By Jennifer Williams
February 19, 2026
During the weekly Miami County commission meeting on February 18, 2026, residents flooded the public comment time, to speak regarding concerns of potential data centers coming to Osawatomie, Kansas.
At the end of the meeting, beginning at the 46:33 mark, the commissioners did address the concerns raised during the public comment time.
Commissioners Vickrey, Scruggs, and Diediker all agreed with the public and expressed their own concerns and lack of appetite to have data centers in the county.
“To everyone that came and spoke today, this commission is listening to what your thoughts are, and it’s very concerning when a business with the type of energy usage is going to be one of our neighbors. I don’t know that this county commission has authority to veto something that a city has decided to do,” stated Commissioner Jene Vickrey.
Commissioner Scruggs stated that he is vehemently against the decision, “but more than the decision was the process that led up to it. . . you can tell me the fluff or potential, but tell me the downside of everything.”
He then read a letter from one of his constituents, Brad Ryckert, who serves on the Board of Rural Water 2, and wrote strongly opposing data centers in Miami County, who expressed concerns of “economic and environmental harm that would negatively affect the taxpayers of Osawatomie and Miami County. The significant demand these facilities place on water and electricity could put residents of Osawatomie and the surrounding county at risk.”
Commissioner Scruggs went on to explain that he inquired with Mr Ryckert how much water goes out of Water District 2, and he was told that Water District 2 uses 1 billion gallons of water a year, of which approximately 500,000 gallons go to Miami County. “This data center uses 1 million a day. That’s 73% of the total (county) usage and that hit me like a ton of bricks.”
Commissioner Diediker stated, “I’ll have to agree with the citizens on this one. . . with the amount of water usage and not necessarily knowing what type of effluents would be coming out of this as it was discharging, I don’t think this is a very good fit for Miami County or actually for the city of Osawatomie. So in my view I’m not in favor of data centers at all, and I would be a proponent of putting a moratorium on them for the county for a couple of years so we would have a better chance to see the pros and cons and make a better decision without it being rushed.”
Commissioner Vaughan discussed meeting with residents throughout the week and how he “explained what the process is.”
He went on to “ask for respect and decorum to understand what our responsibility is, what the actions are that we can actually take, and advocate for that.”
It was explained that with the Kansas Home Rule authority, cities have local governmental authority within their city limits, and the county has no authority over those decisions.
Commissioner Pretz reiterated the local control that Osawatomie had with their own separate elected officials that make their decisions and stated, “I fully understand that the city and the county meet at this line, and it’s affecting some of you close to the city limits. So I certainly understand that, but we have to understand the process that Osawatomie elected their city council. Their city council voted to have this data center, and that appears that’s the direction it’s going. But as a county, we need to be thinking about the unincorporated area of the county, because we could get approached any day. So I propose a motion to have a moratorium on data centers in Miami County for at least two years . . . and instruct our county administrator and legal counsel to draft a resolution that we can pass next week, at the latest in two weeks.”
Commissioner Scruggs asked about the moratorium also including solar and wind, which the county currently has in place but is possibly near expiring.
Commissioner Pretz went further to add battery plants to the moratorium, which was rephrased as battery storage in the final motion.
County administrator Shane Krull stated it would be prudent to have the county counselor attend to present the resolution in March with his findings because he was unsure of the legal ramifications of extending solar to four or five years when they had never taken any action to do anything with it on the original moratorium. Krull stated, “If we’re going to do a takings of property rights, we probably want to insure that we are on solid ground when we do that.”
The commissioners will have the county administrator and county counselor prepare a resolution to be presented the first week of March for a vote.
It was a unanimous approval for the motion to write the resolution for the moratorium for data centers, battery storage, and extending the current ones on wind and solar.