When Tucson organizes, things happen
The Tucson activist’s cookbook … Project Blue timeline … And a weirdly prescient laugh.
Happy Friday, readers!
And what a Friday it is — after today, the Agenda team is heading out for a summer break.
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On to the news!
A recipe for resistance
Project Blue inside the Tucson city limits is dead — for now. Its controversial life was cut mercifully short by a unanimous vote.
What killed the proposed data center wasn’t just the Tucson City Council, one popular narrative in the media, or a single decision — it was a complex recipe from a community of activists and citizens paying close attention.
Wednesday afternoon didn’t necessarily mark the end of the controversial development — there appears to be a Plan B — but it was a huge win for local organizing.
The opposition campaign that coalesced over the past few months offers a step-by-step guide for peaceful protest that works, and serves as a warning for Amazon and others who might bring similar proposals to Southern Arizona: Don’t get on the wrong side of Tucson’s activist and civic community.
It starts with art
The first ingredient in this recipe for success wasn’t rallies in front of the building where the Pima County Board of Supervisors meets or threats of lawsuits.
It was a series of photographs, videos and infographics floating around on social media.
One well-known Tucson photographer, Kathleen Dreier, began posting striking visuals of barren land soon to be home to Project Blue, families united against the project, and some groups meeting almost every night and those photos translated utility-scale data centers into human-scale consequences.
Soon, these same pieces of media would proliferate throughout the greater Tucson community, reaching thousands of families.
By the time the broader public started paying attention, activists had stitched up matching coordinated outfits, crafted hand-painted signs and landed on slogans like "water for people, not billionaires."
On the eve of the Council vote, the Watershed Management Group reminded the public that the Sonoran Desert was once a place of flowing rivers and forests full of willow trees, a natural beauty that has already been decimated by development.
It didn't hurt that the timing was ripe for a new David vs. Goliath fight.
Weeks earlier, Elon Musk had exited the Trump administration under pressure from a nationwide protest movement — one that started right here in Tucson, with thousands standing outside a Tesla dealership every other weekend.
With Musk gone, Project Blue became the new big bad.
A dash of shoe leather
Even as the public began to mobilize, local journalists were already on the beat. Our first story on Project Blue was in mid-May.
Tucson journalists collectively hounded politicians and bureaucrats, asked pointed questions and followed activists as they entered the chat. We fact-checked the rosy FAQs put out by both the city and county, challenged their press releases and demanded more details than the sound bites at town halls. We filed public records requests, sat through long meetings, and showed up with notebooks while the city tried to smile through questions they legally couldn’t answer.
The press was a tocsin for the larger Tucson community, just as the First Amendment always intended.
It may have also added some heat to this metaphorical recipe.
Add in some experts
Opposition to Project Blue began to boil over as water policy experts, AI wonks, environmental lawyers, data scientists and other experts stepped up to challenge Project Blue’s narrative. They added vital context to the conversation as quickly as proxies for Project Blue went public with key new details.
A local watershed expert offered thoughts on the potential impacts to the Santa Cruz River. An AI expert published an interactive dashboard that modeled much higher energy use than what Project Blue was telling the community. And County Supervisor Jennifer Allen leaned on her background in environmental advocacy to push for future projects to require environmental assessments.
Comments made in town halls, group chats, and forums not organized by the city were repeated from one friend to another, starting a bigger community conversation one person at a time.
This reached an apex this week, with people lining up to get a taste of local democracy.
Pressure cook with a public presence
Activists didn’t just post memes. They showed up — everywhere.
They organized in both new and traditional ways. Some packed meeting halls. Others ran point in encrypted chat groups, shared Zoom links, made flyers or helped neighbors hone their talking points.
Behind the scenes, many reached out directly to their elected officials.
That combination of being informed and being physically present helped sway the Tucson City Council in a way that hadn’t worked with the Board of Supervisors.
The county had taken the first blows when the land sale became public, but it quickly passed the buck to the city.
A new regional chamber of commerce tried to make the economic case for Project Blue, but never gained traction.
Officials knew they were being watched — not just by opponents and voters, but by their friends and trusted members of the community.
