The QTS Water Story Is Real. It’s Just Not About QTS.

Over the past week, the QTS data center campus in Fayetteville has become a national news story. Politico reported it first. Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, The Verge, The New York Post, Fortune, The Daily Caller, and outlets I had never heard of before this week all followed. The headlines are some variation of the same theme: A massive data center in Georgia secretly used 30 million gallons of water during a drought without paying for it.

Public concern about data center water usage is legitimate. The industry uses a lot of water. Communities have a right to ask hard questions about whether local infrastructure can keep up with what is being approved. None of that is in dispute.

But the specific story that went national this week is built on a county document that the county’s own top administrator has since said does not accurately describe what happened. And nobody outside of Fayette County seems to have noticed.

This column is about how a misleading letter from the Fayette County Water System became the evidentiary spine of a national scandal, what county leadership has said on the record about why the letter was misleading, and who in our local government needs to answer for it.

What Actually Happened

The Citizen‘s reporting, published Monday by editor Ellie White-Stevens, lays out the timeline based on interviews with Fayette County Administrator Steve Rapson and Assistant County Administrator Jason Tinsley.

Fayette County Water System was in the middle of replacing roughly 33,000 water meters across the county, transitioning from an older Beacon system to a new Advanced Metering Infrastructure system that allows for remote reading. During that transition, the meter serving one of the QTS hookups was missed in the billing rotation. The county believed the meter was being read electronically. It was not. The error went uncaught for approximately six months.

Once the county identified the gap, QTS was billed retroactively. The total came to about $147,000. Roughly $100,000 of that was attributable to the single six-month meter read that has driven most of the national headlines. QTS paid the bill.

That is the entire substance of the underlying event. A meter that should have been read was not. The customer was billed once the problem was found. The customer paid.

The Letter

The reason this episode became more than a billing correction is a May 2025 letter from Fayette County Water System Director Vanessa Tigert to QTS. The letter stated that one meter had been installed “without the knowledge or inspection” of the county water system. It referenced millions of gallons of water associated with that connection. Read in isolation, the letter looks like documentation of corporate misconduct.

Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation. Rapson’s exact words were, “It’s not like they put a meter in, threw a camel net over it, and we didn’t know they put the meter in.”

He also acknowledged that the letter created an impression that was not justified by the facts. “If you read the letter, I can see how someone can interpret it that way,” Rapson said. “Because the letter kind of has that vibe.”

Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.

So the document at the center of the national coverage was sent in haste by the official who now says she may not have had all the facts, contradicted on its core claim by the county administrator who oversees her department, and acknowledged by both of them to be at least partially inaccurate.

That is a problem. Not because Vanessa Tigert is a bad person. I do not know her. I have no reason to question her work generally. But she runs a department responsible for water service to tens of thousands of residents and businesses, and she wrote a letter that turned out to be misleading on the most important factual claim it contained. That letter is now part of the basis for a national news cycle that has damaged the reputation of the Fayette County government and the largest single taxpayer we are likely to ever have.

The Operational Failure Underneath The Letter

Even if the letter had never existed, the underlying operational failure deserves serious scrutiny.

The Fayette County Water System lost track of a meter serving its largest commercial customer for six months. They failed to invoice millions of gallons of water. The problem was not caught by any internal billing review. It was not flagged by any meter audit. It surfaced only because residents in the Annelise Park subdivision complained about low water pressure, and even that connection turned out to be misleading. Rapson noted that the resident whose complaint kicked off the investigation was on a private well rather than a county connection, which means their pressure issue was not actually caused by QTS at all.

The county has cited the scale of the smart meter transition and limited commercial metering experience as factors. Those are explanations. They are not excuses. If a residential customer underpaid their water bill by six months, the county would not respond with empathy about how busy the system has been. They would shut off the water.

The Fayette County Board of Commissioners should be asking, publicly and on the record, what changed after this incident. Has the county implemented commercial meter audits? Has the AMI transition been completed? Are large commercial customers being treated with the same oversight as a homeowner who runs an irrigation system?

What The National Coverage Got Wrong

Several specific claims have been repeated across the national coverage that do not match what county officials have said on the record.

The framing that QTS is the largest water consumer in the county is not accurate. The City of Fayetteville is typically the largest consumer of Fayette County water. The framing that residents were rationing water during a drought while QTS consumed freely is not accurate. Fayette County has not implemented mandatory water restrictions during the relevant period. The framing that QTS got a sweetheart rate is not accurate. The company pays a commercial construction water rate that county officials say is approximately double the residential rate.

