Though I’m writing a larger article to be more specific about the issues of data centers, I wanted to get my interview with some of my neighbors about a possible data center landing in our town of Luther, Oklahoma, up on the website.
Recently, it’s come to our attention that our town had been approached by a company called Beltline Energy. They are headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and have been creating solar installations for a number of years. In fact, all their solar installations are referred to as “farms” and include information about how it was a “converted” from some kind of actual farm – timber farm, peanut farm, or simple agricultural property – and how the “conversion” was, “for this private landowner to create consistent, recurring lease revenue for 20+ years”. Because it’s always about money – not the environment and most certainly not about neighbors.
Apparently, Beltline Energy created some kind of application for their solar “farms” that they believe translates to running a data center so, guess what? Yes, they are wanting to “convert” their business to building data centers.
Just think, little Luther’s (the Census has us listed as under 2000 residents) farmland could be the guinea pig for Beltline Energy’s NEW data center model. That’s gotta be good, right? (insert eye-roll).
Now, let’s think further, this company doesn’t make their investor/investors available. On their website it says, “Beltline benefits from a single, well-capitalized development partner.” Who is that? Shouldn’t we be able to find out if we want? After doing a pretty thorough search of the internet, I couldn’t find anything about who was providing their funding source. More than likely taxpayers – in the way of a tax credit of some kind – will be at least part of the funding source.
As I said, I’m working on a larger article about data centers and I will write more about the ridiculous amount of taxpayer dollars some are getting, and the schemes being put in place to make sure these data centers are seeming to return an ‘investment’ to their surrounding community, when in actuality, it’s more a return to taxpayers what was taken from them for the initial tax break.
For now, below is a video of the Town of Luther meeting shot by local activist and donkey milk dairy owner, Saundra Traywick during which the ‘idea’ of the data center was broached. Terry Arps is the Mayor of Luther.
We attending Lutherites didn’t know at the time of this meeting that Mayor Arps had signed a non-disclosure agreement with Beltline before entering the meeting. It is interesting to hear him say numerous times how transparent and open this process will be. How transparent can a process be under an NDA?
Our video can be found on both our YouTube and Rumble channels, but I’ll embed it below for ease of viewing. Below that, I will embed the NDA and the emails resulting from the FOIA request. I will also leave you with the following list of concerns for ANY data center:
How much water will it use?
How much energy will it use?
How much noise will it make? (The Mayor has suggested it will make less than the Red Bud Power plant less than a mile from many of our residences and the site to which the data center will be adjacent – sadly, that is often quite loud)
Where will the money come from to build it?
What are the regulations from the state or federal government surrounding anything having to do with the data center (spoiler: there are none)
How exactly will the data center provide the money to the community they are promising? Is it just a refund on tax revenue offsets?
Will there be any kind of pollution associated with the data center?
Obviously, there are many more questions, but below are the podcast and the documents as promised.
Wednesday, April 2nd (2025), former Oklahoma State School Board Member, Kendra Wesson, joined us to talk about all the things – what she felt like after Governor Stitt (King Stitt) fired her from the school board, how she got the news, the frustration she felt at her firing – was it for political drama and NAEP scores, or because she was ‘hurting’ kids – and what she learned from her years of serving.
Our conversation was wide-ranging and covered a lot of ground between politics and education and I truly suggest you watch the whole thing. It really was a great interview. You can find the full interview on our Rumble and YouTube channels.
Because I’m still angry about her firing, I would just like to remind everyone that, King Stitt – as I like to call him, because Kings do whatever they want whenever they want, without a care in the world as to the ramifications – has a truly ‘off-with-your-head’ governing style (don’t forget, one of his houses burned down so he fired the head of the Oklahoma Forestry Service much to the anger of Oklahoma firefighters who apparently loved the guy) and because of this, removed one of the hardest workers in the state from that board. I hope that fact is NEVER forgotten. I hope that’s his legacy – that he acts first, doesn’t get all the facts and does what he wants. But enough of my rant about our lame duck governor.
At any rate, as usual, Kendra was exceptionally poised and graceful throughout the interview and it was clear that her time on the Board gave her perspective she hadn’t had previously. We talked about school boards several times – and those are the things we’ll cover in the clips because it’s such important information. For example, in the clip below we all talk about how important school boards – and even other boards. Why are ‘regular’ people not on these boards? Why not moms and dads? Why is it always business associates or cronies? Kendra and I both have seen many people sitting on boards who don’t VALUE their job. It’s just padding their resume. Few on a board really do the work. And since the boards aren’t doing the work, that puts the oneness on CITIZEN to go to ALL board meetings to keep the members accountable to doing their jobs. “It’s just one meeting a month,” as Kendra says!
