Data Center Moratoriums, Voter Roll Lawsuits, and the AI Land Grab

On the May 20, 2026 broadcast, Kim Monson connected three property-rights fights into one conversation. Ralston Valley Coalition’s Mike Rawluk explained the new Jefferson County moratorium on data centers, physicist Douglas Frank traced Colorado’s voter roll lawsuits and the El Paso County cleanup model, and sixth-generation rancher Trent Loos warned that AI data centers, federal tax incentives, and President Trump’s December 11, 2025 executive order on artificial intelligence are driving an eminent-domain land grab across rural America. Show sponsor Carlton Jones of Radiance Power opened the hour with practical advice on outdoor lighting and LED color temperature for home security.

Lighting, Security, and the Color of a Bulb

Start listening at 09:49 – Hour 1

Carlton Jones of Radiance Power joined Kim Monson for his weekly sponsor segment and made the case for outdoor lighting as both a quality-of-life upgrade and a security investment. Many homes, Jones said, are built with only the front porch, garage, and back patio lit, leaving walkways, long driveways, gate entrances, detached garages, and wraparound porches dark. Kim cited a recent Nextdoor post about a car driving the neighborhood looking for unlit houses as a reason to take the security angle seriously.

Jones walked Kim through the difference between the old curly compact-fluorescent bulbs, which Radiance Power avoids, and modern LEDs, whose diodes sit on a small board and last far longer than the filament-based fluorescents they replaced. With LEDs now standard, he noted, leaving lights on through the evening or while a family is away no longer adds meaningfully to the electric bill.

Color temperature was Kim’s other question. Jones explained that LED bulbs range from 2,700K, the very gold, yellow, traditional incandescent look, up to 6,000K, the sharper blue look found in commercial spaces. Roughly 3,000K to 4,000K is the most popular middle ground, and most builders ship homes at higher color temperatures than warm-light fans like Kim would prefer. He urged listeners to pay a little extra for a color-selectable bulb so the same fixture can match a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room.

“The range is from 2,700K to 6,000K. The higher the number, the more fluorescent or blue the look is going to be.”

Carlton Jones, Owner, Radiance Power

Jefferson County’s Data Center Moratorium

Start listening at 19:35 – Hour 1

Mike Rawluk of the Ralston Valley Coalition reported that Jefferson County commissioners had just extended a temporary data center moratorium for up to a full year from its first enactment, after passing it two weeks earlier on the consent agenda. The new framework, he said, does not stop all data centers. Applications must be filed on industrial land, must be processed as a planned unit development rather than a use-by-right site plan, and require an affirmative quasi-judicial vote of the Board of County Commissioners.

Setbacks were the key change. Where Nevada’s standard is 300 feet from a residential zone district, the Jefferson County rule requires a minimum of 1,500 feet from any residence. Rawluk acknowledged that low-frequency noise studies could still push that number higher, but called the policy a reasonable first bite at the apple. The county now has a year to hold public meetings, gather comments, and decide what comes next, and he urged listeners in any Colorado county to bring the same model to their own local boards.

The moratorium also forces Jefferson County to write a code definition of “data center facility” from scratch. Rawluk pressed counties drafting those definitions to keep them future-proof, citing how the federal language around gain-of-function research evolved into dual-use research of concern and enhanced study of pandemic potential pathogens. Jefferson County’s new definition, he said, captures purpose-built data centers, retrofits, and integrated structures used for servers, storage, and large-scale data processing, including the cooling systems and battery storage that drive noise and fire risk. He noted the definition should also reach Bitcoin mining sites and crypto staking pools, which he sees as a future flashpoint.

Kim tied his work to a broader property-rights framing. When government uses tax credits, streamlined permitting, and favorable financing to make a project economically viable on land where it otherwise would not pencil out, she argued, the original neighbors’ property rights are violated even before a single facility opens. Rawluk pointed to the headline from Lake Tahoe, where 50,000 residents were notified their utility would redirect power to a data center next year.

“And if I’m going to lose my electricity services because you moved in and you told me it’s good for jobs, I call foul.”

Mike Rawluk, Ralston Valley Coalition

Voter Roll Lawsuits and the El Paso Model

Start listening at 34:39 – Hour 1

Douglas Frank, a physicist with 60 peer-reviewed publications and a Nobel Prize nomination who became a leading election-integrity researcher after the 2020 election, told Kim that Judicial Watch’s settlement of its Colorado lawsuit had ordered the state to remove 372,000 names from the voter rolls last month, and that the U.S. Department of Justice has its own Colorado suit pending. The reason those names were still on the rolls, he argued, is that Colorado has been out of compliance with both state and federal law for years, even as the secretary of state’s office dismissed the warnings.

