Ban or Bargain: Two Counties, One Choice

Real Estate Insights. Success Mindset. One Step at a Time.

Issue #62 | August 2, 2026

Two counties. Same week. Same knock on the door. One said no to all of it. One said yes, but only on its own terms. Only one of them just wrote the playbook for the next ten years of deals.

🧠 Market Insights

Ban or Bargain: Two Counties, One Choice

A community in revolt can block a project. It can't bargain with one. You can't have it both ways, and this week two counties proved it in real time.

Mark Vitner over at Piedmont Crescent Capital put these two side by side in his latest note. One of them is about to find out the hard way what it gave up.

Frederick County, Virginia said no to all of it. On July 8, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to draft an ordinance banning data centers from every zoning district in the county. Months of packed public meetings got them there. Chairman John Jewell called the whole fight a distraction. Fine. Case closed.

Except it's not closed. Two projects already in the pipeline still get a hearing under the old rules. Everything filed after that gets nothing. No table. No fund. No say in what comes next, because nothing is coming next.

Effingham County, Georgia took the other road. OpenAI is building Project Camellia there, a $20 billion, 3.2 gigawatt data center campus at the Savannah Gateway Industrial Hub. The county didn't just say yes. It set terms first.

An $80 million community benefits fund the county gets to point at whatever it actually needs. Schools. Public safety. Workforce training. Up to $71 million in coding credits for Georgia students. An independent firm auditing the project every year, with the results made public. And local estimates suggest homestead property taxes could fall by roughly 40% as the tax base broadens.

Frederick picked quiet, and nothing else. Effingham picked quiet too, on its own terms, plus a fund, an audit, a tax cut, and every bit of leverage that comes from writing the deal instead of reacting to it.

Here's the piece worth sitting with: this was never a fight over land. Land is everywhere. Virginia has it. Georgia has it. Every county in this story has it.

What Effingham had that Frederick chose to walk away from is the thing a developer can't just find down the road: 3.2 gigawatts already lined up with Georgia Power, and a water plan the county could actually live with. That's the scarce piece. Not the dirt. The power and the water sitting on top of it.

Effingham knew what it was holding and negotiated like it mattered. Frederick never found out what its hand was worth, because it folded before it looked at the cards.

Dirt Dawg Take: A ban stops one project. A bargain sets the terms for the next ten years of them.

✨ The Alpha Effect

Positioning Beats Reacting, Every Time

A community in revolt can block a project. It can't bargain with one. That's not just a Frederick County problem. That's a leverage problem, and it shows up everywhere in this business.

The instinct when a deal shows up uninvited, at a zoning meeting, in your inbox, across a negotiating table, is to react. Say yes to keep the peace. Say no to make it go away. Either answer hands the terms to someone else.

Effingham didn't do either. It found its leverage before the meeting started: megawatts, water capacity, industrial-zoned acreage, things OpenAI needed and few counties nearby could deliver at that scale. Then it used that leverage to write the deal instead of just signing whatever showed up.

That's the mindset shift worth taking into your next negotiation, whether it's with a buyer, a lender, a JV partner, or your own county commission. Stop asking yourself yes or no. Start asking what you actually control that the other side needs. Position before you answer. Prediction is guessing what happens next. Positioning is deciding what happens next.

Come with terms, and you help write the deal. Come without them, and you just find out what it is.

🚀 One Step at a Time

Action Steps This Week

1. Find Your Real Scarcity

Before your next negotiation, whether it's a buyer, a lender, or your own county, list what you actually control that the other side can't get anywhere else. Power capacity. Water access. Entitlement status. Location. That list is your leverage. Know it before you sit down.

2. Draft Your Own Compact

Don't wait for the other side to propose terms first. Write down what you'd want if you were setting the deal instead of reacting to it: funded improvements, audit rights, a clear exit. Bring your own list to the table, not just your objections.

3. Call Before the Headline Drops

If there's a rezoning, a project, or a policy fight brewing in your market, get to your planning office or commissioners now, not after the vote. Early is when you can still shape what happens to your land. Late is when they tell you what happens.

Small steps compound. The counties writing the terms right now are the ones who showed up with a list, not just an opinion.

Here's to building your success, one step at a time...

from the dirt up.

Kris "Dirt Dawg" McGee 🐾

The Dirt Dawg Den