In the clip below, Kendra calls us all out – school board elections are one time a month, but we should be going to the meetings EVERY MONTH. Holding the board accountable is the job of The People. If we only show up at election time, it’s like coming into a play after intermission! We’re far, far behind at that point. It’s a YEAR ROUND JOB.
Though is is truly an AWFUL miscarriage of justice that Kendra Wesson is no longer on the State School Board, she has learned a whole lot in the process and that will not only make her stronger, but allow her to make US stronger as she educates us on her lessons!
In fact, we’ll have Kendra back with Sherrie Conley on Wednesday, May 21st! You won’t want to miss that!
Granted, in a recommended appropriation budget of 10,060,793,526 for 2024, a million dollars here and a million dollars there, isn’t that big a deal – it’s chump change.
But then again, every dime of this money is taken by force from a working citizen of the state, ostensibly to provide services to the taxpayer – not to enrich the multibillion dollar corporations of billionaires – even ones that make Oklahoma their homes.
Let’s take Paycom, for example. Paycom is an online payroll company created by Oklahoman, Chad Richison. Here is a bit about Mr. Richison from Forbes.
As you can see, Mr. Richison is personally worth over 1 billion dollars. Here are a few articles about Mr. Richison that pop up in a simple internet search:
Unfortunately, Mr. Richison is also a liberal who is not at all shy about announcing his thoughts on state policy. For example, during the COVID nonsense, Mr. Richison wrote a letter to Governor Stitt complaining about a lack of leadership on COVID and that further restrictions must be made on business and movement in the state.
Also in 2020, Mr. Richison wrote a letter to OU saying that he was pulling his advertising because the University was essentially racist and didn’t have adequate training to establish an understanding of ‘racial equity’. Not long afterward, OU became a bastion of DEI training. But that’s not all.
In yet another letter written to the Regional University Board of Reagents, Richison criticized their pick for UCO’s University President, former Republican Lt. Governor, Todd Lamb.
Why then, has the State of Oklahoma Commerce Department given Paycom Payroll over ELEVEN MILLION dollars in taxpayer funds during the years of 2024 and 2023 and, beyond that, why has it been granting them funds since 2009?
The information above is from a very useful website called, “Subsidy Tracker” by “Good Jobs First”. If you click on the hyperlink on the left side of the spreadsheet (which can be found here), it tells the origin of the subsidy. Note, on this page, apparently Texas is providing subsidies as well, though very limited. Overwhelmingly, Paycom’s incentives are Oklahoma based.
Note, the origin of the subsidy is the “Quality Jobs Incentive” program. Though the money is dispersed through the Oklahoma Tax Commission, the Quality Jobs Incentive Program is a product of the Oklahoma Commerce Department (OCD). Here’s what the website says about the program:
The Oklahoma Quality Jobs Program serves as an incentive for companies to expand or relocate jobs to Oklahoma by providing a rebate of a portion of newly created payroll in the state. The program induces the creation of well-paid full-time jobs and promotes economic development. Companies may receive benefits during the first three years of participation while working to achieve the required payroll threshold for full qualification.
How are these grants dispersed?
The agency – in this case Paycom – that wants one of the many taxpayer subsidies dispensed though the OCD, must fill out a request. Then, at some point, the OCD Incentive Approval Committee calls them in for a meeting during which the asking business may speak. After that, the Committee adjourns to an Executive Session during which they decide how much of a grant to provide the business.
There are several problems here other than the glaringly obvious:
Who is on the Incentive Approval Committee? Internet search turned up no answers, but a concerning Frontier article – Committee approves request for state jobs incentive money by company founded by Gov. Kevin Stitt. This article states that the Committee consisted (when the article was written in 2020) of Department of Commerce Executive Director Brent Kisling and Oklahoma Tax Commission Chairman Charles Prater – both of whom were directly appointed by Governor Stitt. The third board member was Dan Ross, director of capital assets for the Office of Management and Enterprise Services.
