A citizen’s group fighting a proposed Google data center in the small northeastern Minnesota city of Hermantown has filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging it has violated state law in its pursuit of the data center.
The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in St. Louis County District Court by Stop the Hermantown Data Center. The group claims the city of Hermantown improperly changed its 2045 comprehensive plan and rezoned the neighborhood where the data center is proposed to be built to allow the controversial project to move forward.
The lawsuit also alleges the city violated Minnesota’s open meeting law by closing three meetings to the public while Hermantown officials secretly worked with the developer to make changes to its development plan.
City officials met with representatives of Google for more than a year before the project was made public last year. Several city and county officials signed non-disclosure agreements forbidding them from discussing the proposal, which was dubbed “Project Loon” in documents.
The group filed the lawsuit “to appeal the city’s actions and lack of transparency,” said Hermantown resident Emma Richtman. “We found it necessary to try and get a seat at the table to have a say in the plans for the development of a hyperscale data center in our community.”
Hermantown officials say they don’t comment on pending litigation.
The Hermantown city council voted last October to approve a zoning change to make way for the proposed data center on about 200 acres in a rural corner of the city, about eight miles west of Duluth.
It’s one of about a dozen large-scale data centers proposed around the state. Only one is under construction: a Meta facility in Rosemount.
Data centers are huge buildings that house rows of computer servers. Those servers contain the raw computing power that undergirds cloud computing and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. The complex in Hermantown would include up to four buildings. Each one would be up to 50 feet tall and would cover an area about the size of five football fields.
The more than $1 billion project would create around 100 permanent jobs and hundreds of construction jobs. The city is weighing a proposal to grant Google significant tax incentives. In return, the tech giant would contribute tens of millions of dollars toward infrastructure upgrades, as well as payments to the city and school district.
Opponents argue the massive project would fundamentally change the character of a rural neighborhood, depress property values, increase traffic and create noise and light pollution.
Community residents say they were kept in the dark as the city negotiated with Google. Jonathan Thornton, who lives about a mile from the proposed data center, was part of an advisory committee helping develop the city’s 2045 comprehensive plan.
Thornton said those committee meetings abruptly stopped in the summer of 2024. Shortly thereafter, city officials changed the comprehensive plan to allow for a data center at its proposed location.
“This complaint is the direct result of what happens when government officials sign non-disclosure agreements and circumvent the public process,” Thornton said at a rally announcing the lawsuit outside Hermantown city hall.
The Hermantown citizens group is also involved in another lawsuit that alleges the project’s environmental review was inadequate. The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy is representing the group in that lawsuit. The MCEA also has filed lawsuits against proposed data center projects in Faribault, Lakeville, Monticello and Pine Island.