Meanwhile, labor unions hoping for a major contract became de facto spokespeople for the project — another reminder that not everyone in the community was on the same page.
A seasoned message for the public
Activists succeeded by making the narrative about the future of Tucson — not Project Blue. The public conversation wasn’t just about the fate of the data center or even the revelation that Project Blue’s parent company was Amazon. It was about how we allocate water during a sustained drought, how we protect our fragile desert ecosystem, and the right to have a voice about the future of public lands.
By the time the final vote came, the Council was staring down a community that had taken the time to study the facts — and showed up to defend them.
It was the recipe to get every member of the Council’s attention.
A burned entrée
Could Amazon’s hired consultants and proxies have saved Project Blue from defeat?
Had Beale Infrastructure led with transparency, embraced local engagement, and provided a comprehensive environmental impact statement, this story might have unfolded differently.
What is clear now is that those NDAs were a poisonous ingredient baked into their proposal from the start. The consultants insisted on using them even while giving polished answers in public.
Their PR strategy partially relied on proxies — labor unions, business groups, and city staff — who were supposed to tell you the entrée was going to be delicious.
But residents weren’t buying it, at least not in the middle of an extended water crisis.
The Project Blue saga appears to be over for now. But it could come back in another form.
If it does, wouldn’t it be nice to have a quick way to get caught up on everything that went down when Amazon tried to do it the first time? Or if some other tech company starts looking at Tucson?
We gathered more than 70 news stories and put them all in one handy database for you, from Joe spotting a mystery project buried in a meeting agenda for the Pima County Supervisors to the Arizona Luminaria revealing Amazon was lurking in the background.
We have all the mini-dramas in there, too, like Tucson Electric Power announcing a rate hike, right after the Supes approved selling nearly 300 acres of land to an electricity-devouring data center company.
Or Tucson officials getting lambasted at a community meeting, while making sure to never say “Amazon.” And then sticking it out for another round of “boos” a few days later.
Along the way, a few things got pushed to the surface that otherwise might not have.
Tucson officials are going to come up with parameters for any future data center in town.
At Pima County, officials now want the state Legislature to allow taxes on data center equipment, for example. They’re also going to revisit their NDA policies to avoid finding themselves in the same bind.
And somebody at the county is probably going to get in trouble for revealing Amazon as the end-user.
So take a moment and browse the archive, or bookmark this page for the next time around.
It turns out, we knew who was behind Project Blue all along!
Just kidding. We had no idea until the Arizona Luminaria reported it was Amazon Web Services.
But if we had trusted our first instinct, our guess would’ve been right on the money.
Back in May, Joe was tracking the mysterious Project Blue as it popped up in the meeting agendas of the Pima County Board of Supervisors.
Finally, officials sent out a memo about the project with some blurry images that we mocked in our “What We’re Laughing At” section, along with ridiculing the secrecy around the project.
County officials didn’t say what the project was, other than it was for a company that “operates in the advanced and emerging technology industry sector.” Except that the plans they included in the memo showed buildings clearly labeled as “data centers.”
That prompted Joe to write on May 13: “Well, in any event, we hope it isn’t connected to Amazon.”
You’ll know if you’re among the first 100 subscribers if you get our first edition on Sunday. The rest of you (assuming more than 100 people are even interested in this) will be added to a waitlist.
Which, to be fair, isn’t really an advertisement since we liked the message so much that we offered to run it for free.
Proud to be a Tucson citizen because the people of the Old Pueblo want to preserve our desert paradise! It bothers me that alternative power sources such as Bloom Energy’s power cells were not considered for the proposed AI center. Also, immediately that TEP announced a price increase! Also, why were other coolants other than water were not considered? Third, there are now commercially available quantum computers available and the increased computing power could lessen the power demands of any AI center?
The laugh made me laugh. The irreverence just caught me.
I can’t comment on Project Blue, and wasn’t involved in the activism against it, but the community really activated in opposition in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.
Whatever one’s position on the project was, I think we can acknowledge the effectiveness of the community. Just like with the Tea Party; one might not have agreed with their message, but there’s no doubt they influenced politics.