The article mentioned above, also points out the lack of transparency in this process – all of the grants given out through the Quality Jobs Incentive Program are done so through Executive Session of the Committee. The only way to find out how much any company gets is by going to the Oklahoma Tax Commission website and scrolling through the yearly Excel files housing the HUGE number of tax dollar giveaways supported by Oklahoma citizens.
On the website where agendas are stored for the various taxpayer giveaway committees, the only agendas for a program that was created in 1993 (according to the Frontier article), are from 2024 and January 2025. Even then, five months of 2024 agendas are missing. Why?
Every agenda must be scoured to find out the names of the businesses going to the OCD with their hands out asking for taxpayer dollars. There is no searchable list, so each agenda must be read individually – if it’s available for inspection on the website.
Obviously, taxpayer dollars are being provided to certain private businesses and the taxpayer – the people funding these ‘grants’ – have to go through quite a process to find out how much of their dollars are going where. How very transparent. But then, the Frontier article is about how Governor Stitt’s mortgage company was receiving grants from the Committee he peopled to make decisions about how to give away state taxpayer dollars.
Unfortunately, this is the same for Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores, Inc. According to Subsidy Tracker, Love’s has a large number of ‘grants’ given it by the state of Oklahoma for both 2023 and 2024. In fact, the taxpayers of Oklahoma have given Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS – $8,074,378 to be exact.
Tom and Judy Love, who together founded the Love’s dynasty here in Oklahoma, have both recently passed away (Tom in March of 2023 and Judy in November of 2024). Both Tom and Judy were tremendously generous with their self-made billions in their home state.
A story in the Oklahoman published just before Judy died, listed her as the second wealthiest self-made woman in America, pegging the Love’s net worth at over 10.2 billion dollars. It also provided a long and varied list of their philanthropy in Oklahoma, including Positive Tomorrows, the Oklahoma Hall of Fame and the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. The Loves were also famous for their support of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Love’s has benefited from tax credits, TIFs, grants or rebates from the states of Nebraska, Colorado, Mississippi, Virginia., Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. All of these subsidies have been a mere fraction of the 8 million dollars provided by their home state of Oklahoma, however.
In 2022, a subsidiary of Love’s, the Musket Corporation, received a $10,800,000 guaranteed loan from the federal Import/Export Bank.
One last piece of information collected by the Oklahoma Commerce Department, indicates that neither Love’s, nor Paycom is in the top 10 hiring companies in Oklahoma. Which begs the question – why are so many millions given to both multiBILLION dollar private corporations for ‘quality jobs’? Paycom is number 25 and Love’s is even lower at 31. Consequently, taxpayers are paying for job recruitment and retention for two billionaire corporations of Oklahoma billionaires that aren’t even top 10 employers in the state.
Just this week, Governor Stitt has announced that he wants to reduce and eliminate the Oklahoma income tax. That’s wonderful. No citizen of America – let alone Oklahoma – should be forced to give their hard-earned wages to their government to be redirected to private entities and other nonsense that doesn’t benefit them directly. Oklahomans should applaud that idea.
It is a cause for curiosity, however, as to how this miracle can occur until Oklahoma stops handing out the millions upon millions in tax-payer funded incentives for private business we continue to shell out on the back of the Oklahoma taxpayer, yearly.
ROPE Report – Lots of links with the clips from last Friday when Michael and I interviewed Peter Murphy. You might want to send this article to your legislator!
The Oklahoman – I’m not sure how we’re not to see this as a major conflict of interest. How does one sit on the board of an organization – certainly one like the Freedom From Religion Foundation – without that influencing your legislative votes? How do you lobby for a group and then NOT vote in a way that would further their cause on the floor of the House?
Rep. Dollens says he can do it because he’ll vote the way his constituents want, but then there’s this; Dollens’ new job will be to, “identify[ing] and advance[ing] key legislative priorities, building coalitions in strategic states and developing initiatives to counter Christian nationalism”. Interestingly, he then goes on to say in basically just the next paragraph that he is “in no way a lobbyist.” Since he just articulated the definition of lobbyist in the prior sentence, I’m very confused. Does that mean Rep. Dollens is as well?
Sooner Sentinel – The Sentinel tells us in this installment, that the ATF has been allowed access to automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data by the Guthrie Police Department. What? Essentially, just like we learned from Rep. Tom Gann’s interim study on ALPRs, the contract that Guthrie PD has signed with ALPR data group FLOCK. This is – I would hope – obviously, distressing. Police departments should not be using FLOCK because they share their data with so many other organizations. But then again, just recently the Sentinel told us how the City of Edmond refused an open records request for information on with whom exactly the City was sharing their ALPR data, so how would we really know. ALPR cameras must go IMO.
