The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Speaker 1:

We all are well aware that we’re not dealing with good faith actors when it comes to the people who want to build data centers.

Speaker 2:

I currently work at a data center. That doesn’t mean that I approve of data centers. Every

Speaker 3:

Every time it storms, it seems that a bunch of lights go down in the city. I’m confused why we’re even talking about a data center if we can’t keep our own lights on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Baltimore currently has a moratorium on new data center development while a city study examines the potential impacts that data centers would have on our city. However, even though that study hasn’t been completed yet, a proposed city council bill has residents here nervous that the door is creaking open for data centers to come into the city and that city council views this as inevitable. Council Bill 260174, sponsored by city council member Felicia Porter, would require new data center projects to go through a conditional use approval process that includes a health equity assessment. Now, residents who are opposed to the bill say that the bill may be well intentioned, but what they want is a full data center ban in Baltimore, not stricter guidelines for data centers to operate in Baltimore. Now, the bill is going to get another public hearing in front of the Baltimore City Council’s Land Use and Transportation Committee on the fourth floor of City Hall on the morning of September 24th.

And that meeting is open to the public. Now, I was there in the room during the last public hearing on Council Bill 260174, which took place on August 27th when the bill was reviewed by the Baltimore City Planning Commission and residents were given a chance to voice their public comments. Now, the planning commission ultimately declined to support the bill and opposition from members of the public to data centers of any sort was frankly overwhelming, but you don’t got to take my word for it. Watch for yourself.

Andy Ellis:

We’re here at the Baltimore City Planning Commission getting ready to hear a bill that would allow data centers to come in if they had a health equity assessment into Baltimore. This happens despite the fact that we have an existing moratorium. And so we’re here today to testify against the bill because we think that the moratorium should be extended or made into a ban so that we can stop data centers from coming into the community.

Blaire Postman:

Hi, I’m Blaire from Cat Ladies for America. I’m a resident of Baltimore and I’m here today because even though there’s a moratorium on AI data centers in the city, it seems like they’re laying the groundwork for them to allow them and allow them to come in without a lot of oversight. And that makes me very angry. Claws out!

Speaker 8:

The next item is number eight, city council bill number 26-017 zoning conditional use, health equity assessment data centers.

Councilmember Phylicia Porter,:

I am Councilwoman Phylicia Porter and I represent Baltimore’s 10th District and chair of the Public Health and Environment Committee and bill sponsor for 26-0174. The data center industry is looking at Baltimore at the peninsula, Fairfield, Hawkins Point and other industrial areas. At the same time, the federal government is accelerating AI infrastructure development and scrutinizing state and local laws. It regards its obstacles to that development. This creates a real risk for jurisdictions relying only on a temporary moratorium without a permanent framework under development, which will face legal and economic pressure. Other jurisdictions have already quickly learned how that pressure can arrive. Hill County, Texas faced a hundred million dollars in federal lawsuit shortly after adopting its moratorium and rescinded under that pause under the weight of that litigation. This lesson is not that Baltimore should surrender its authority. This lesson is that Baltimore must exercise its authority carefully, deliberately, and now.

A moratorium alone without companion framework and process is exposed to taking legal challenges. Moving bill 26-0174 through this process, hearings, testimonies, amendments, votes itself is a part of that good faith planning effort that the Supreme Court has been requiring. Bill 26-0174 does not promote or green light data centers. It strategically and administratively blocks development at every step of the way that does not align with community. It creates public accountable process for deciding whether a qualifying data center is appropriate for a particular location and under what conditions it may process. This is the foundational right of the conditional use ordinance process. Traditional zoning asks whether proposed use is compatible with the land around it. A health equity assessment asks an equally important question, what will this decision mean for the people who already live in those conditions surrounding that land? Bill 26-0174 puts that cumulative reality into the decision making process of the city council before approval, not after residents become ill, household costs rise and public infrastructure is strained.

This is environmental justice and it’s basic due diligence.

