Mark Cuban spent Monday telling towns to put their data center contracts out in public. “Maybe,” he wrote, “we can combine crowd sourcing and AI to create a contract that is optimal for the community, at the expense of the company building the datacenter.” That was September 7, and Benzinga carried the post. In a second post the same day, reported by Moneywise, he published a 10-point checklist called “A town’s first data center: what to require before saying yes.”
By this week a site was up at datacenters.policyframeworks.org calling itself the Open Community Benefits Agreement for Data Centers. It says it was built in response to that call, and that it is not Cuban’s: “Independent project. No affiliation with Mark Cuban is implied.” The person behind it is Ben Newman, founder of Shaper Collective, “an AI-native public relations firm in Washington, DC” that “helps causes, brands, and candidates win attention inside algorithmic feeds.” I will come back to that.
What is on the site is not a template. Its own framework page says “No draft has been published.” What it has is a library: 38 public agreements between data center developers and the places that host them, each summarized and linked to the original document. There is a gallery of ideas from those agreements, sorted by topic. There is a page that holds Cuban’s 10 points up against five real deals. And there is a form where anyone can send in an agreement or a clause for an editor to review.
That is all it is: a collection of public contracts, and a way to add to it. I think that is exactly what this valley has been missing, and I want to explain why.
And before I go further, what this is not. It is not an argument for data centers, and it is not an argument against them. It is about understanding what you are saying yes or no to before you say it.
what changes when you can compare
When a data center proposal lands in front of a city council, the council sees one project and one set of numbers, written by the company that wants to build it. There is nothing to compare it to.
Now there is something. Three of the 38 are from Arizona, all three link to the actual public documents, and here is what those documents say.
Chandler’s development agreement for a data center expansion, from 2024, says the project “may not incorporate or use any Water-Based Cooling Systems.” The old cooling towers have to be replaced with mechanical systems before the city issues a certificate of occupancy. And “a violation of the City’s Data Center Sound Requirements will be deemed a violation of this Agreement.”
Goodyear’s 2023 amendment with Microsoft ties the campus to a water right of 362.60 acre-feet a year and allows evaporative cooling in no more than three of 10 buildings. It also requires a $5 million deposit into an escrow that has to cover “at least 110% of the costs of the improvements.”
Pima County’s memorandum for Project Blue, from December 2025, commits the developer to “air cooling technology incorporating a closed-loop system,” to “commercially reasonable efforts” to match all of its energy with renewables, and to $15 million in community donations, paid phase by phase and only for the parts that actually get built.
Water, power and what the public gets are the things Coachella residents packed a town hall over in May, according to NBC Palm Springs. Two desert cities and a desert county wrote answers into contracts, and the contracts are public. A number you can point to beats a number you have to invent.
where the valley is right now
I wrote in June that a moratorium is worth exactly what it produces before it lifts. So look at the calendar.
Coachella banned large-scale data centers on August 26. Indio extended its moratorium in July and is drafting a permanent ban. Desert Hot Springs voted on July 7 to extend its moratorium to two years. Palm Springs voted on August 26 for a 45-day pause that runs through October 10, and the Palm Springs Post reported the council can extend it for up to two years while staff study water, power, city services and the mix of local employers. Councilmember Grace Garner: “It’s really important that we are cautious and thoughtful in our planning for all of these.”
Every one of those is a decision about what to require. Even a ban is a statement about terms. And here is the fact I cannot get past: as of September 11, not one of the 38 agreements is from California. KVCR reported that Coachella was the second California city to ban data centers, after Monterey Park, where voters approved a ban in June. KVCR also reported that at the June meeting where Coachella adopted its first moratorium, the council voted to terminate a utility agreement that would have brought a Stronghold Power Systems campus to the city. Two cities in this state have said no, and neither left behind a document the next city can read.
who should read it
If you sit on a city council or work in a planning department, this library is 38 sets of rules other places already wrote, with the enforcement language attached. Reading the three Arizona documents is, at my guess, a day’s work. Palm Springs has until October 10.
If you are a reporter, on September 10 we published six questions to ask before any vote. When a developer says it will pay for the substation, ask whether it will put up an escrow of at least 110 percent of the cost, because Goodyear got that. When it says it will be a good neighbor, ask whether breaking the city’s sound rules breaks the agreement, because Chandler got that. Pull the document before you print the clause. The site’s summaries of the other 35 are a starting point, not a source.
If you are a resident, the library turns a worry into a clause. Closed-loop cooling, as in Pima County. No water-based cooling, as in Chandler. Those are things you can ask your council for by name, and when you ask for something by name, you get an answer in writing.
If you run a business here, you live with these deals whether or not you signed one. Goodyear’s amendment puts Microsoft’s deposit toward the pump station and water lines the campus needs. The question for a hotel, a farm or a clinic is whether your bill rises to build their substation.
One more thing, as promised. I would not treat the site as an authority. It was built by the founder of a PR firm whose stated business is helping clients “win attention inside algorithmic feeds,” and its editors are not named. Its own FAQ says a signed agreement does not necessarily mean “every resident supports the project.” The value is in the documents, and the documents belong to no one.
what I want
Before October 10, I want every Palm Springs council member to have read the three Arizona documents, because Chandler, Goodyear and Pima County are the closest thing in that library to us. I want Indio’s draft ordinance to cite at least one of the 38 by name. And I want Coachella to send the utility agreement it terminated to that site’s form, so the next California city that gets a proposal starts from a document instead of from nothing.
And if you live in the Coachella Valley or the Inland Empire, take this to your city council, and share it with your friends and neighbors. Not to win an argument, but so that when the vote comes, everyone in the room understands what is being decided.
The library has zero entries from this state. Which of our cities fixes that first?