V1SUT – Well this was an interesting departure from the articles we usually share from V1SUT, but BOY was it interesting. She makes a pretty darn good argument that Lyme disease was a lab-created, warfare disease. It’s a bit long, but fascinating. When you have a minute read it. But careful though, it might red-pill you if you’re not already! LOL
Shooting The Oklahoma Breeze Substack – really, quite a great commentary on the environmental movement. It’s short and very well-written, so at least scan it. His thesis is that the climate change narrative is given to us by fools who are too arrogant and consumed by elitism to realize they are even fools. Jesus is the only person who can save the planet, so we’re sitting with fools if we believe we’re somehow going to ‘fix’ the planet via any of the climate crowd’s ridiculous nonsense. I would add, that the best way to fix the planet IMO is reducing, reusing and recycling as individuals. Also, instead of technology companies focusing on things like AI that will not only eventually harm us, but eat up massive amounts of energy, they should focus on how better to recycle the things we’re taking from the earth NOW so that more people can use them a second time.
The Federalist – YES! But it would have been nicer had they sped up the process a bit so we didn’t have to fight over boys in girls’ restrooms. With Trump coming into office, I expect that this stupidity will start to die off. If not, he – and we; in our own localities – should put the nail in that coffin. Another piece of nonsense that the Left had to dream up for their Utopian vision to be complete, so GOOD RIDDANCE.
The Oklahoman – Who really knows for certain what the Department of Educational Quality and Accountability office is doing with the state report cards. It was reported that the data had changed for the year and that cut scores had been changed, but there is nothing on the website I could find that explains how the data was crunched. If we don’t know how the data was collected, how do we know what to think of the scores? We talked to Kendra Wesson about that briefly in our conversation from last Wednesday, but even she wasn’t clear, she just mentioned that the differences in scores from then to now were not outrageous in the scores she’d spot checked.
You can scan the article to see some scores reported for mainly central Oklahoma schools.
WAIT! I just went out to find the article on Oklahoma’s cut scores only to find out that Wisconsin and Ohio changed their cut scores – I didn’t have time to look for other states. So, because the A-F grading for schools was federally mandated in Obama’s ‘Race To The Top’ program in order for schools to get federal dollars, I’m thinking there might be something going on at the federal level that sparked the change. I don’t know and don’t have time to research it I’m sorry to say, but I think the chances are good…
Real Clear Energy – YIKES! I didn’t know anything about this, but we’d better start looking to get rid of any “right of first refusal” laws that might have previously been passed, or that might be passed this year. Here’s the explanation RCE gives:
“The proposed bills would give electric utilities in these states a “right of first refusal” (ROFR) to build, own, and operate new transmission lines in their service area, preventing new projects from being competitively bid on by other energy companies. These bills would eliminate a key element of competition from the part of electricity grid development known as transmission planning.”
Oklahoma Senate Media – Although I’ve not read these bills myself yet, it looks as if these are the bills we need to help keep predators out of the classrooms and to help parents remove pornographic library books. We’ll definitely have to watch these. SB346 and SB348
The Oklahoman – I can say that this article finally has something upon which the Superintendent and I can agree fully – THE FEDERAL EDUCATION DEPARTMENT SHOULD BE SHUTTERED FOREVER.
Basically, however, this article is about Walters’ meeting with the state Senate education budget subcommittee where he submitted a request for…. drumroll please….. $3.95 billion dollars – which includes 3 million dollars Walters wants to spend on classroom Bibles.
Billion. Think on that. A BILLION dollars spent on Oklahoma public education systems graduating a vast majority of students who aren’t proficient in either reading or math. I want my money back. What a horrible return on ‘investment’ <eye roll>.
OK House Media – New Rep. Gabe Woollley has “introduced House Bill 1100, a legislative measure aimed at ensuring accountability within the Oklahoma Department of Human Services (DHS). The bill would require clear and convincing evidence to keep a child away from their parent or guardian. HB1100 would also impose felony kidnapping charges on the DHS employee who is responsible for approving the continued holding or release of a child for noncompliance.”
Not according to our friend Amber Evans – who has pulled Oklahoma voter roll data for examination.
What does this mean?