Jon Laria:

There are maybe some questions, but it took me a while to sort of get this straight in my head, but there are only written submissions opposed to this bill by people who are opposed to data centers and so are you. Yes. So it’s kind of odd because they’re opposing a bill and I think the reason that’s happening is because most people are starting with the idea that there’s a moratorium, meaning zero data centers. And your bill provides a path, a difficult path, but a path to data centers. No,

Councilmember Phylicia Porter,:

That’s not correct. So it is not correct. So the study adds a legal framework attached to the moratorium right now as shared within my remarks, right now we are under a moratorium where we are legally unrestricted. We are unprotected right now under this moratorium without the conjoining health equity framework attached to it.

Jon Laria:

I’m not sure I understand.

Councilmember Phylicia Porter,:

Yeah. So no worries. So when you have a data center and we currently have, I will say if you have a data center that comes into the city that’s under a moratorium right now, if they sue Baltimore City, they sue Baltimore City saying this is unjust. We understand that data center developers are getting very crafty in their arguments. They’re arguing First Amendment rights. They are arguing other rights that provide them a pathway forward. We are seeing that those moratoriums are getting overturned. The successful moratoriums that have been upheld are always assigned and/or connected to a framework that allows good faith effort to showcase that they are doing some sort of regulatory footprint with that moratorium, not just saying that you want a moratorium. So that is the issue.

Jon Laria:

Okay. Although we are doing this study, I mean the moratorium is not just a moratorium. A moratorium that just says moratorium because we feel like it, I see the weakness that you’re describing, but a moratorium so we can study it seems like a defensible position.

Councilmember Phylicia Porter,:

It’s not because again, what was mentioned in the planning commission report was that there is a lack of health equity associated with the current moratorium. This answers that response.

Jon Laria:

But it is sort of an odd posture because I think, and people should speak for themselves, but we have all these people who are opposed to data centers and they will come and testify and they’ve submitted testimony saying no data centers because I think they see in your bill a pathway to data centers and their view is we don’t want them at all. And under the moratorium – I’m not arguing with anyone. I’m just trying to get straight because they have all these people who are going to come up and say no data centers because they perceive perhaps your bill as loosening the restrictions, which is actually not how you intend

Councilmember Phylicia Porter,:

To bill. It’s not the intent of the bill. And I will also caveat, how many data centers have an application now with the current city of Baltimore that once this moratorium goes away, if we do not have the regulatory framework in place, how many of them will be actually going through the process?

Speaker 1:

But if I’m understanding the bill correctly, basically we currently have a moratorium that is pending a health review, health study review in the findings there. And that the bill is saying we need to do something that is stricter than a review and stricter than a moratorium because a moratorium can be overturned. And basically the bill is saying we’re going to provide a path to a data center, but the path is going to be very difficult. And so the hope, I believe if I’m understanding correctly, is that with the difficulty of the path, the data center should not be able to be built unless it passes very strict scrutiny that it likely will not pass. My concern as a citizen of Baltimore is this. I understand we all know full well, we cannot legislate the hearts and minds of people. We cannot put into a bill.

We all have to be nice to each other. However, we all are well aware that we’re not dealing with good faith actors when it comes to the people who want to build data centers. We’ve already heard testimony that there are people in rooms looking, combing through every law, probably across the country with fine tooth combs to see where they can actually exploit loopholes. And my concern is a citizen of the city and someone who cares about the city, who has young people who I care about in the city, who I want them to grow up in a place with clean air, clean water, not having the sound pollution and the headaches and all the things that come with having a data center in their vicinity. My concern is that if we know that we’re dealing with bad faith actors, then is it not our responsibility as citizens and as people in government to deal with the world that we have and not the world that we want to be?

You know what I mean? Deal with the people who we know are building these, which are bad faith actors and not deal with the fantasy of, oh, well, it’s going to be really hard so people aren’t going to be able to pass the test when people are looking to do everything they can to subvert every possible obstacle to getting these built.

