is not legal advice.
Corrections: ron@guerrilla.news
Sources
- Project Thunderbird: City of Enid. enid.org
- Project Thunderbird: A Proposed Power & Data Project for Enid, Oklahoma: Plainsmen Holdings, LLC. projectthunderbird.com
- Ordinance No. 2026-17: City of Enid Municipal Code, American Legal Publishing. codelibrary.amlegal.com
- "Proposed Enid data center project could bring $35 billion investment": News 9, Sept. 8, 2026. news9.com
- "Project Thunderbird proposes 1,700-acre data center in Enid": KFOR, Sept. 8, 2026. kfor.com
- "Data center opponents outnumber supporters at commission meeting": Enid News & Eagle, Sept. 16, 2026. enidnews.com
- "UPDATED: Rezoning requests removed from agenda": Enid News & Eagle, Oct. 5, 2026. enidnews.com
- "Proposed Project Thunderbird data center in Enid faces rezoning delay after item canceled": KOKH FOX 25, Oct. 6, 2026. okcfox.com
- "Enid city leaders delay public meeting on proposed data center": Oklahoma Energy Today, Oct. 7, 2026. okenergytoday.com
- Meeting schedule, Mayor and Board of Commissioners Special Meeting, Oct. 27, 2026: City of Enid. enid.civicweb.net
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