According to state law, everyone who votes in Oklahoma must be a valid elector. What is a valid elector? Watch and Amber will show you and explain.
How do these people get left on the rolls? Because they aren’t noticed by election personnel and deleted. What personnel would delete them? Personnel at either the County, or State, Election Board (SEB). Why isn’t this getting done – especially when we were just given the talking point by the state that the SEB purged 450,000 voters since 2021? That answer is unclear.
The SEB performed an official audit of the state’s Primary Elections which was released at the end of August. I urge you to review it. We are told at the beginning, “The post-election audits were conducted pursuant to the procedures developed in advance under the direction of the Secretary of the State Election Board”, but we’re not told what those procedures were or where they were located in state law, so we know nothing about the procedures used in the audit.
Were the absentee ballots checked to make sure they followed state law? I’ve said on numerous occasions that – before I was fired from the Oklahoma County election board – we didn’t check to make sure there weren’t more than 20 absentee ballots submitted by one notary as state law required. What about the notary themselves? They’re required to maintain a log of their absentee ballots for two years so their records can be checked against absentee ballots submitted to county election boards. Have any of those been audited? If not, why have the law?
Notice these things about the released audit;
Not every race was fully audited – they were ‘spot’ audited, meaning one race was audited for absentee ballots and another for precinct reports (machine tabulations) – so it was not a full audit as we were led to believe by the press release.
Not every precinct, or race, was audited.
Only certain results were printed in the audit ‘report’, the public was not provided a link to the database with the information collected. This is important because we have no way of ‘checking up’ on the results, we’re just told by the SEB what they were.
The ‘audit’ results given are not broken down. All we’re given in the ‘audit’ is a list indicating that ‘everything’ (whatever that is) matched up 100%, which results in the following questions:
how many absentee ballots were there in the race?
how many in-person voters were there in the race?
Consequently, when you stop to really examine the ‘audit’ released by the SEB, how do we really know that what we’re being told – that the primary elections were 100% accurate – is true? Where is the data? Why wasn’t the report specific in nature? All the information I mentioned that wasn’t included, could have been collected in a spreadsheet and a link provided to the public.
Again, this information doesn’t even take into consideration the VOTER ROLLS.
We were told by the Governor on September 18th, about the numbers of voters who have been purged from Oklahoma’s voter rolls since 2021. KOSU, received actual data from the Governor’s office, as it was not provided in his press release.
Look, I’m a former scientist. I understand data. This is nonsense. Again, actual data would be listed in a spreadsheet and broken down for all to see. This is meaningless data that requires us to take the SEB at their word.
The SEB insists that we have 100% accuracy in the Oklahoma primaries, however – and again – how is it that Amber found all the non-eligible electors on the Comanche County voter rolls and over 100,000 on the state rolls AFTER the multiple purges this ‘data’ represent.
But it’s not only that.
What about people who have moved into and out of Oklahoma? The clip on that topic was too large to create, but if you find the FULL LIVE video on our Rumble or YouTube account and fast forward to 34:27 and watch until about 1:13:20(ish), you’ll get a great discussion on the fact that it isn’t clear how often Oklahoma’s voter rolls are run against the National Change of Address database as per law.
Amber ran Comanche county data against the NCOA in September of last year and found that 19.3% of the registered voters in the county had moved and/or registered in another county or state. That’s a very large number of INELIGIBLE VOTERS on the rolls in that county and who’s to say if people are double voting? How would anyone know?
In addition, she also found a voter with double registration – another thing that was supposed to be in the purged data according to our Governor and the SEB. Again, without real data on the purge – which we’re not given – Oklahoma citizens are unable to examine these issues for themselves. THAT is a problem.
And one last thing that we briefly covered on the full LIVE video, how can Oklahoma have a law that says that election board members SHALL certify an election? At 28:42 on the full video, we talk about that. That’s a problem in and of itself.
The takeaway here is this: Oklahoma’s elections are probably some of the safest in the country, but are they 100% accurate as the SEB and Secretary Ziriax have asserted? No. There’s no way they could be. There are way too many unanswered questions about the number of unqualified electors on the roll according to the data Amber has pulled and analyzed.
We need to find legislators willing to make changes to Title 26 to clarify the ways in which Oklahoma’s voter rolls are cleaned and maintained. Without that, Oklahoma’s election results still can’t be guaranteed. Hopefully, after the video, that’s 100% obvious.