Speaker 2:

So I’m a longtime Baltimore resident, electrician with IBW. I’m here to speak against obviously data centers. Obviously the contradiction here is that majority of the work for the IBW right now is data centers. I currently work at a data center. That doesn’t mean that I approve of data centers. One of the things that I think that we’re all missing here is that Baltimore is a city that has suffered from de-industrialization for a long period of time. Obviously the shutdown of General Millers, the shutdown of Bethlehem Steel. What we could be talking about instead of wasting our time with this is we could be thinking about how can we generate the power that the grid demands for something like this. We could be talking about solar farms, wind generation, be talking about battery storage. If you look at PJM’s own records, they say that Baltimore and the mid-Atlantic region is at risk of rolling blackouts, as others have said, by 2028.

Obviously our grid needs investment. Our infrastructure needs investment. The city needs investment. Investment from Google Meta does not solve our issues. If we actually care about having a city that functions, we’re going to need to be thinking about where are we putting power, not where are we taking power to? It’s really just that simple. And on that topic, if we’re talking about actually maintaining a labor force, we should be talking about how do we get the young people in our city into the trades that this type of work demands by doing some type of local hire mandates, something to make sure that our young people are not just left in the wind. Roughly 25% of young black men in the city aren’t working. Why are we not talking about what we can be doing for our city? It pains me. I just see no solutions, but we’re talking about something that can help billionaires become trillionaires.

Speaker 10:

Baltimore ordered the nine month study specifically required to recommend conditional use standards for data centers, yet this bill is already establishing conditional use framework. Why not finish the study and let the evidence inform the legislation? Second, under this bill, the company seeking approval prepares the health equity assessment evaluating its project’s potential health and environmental impacts. Subjection C9 even requires that applicants to explain the compelling public interest in its own project would serve. When a company has financial stake in an outcome, relying heavily on evidence prepared by that same company creates a conflict of interest. Why isn’t this assessment independent from the applicant seeking approval? Where is the scientific independence in this process? Finally, if this legislation is truly about putting community first, where is the community process when this hearing is being held in the middle of the day? As other people have stated, my friend, she had to leave.

Many working class Baltimoreans cannot take off to participate. So we are urging that this study be completed, that we require independent assessment, give affected communities meaningful participation. Please oppose this bill and enact a ban on data centers.

Blaire Postman:

I’m a 29 year resident of Remington in Baltimore. I want to tell you about a new building that’s being built. I know this hearing is not about that, but it’s relevant. This new building is going to use more energy than Remington and Charles Village combined. It required the building of a new electric substation. It’s going to be as big as the convention center. It’s on the edge of Stony Run, ground not appropriate for such a large building requiring very deep pilings. It’s displacing animals already. There are deer on my street. For the first time in 29 years, there are deer on my street. My street is five blocks from any wooded area. Deer are walking five city blocks to come to my street to eat all my flowers. I don’t care that they’re eating my flowers because they’re hungry. This building also has a truck road.

It’s going to result in this destruction of over a hundred trees. There was strong community opposition to this building. We were told that this building would not be a data center. I personally don’t know if it’s a data center. The amount of power it’s using, the size of it makes me wonder. So I have some questions. How did this happen? What’s the definition of a data center? And I just want to say that’s why I want to ban. I don’t believe this is a legal issue. I believe it’s a trust issue. There are bad actors. The megas of the world are bad actors and often our representatives do not support us. Odette supported our community. We voiced our opposition and yet Zeke Cohen voted for this and said data centers are inevitable and we need them.

Speaker 11:

I want to also remind everybody that people in Baltimore City, many, many are living on the edge. They’re living week to week. They’re living month to month already. Now, data centers are needed for AI. So you have AI and data centers working together. For some reason, we’re rushing into unregulated, unplanned black box of technology. I don’t know why, except I think it’s the investors who are creating this, creating this need and creating this bubble. So we have people, regular people striving to just get by. AI on the one hand is displacing jobs. It has displaced jobs. Everybody involved in AI says it’s going to massively destroy jobs. Sam Altman bragged about it. On the other hand, we have data centers which have raised utility rates for people around the city. As they’re built, they will raise more utility rates. Now we have people who are barely getting by.

What happens to them?