Frank framed Colorado as a follower of Oregon, where a parallel suit has just forced the removal of 800,000 names. His on-the-ground strategy moves county by county. At a recent meeting with commissioners in Alamosa County in the San Luis Valley, he showed that 98 percent of the names on the rolls had turned over in just four years, a churn rate that does not match the actual population. The local clerks rarely recognize the names being added or removed, because the additions are pushed by the state every time a resident touches a government agency, not by the county.

The fix Frank is selling to commissioners is the El Paso County model, where the clerk used Experian to scrub the file and removed about a third of the registrants. Six San Luis Valley counties are preparing to follow that path. The leverage, he said, sits with commissioners and the checkbook, not with the clerk: when a county learns that 25 percent of ballots mailed in Rio Grande County’s last general election came back undeliverable, cutting the mail budget by 30 percent gives the clerk the cover she needs to stop mailing to dead names. The County Clerks Association, he noted, recently issued a statement criticizing Governor Polis’s commutation of Tina Peters, but El Paso County is no longer a member.

Frank closed with the Tina Peters case itself. He said Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s own letter on the trusted-build process instructed clerks to back up their election systems beforehand, and only two clerks, Tina Peters in Mesa County and Dallas Schroeder in Elbert County, actually did. Peters faces a parole board on June 1, and Frank, who helped arrange her clemency push, said the prosecution was meant to scare every other clerk in the country away from questioning election integrity.

“The clerks are not kings. The clerks serve the people. We, the people, are the government.”

Douglas Frank, Election-integrity researcher

AI Data Centers and the Eminent Domain Land Grab

Start listening at 71:38 – Hour 2

Trent Loos, a sixth-generation Nebraska rancher, used his Wednesday segment to tie data centers to the larger property-rights fight. He pointed to Nebraska Public Power District’s request for a permit on the R-Line, a transmission project that would run from Gothenburg north through the pristine Sandhills, and warned that the underserved-areas justification echoes the script used in the failed Heartland Greenway carbon pipeline pitch. Loos also reminded Kim that one bad season at the Broken Bow municipal power plant collapsed a town’s local generation into the Custer County Power District, the same centralization arc he sees in water and electricity nationwide.

The numbers, Loos argued, do not justify the scramble. Even one early hyperscale facility in Ellendale, North Dakota, was projected at full build-out to use seven times the round-the-clock electricity of the city of Denver, and forty percent of the data centers operating today sit in the Colorado River watershed. The closed-loop cooling story is misleading, he said, because a single closed loop can hold thirty million gallons of water and still require about ten gallons a minute of make-up. And the U.S. infrastructure already built is only running at seventeen percent of capacity, which raises the question of why every county he hears from has a new hyperscale proposal at its door.

Loos turned from grid impact to the human cost. On a recent episode of his own daily Rural Route program, he hosted industrial hygienists Tammy Clark and Kristen Meghan Kelly after a Sedgwick County, Kansas, symposium documented 73-decibel readings inside a family’s home near a data center, the equivalent of standing on a runway with planes departing nonstop. He recounted truck drivers required to surrender phones and sign nondisclosure agreements just to deliver a pallet, citizens arrested at hearings in Oklahoma and Michigan for speaking too long, and two of his Kansas friends facing terrorizing charges for organizing public opposition. The push, he concluded, does not feel like normal infrastructure rollout.

Beyond the federal subsidies, Loos described a second hidden cost at the property-tax level. When a developer pays 80,000 dollars an acre for ground that would otherwise sell at 1,200, the new assessed value drags every neighbor’s tax bill up alongside it, and the developer often pockets a property-tax abatement on top. Loos named President Trump as the number one federal champion of AI data centers, pointing to the May 2025 Saudi Arabia trip with industry executives, the December 11, 2025 executive order ensuring a national policy framework for artificial intelligence, and the federal preemption language in the original House version of the budget reconciliation bill that the Senate later stripped out. Kim told listeners that this is a conversation that conservatives who like other parts of the Trump agenda still need to take to the President.

“Eminent domain is on steroids, and it must be shut down.”

Trent Loos, Rancher and rural-affairs commentator