The framing that current usage is somehow above what was approved is not accurate either. QTS Chief Operating Officer Ryan Hunter told The Citizen that the campus has operated within the water-use estimates submitted as part of its Development of Regional Impact review, which is the binding state-level review process for projects of this scale. His direct quote was, “We’ve only done the things that we’re allowed and legally permitted to do.”

Some of these false framings mirror the public statements of James Clifton, the local attorney who is running for the Fayette County Board of Commissioners and who obtained the May 2025 letter through a public records request. I have written about Clifton’s pattern of dishonesty multiple times already, and I do not need to relitigate in detail here. But Clifton posted the letter on Facebook with commentary that accused QTS of stealing water. He has been quoted by E&E News claiming that residents were told to stop watering their lawns while QTS drained the county dry. That claim does not appear to be supported by the actual record of county water restrictions during the relevant period.

What Clifton also did (and what is worth saying plainly) is sucker the national media with the same playbook he has been running locally for the better part of 2026. He took a document, stripped it of context, posted it publicly with incendiary framing, and watched his story travel exactly the way he needed it to travel days before his primary election.

The irony is that the actual accountability story is one a county commissioner could do something about. The Board of Commissioners has direct oversight of the water system. The Board could ask Rapson and Tigert publicly what went wrong. The Board could require a review of commercial billing controls. The Board could ask why a misleading letter went out without internal review. None of that is in Clifton’s platform. He has the real accountability story sitting in his hand, and he is using it as a prop for a different fight.

What QTS Actually Is As A Water Customer

The other piece of context the national coverage has mostly omitted is what QTS will look like as a long-term water customer.

QTS currently uses less than 1% of the Fayette County water system’s daily production capacity. That usage reflects an active construction site with roughly 8,000 workers on the campus during peak periods, two active concrete plants, multiple large building foundations, and seven bridges under construction. It is, by any reasonable standard, the largest construction project in the history of Fayette County. Of course the water usage is significant right now. That is what 8,000 workers and two concrete plants look like in terms of water demand.

Once the campus is operational, the cooling system uses a closed loop. Niki Vanderslice, the Fayette County Development Authority president, has noted publicly that the long-term water consumption is comparable to fewer than 100 typical homes. Rapson told The Citizen he expects QTS will not rank in the top ten water customers in the county once construction is complete. The campus could have been 1,200 homes drawing residential water on the same 600 acres. It will instead be a facility using closed-loop cooling that consumes a fraction of that, while paying a commercial rate that is roughly double what those 1,200 homes would have paid per gallon.

You can hate data centers if you want. You can hate the electricity usage, the construction traffic, the cultural drift toward AI, the loss of trees, the noise. None of those positions is unreasonable. But the specific water usage story that has been making the national rounds is not what is actually happening here. The reality is closer to a typical industrial water customer that pays a higher commercial rate and operates within approved limits.

Who Is Accountable

The question I keep coming back to is this one. Fayette County government created the conditions for this entire episode. The water system lost track of a meter. The water system wrote a misleading letter. The water system has not, to my knowledge, publicly corrected the inaccurate framing that letter helped create, beyond what Rapson and Tinsley said in The Citizen this week.

Nobody appears to be in any kind of trouble. Nobody has resigned or been reassigned. The Board of Commissioners has not, as far as I can tell, scheduled any kind of public review of how this happened. The water system director is on the record telling a national reporter that she sent a letter she may not have had the facts to send. Her boss is on the record saying that letter is misleading. And the position of Fayette County government, as best I can tell, is that everyone should move on.

I don’t know if Vanessa Tigert should lose her job over this. I do not have enough information to make that judgment. But I think the people who live here, pay water bills here, and were just dragged into a national news cycle deserve a real public accounting from their county government. They deserve to hear what changed after the meter was missed. They deserve to hear who reviews letters like the May 2025 letter before they go out. They deserve to hear what oversight exists for large commercial accounts during system transitions. They deserve a Board of Commissioners that puts this on an agenda and asks the questions in public.

The story that went national this week is real. It is just not the story most readers are being told. The story is not about a data center stealing water. The story is about a county government that lost track of its own meter, wrote a letter that turned out to be misleading, and now seems to hope the whole thing will quietly go away.

We deserve better than that.