Speaker 3:

I love Baltimore. It’s a fantastic city. Fell in love here. We’ll have lots of friends and I’m connected to a lot of local art communities. It’s an important city to me and everyone in this room. And I say that because there’s a lot of conversations going on about water, about power. Every time it storms, it seems that a bunch of lights go down in the city. I’m confused why we’re even talking about a data center if we can’t keep our own lights on. I see streets and potholes all over the place and I would really like Baltimore to be a city that is ready for something like a data center. And to be clear, I want a ban on data centers.

But if I’m looking at the infrastructure we currently have just to support homes, just to support me, just to support my friends and family using regular water, I turn the heat down on my water heater. I’m doing what I can to try to make sure that I’m a good citizen in a drought, in a moment of contention. So I am asking council to put a ban on data centers, period, until we deal with potholes, until I can drive my car and not worry about it, period, until we can deal with power outages after storms, until we can make sure that all of our neighbors have access to grocery stores that are healthy for them in their local neighborhoods.

Speaker 12:

I’m a longtime participant in Baltimore’s professional filmmaking community. I’m also a longtime member of IATSE Local 487. So I think I’ll kind of address my concerns in terms of in sort of a cinematic fashion with a metaphor of sorts. When I think of the evolution of data centers as a topic of debate in the public consciousness, I can’t help but think of vampires as a metaphor for what they offer, both in how they mystify the impressionable and how they have the power to leach resources and destroy communities. When I look at this bill, it almost feels like they’re saying, “Hey, vampires want to come to Baltimore. We want to lay the groundwork to only allow the right vampires to come into the city. Vampires are risky. We want to make sure we know what a vampire is and then we want to make sure we get the old money vampires who have accumulated their wealth over hundreds of years and only bite certain kinds of people, maybe vampires that’ll make some of us super hot and young forever.

We want the best vampires for the community.” I don’t think I’m alone when I think of that and I go, “What if we just did no vampires?

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

So we are here at Eddie Conway’s front porch, which is, we call it People’s Museum. I’m here with Dominque Conway, the wife of Eddie Conway. Tell our audience what Eddie Conway meant to you or who was Eddie Conway to you?

Dominque Conway:

That’s really, that’s hard to sum up, to be quite honest. Eddie was so many things to me and so many other people, but Eddie was, quite honestly, he was my hero as he was to many other people. He was a Black Panther. He was somebody who also served 44 years in the Maryland prison system and didn’t allow that time to break him. During that time, Eddie worked with hundreds of men in the prison system, many of whom have come out and done their own programming and continued to do really great things in the community. So at the end of the day, Eddie was just a man. But he loved people. He loved humanity and he exuded that. He loved nature. He loved animals. He exuded that pretty much in everything that he did. And I wanted to capture some of that. I wanted to capture his legacy.

I feel like it’s very important for us to own our narratives and to give those proper narratives because it’s easy for many people to just see Eddie the icon. I want them to see Eddie the man.

Mansa Musa:

Talk about how this came about in your mind and how it became a vision for people who could see.

Dominque Conway:

Well, I wasn’t even planning to come back to Baltimore. You know this, right? But I don’t know. I woke up one day, I saw this house online and thought about all the things we’ve talked about, what we want to do, and it was the perfect place. Also, I think at that time I felt like we need to do something to really preserve his legacy. I have a lot of documents, a lot of papers, a lot of things that need to be archived. And I’m like, we need to do that. It would be easy to say, oh, maybe they should go to a university. But I think we need our own people’s archives. We need our own spaces where we not only celebrate and remember, but we tell accurate histories of resistance, of black liberation in particular, but not even limited to that, the experience of indigenous people, the experience of Latino people.

We need to be able to own our narratives and share those stories with youth, with people in the community. One of the young men who’s going to perform today, he’s doing spoken word. We’ve been telling him, Hey, this is your space. Host spoken word events here. So we’re looking to get people in to just do what they want to do. We have a small theater group that meets here at times and just comes together to do storytelling. So we’re just opening the space up and wanting the community to come in.

