Saline Township v. the $7 Billion Data Center: When the Developer Is the One Who Sues

Saline Township sits in Washtenaw County, Michigan, southwest of Ann Arbor, and the land at issue was 575 acres of farmland. The proposal on the table was enormous for any jurisdiction, let alone a rural township: a $7 billion campus drawing 1.4 gigawatts of power, built by Related Digital to serve OpenAI and Oracle workloads.

On September 10, 2025, the township board said no and denied the rezoning. What followed was not an appeal by disappointed residents but a lawsuit by the developer. Related Digital, joined by the landowners who stood to sell, sued the township in Washtenaw County Circuit Court. Their theory: the denial was unconstitutional exclusionary zoning under the Michigan Constitution, effectively walling a lawful use out of the township.

Exclusionary zoning doctrine was built decades ago in fights over housing, where courts held that communities cannot zone entire categories of legitimate development out of existence. Turning that doctrine into a sword for a hyperscale data center was a novel and aggressive move, and it put a township with a modest budget up against a litigant with billions behind it.

The township settled rather than litigate to judgment. Under the settlement, the project was allowed to proceed, and Saline Township received a community benefits package worth roughly $14 million, a figure reported at about 10 times the township's entire annual budget.

Read one way, that is a small government extracting real money from a project it could not ultimately stop. Read another way, it is the asymmetry of the fight laid bare: the township's realistic choices were a negotiated yes with compensation, or years of litigation against a far better resourced opponent with an uncertain constitutional question at the center. Small governments rarely take that second path, and developers know it.

The math is worth sitting with. A township whose annual budget is a fraction of what one side spends on legal fees cannot bank on winning a novel constitutional case, and losing could have meant the project anyway, with nothing in return and a legal bill on top. Settlement was the rational move for the board even if it felt like defeat to the residents who packed the meetings that produced the original no vote. That gap, between what a board can rationally do and what its residents voted for, is exactly where the community's trust fractured, and it is why the deal itself became the next thing challenged in court.

Not everyone in Saline Township accepted the settlement. Resident Kathryn Haushalter moved to intervene in the case, alleging the township reached the deal in violation of Michigan's Open Meetings Act, the state's law requiring public bodies to deliberate in public. In February 2026, the court denied her intervention, and construction proceeded.

The Saline fight has also echoed in Lansing. Michigan lawmakers introduced House Resolution 240 urging a pause on data center incentives, a sign that what happened to one township of a few thousand people is now shaping the statewide debate over how much leverage communities should have before the next $7 billion proposal arrives.

The intervention attempt matters even in defeat. It shows the last lever residents hold when their own government settles over their objections: open meetings and transparency laws aimed at how the deal was made. That lever has worked elsewhere, and it is the live theory in the pending Festus, Missouri Sunshine Law case and the Port Washington open meetings suit. In Saline it failed at the intervention stage, a reminder that timing and procedural posture can decide these fights before the merits are ever reached.

The hard lesson of Saline Township is asymmetry. A $7 billion project can spend more on lawyers than a rural township spends on everything, and a denial vote your board casts on principle can be converted, through litigation pressure, into an approval with a price tag. But the case also maps what residents can still do:

• Show up before the vote, not after. The strongest resident influence is on the front end: the zoning record, the conditions attached to any approval, and the terms of any development agreement. Our guide to fighting a proposed data center walks through that window.
• Push for enforceable terms. If a settlement or approval is coming, residents can press for binding noise limits, water protections, setbacks, and monitoring in the agreement itself, terms that create enforcement hooks later.
• Watch the process. Open meetings and public records laws still apply to settlement negotiations by public bodies. Documented process violations are the most litigable thing a resident can hold, even if Saline shows intervention is not guaranteed.
• Preserve your individual claims. A township settlement does not waive your personal rights. If construction or operations later damage your well, your foundation, or your sleep, claims like private nuisance remain yours to bring.

If a data center is being negotiated over your objections, or one already approved is causing harm to your property, an independent attorney can tell you which of these levers is still available in your state. Start with a free case review and we will connect you with a lawyer in our network who handles data center cases.