Speaker 3:

So this is real news. So let me give you some real events. Mr. Conway, I call him Mr. Conway. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like that. From day one, we met inside a prison. I was doing youth work and he was doing outreach work inside the institution and someone had a good idea for us to come together. And right off the top, when I met him, immediately we connect. Immediately, he was everything that I read about, everything everyone told me about real charismatic, real intelligent and planning. And our first encounter was straight away about the people. And day one, we established a curriculum called Friend of Friends, which was a grassroots program inside the institution that developed outside here to where we at today.

Mansa Musa:

And you said that Eddie was instrumental in helping people constantly go in prison. And that’s where I met Eddie at. And to a point, as you’ll talk to some other brothers today to resonate this point, Eddie was responsible for a lot of us getting political education. And when you look at the time that he came into the Maryland prison system, what was going on in this country, a lot of people was resisting the establishment in society and they were putting him in prison. When Eddie came in the prison system, he didn’t come in the prison system. I’m Eddie Conway. I’m here to change. I’m the natural of the Maryland prison system. No, he came in, I’m trying to get out of prison. But the conditions made him be who he is. He responded to the conditions. Condition was so horrendous that he started educating. And one thing he said in his book, COINTELPRO, the greatest threat ever say agitate, educate, organize.

This is what he’s saying that this was a model that he want people to understand how they look at things. So I’m an example of the impact that Eddie had on people. When I got out, it was no brainer for me to fall in ranks, to become a part of this process. This house right here, if I got out tomorrow, I would be in. If I got out a year from tomorrow, I would be here. Wherever we at in this space, wherever Eddie or Dominique is doing something, we in that space. So that’s what Eddie pretty much, like Dominiqu said, it’s hard to sum up for Eddie, but we try to get people to understand that Eddie was a human being and a man and our hero always got different views on him. But at the end of the day, Eddie was a person that loved our people and did everything humanly possible to get our people to understand their right to self-determination.

Speaker 4:

I was working in the library. He comes up to get science fiction books like Star Track and stuff like that. I used to be like, “That’s nothing revolutionary.” He says, “It is. These are the things that’s going to come. This is information that was redone, replayed and put into a book.” He said, “It’s a lot of information inside fiction and it’s the history wrapped up in fiction.”

Speaker 5:

So let me first start off by saying friend of a friend. When I first learned about Friend of a Friend and I asked where the name came from, I was taught that the name came from the times of slavery and underground railroad with Harriet Tubman. People just couldn’t go knock on anybody door because the Underground Railroad was a group of people or a system of people that helped people along the road on the way to freedom. So when people would knock on the door, they just couldn’t say anything random. So when they would ask who was it, you would say a friend of a friend. And that’s how we knew that the people were official. That was the secret code. So when we say a friend of a friend, we speaking about family, we speaking about unity. We speaking about a safety net, a safety system where we could come to and be whole as family and put ideas together, think tanks, so to speak.

Speaker 4:

Eddie Conway was like a mentor and a father to me. I came in the Maryland Penitentiary Act the age of 22 years old, stayed in prison for 28 years. And during that time, Eddie Conway gravitated to me and pulled me in tight and gave me some things that I could actually make better decisions with. And ever since then, he had me under his wings.

Speaker 3:

So our experiences have always been from four different institution. Me and Eddie Conway had a different relationship. I think everybody would say the same thing had a different relationship. Him and I shared a mutual common ground about young individuals and the growth and development of young guys in prison as well as society. So our relationship was trying to build that gap between prison and society. And everything that he represent was about the community.

Mansa Musa:

So we was doing libation in Gilmore Projects and honor Eddie and our ancestors. And a guy rolled up that was on a bicycle and he was a little kid when they first moved down Gilmore and Dominique said, “Man, he was a pain.” And this is what he said. He rolled up, he seen Ms. Dominique. And this is what I said. I sai, “What she means?” Now Ms. Dominique was good. So this is an example. This guy just came out, he’s still in the neighborhood, but his memories of what we was doing in Gilmore Projects is memories of us recognizing him and saying, “You got worth, so what do you want to do with your worth? We’re here to help you maximize on your worth.”

Speaker 4:

So from that, I paid a lot of close attention to Eddie and he showed me. During that time I was already a member of the Black Gorilla family and field marshal. So I had a real good rapport inside the prison with every organization, every gang. And Eddie gave me a way to construct a unified effort of prisoners to keep down the trouble, the violence, keep down a lot of the unnecessary stuff that take place in prison with a lot of our youth. So when I got released. Well, he got released first and I was a facilitator in the program in which he created him and Ms. Dominique, friend of a friend. I was a facilitator. And it was from the facilitation that led me to college, from college out here in the street into college and to running my own business. If it wasn’t for Eddie, I’d probably still be in prison acting crazy.

So I loved him for that and he guided me all the way until his last breath. So I respect it and here I am doing the work that he taught me to do.

Speaker 5:

Oh man. So Mr. Conway was, he was one of a kind. He was exceptional. It is such a blessing when you can learn from people who experience historical times, who lived through the movement, to be able to garner that wisdom, to be able to be blessed with that type of information. I know that I was totally blessed. It’s sad to say, but I found my best leaders inside of prison. Mr. Conway was definitely one of the best of them. I learned a lot from Mr. Conway. He was a leader. He was a man. He was moral. He was principled. He was exceptional in his walk. He was consistent. He had values. He had knowledge to distill. Whenever you ask, he was ready to give a blessing. He was always strong. He always stayed 10 toes down. So nothing but mad love and much respect for Mr.

Conway, a living legend. Well, he’s passed, but he’s still a living legend. His spirit lives on through all of us.

Speaker 3:

He was genuine how his approach and how he did things and how he organized, how he was able to organize people was one of the things that stuck out a lot about Mr. Conway, right? How he was able to organize. Me, myself, I was still in prison when we lost Eddie, so I didn’t get an opportunity to work with him while he was out there, but I was still working beside him while I was still incarceration because he still kept his hands inside the institutions while he was flying throughout the country, building up the communities. I still was inside holding it down for him and his name along with his wife, Dominique. But I would like to say our experiences and he left a lasting impression on me about how we should build, how we view education and how we view our community and the young people just growing up in it.

And that last impression he left, man, is really profound, if I could say the least. He impart a lot of information on me and a lot of history. That’s one of the things I will say as well, that know your history so it won’t repeat itself, but if it does repeat itself, it repeats itself in a proper way. So that’s some of the things that I would like to say he imparted on myself personally is history and how to deal with the people based upon that. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. But I miss him. I really do miss him. I wish he was here now to view some of the things that all of us collectively as a group, because we was a family. And now that we all out here together and we building together, we missing our hierarchy. We really missing our hierarchy out here.

Even though the sister here, she holding down on his presence, we holding down his presence, but we could feel the emptiness of his not being here, although we do feel like he’s here with us.

Dominque Conway:

Right now in particular, obviously I miss Eddie every day. That’s personal, that’s love. But politically, I miss Eddie because he had such a keen analysis about everything and just the information he would provide about what’s happening in the present. But also because he had that history, he had that history of being part of the resistance, being part of a movement that was the vanguard of the revolution at the time. He had so much information, but I think it is critical. So many people are passing away. Ward Churchill, for example, was a giant. Ward is gone. So it’s really more important, I think now than ever for us to be engaging and working in multi-generational ways, which is really a very traditional way of working in say black, indigenous, and Latino communities. We have to really return to that and not see young people as a separate group.

Age is real, but generation is a social construct too. So we have to break that down and really engage, like I said, in a more multi-generational.

Mansa Musa:

And we look at all revolutionary. Malcolm was young. Huey, Bobby, Lou Bobby Hunt, they was young. These were young people that had big ideas and got together and organized their thinking around changing social conditions. And I’m with Dominique on that.

Speaker 5:

So of course I got to acknowledge and honor Ms. Dominique Conway as well, the matriarch, who is our Harriet Tubman in these days and time, who is one of my teachers. I’ve learned from a lot of women, but I would say that Ms. Conway, Ms. D taught me a lot just about self and acknowledging and having race pride and being a linchpin and a leader and what it takes and means to be a leader. So I couldn’t go do this brief interview without saying, thank God for Ms. D, because Ms. D was angel in my life and still continue to be. So much respect to her, Eddie First Lady, and thank you for having me.