Mississippi's data center fight has mostly played out in city halls and at the Public Service Commission. This week it moves to a hotel ballroom in downtown Jackson, where the officials who actually cast the deciding votes will sit down for two days of briefings.

The Mississippi Association of Supervisors Minority Caucus hosts its Data Center Development Information Convening on Sept. 15 and 16 at The Westin Jackson, 407 S. Congress St., according to the caucus website (mas-mc.org). The theme is "Empowering Progressive Mississippi Leadership." Roughly 300 attendees are expected, per the event listing on starbridge.ai.

The agenda, posted as a PDF through the Mississippi Municipal League (mmlonline.com), is the document worth reading. It runs from a 9 a.m. opening prayer by Newton County Supervisor Terry Frazier through a 12 p.m. adjournment Wednesday, and it maps almost exactly who has access to county decision-makers right now.

The state gets the first word. PSC Central District Commissioner DeKeither Stamps speaks at 9:45 a.m. Tuesday on "State Regulatory Policies and Requirements." Stamps has spent the year arguing that Mississippi's oversight framework is not keeping pace with the industry; he told WLBT in June that the growth led largely by Amazon Web Services is outrunning the rules. AWS has committed more than $25 billion across Mississippi, with sites in Madison County, Ridgeland, Vicksburg and Clinton.

The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality follows at 10:15 a.m. on environmental concerns, then Mississippi State's Center for Government Technology and the Central Mississippi Planning and Development District take land use and planning at 11 a.m. The morning is a tour of state agencies. The afternoon is where the local politics live.

At 1:30 p.m., the session titled "Community Concerns: Answering All the Tough Questions" is handled by Madison County Supervisor Karl Banks and County Administrator Greg Higginbotham. Madison County is the state's most developed data center county, and it is also where supervisors approved a $48 million conference center bond this month. The people fielding the tough questions are the people who have already answered them once.

The revenue session at 3 p.m. brings in the Office of the State Auditor, the Mississippi Association of Tax Assessors and Collectors, and MSU's Dr. Jason Camp. That is the panel that matters most to a board weighing a 30-year tax exemption against a decade of school and road costs. The agenda does not list a session on water consumption, though the state's data center buildout has already prompted legislation: SB 3410, signed April 8, authorized Brandon and the West Rankin Utility Authority to contract with data center facilities for water and wastewater service.

Wednesday's schedule is thinner and more promotional. A social impacts speaker is still listed as TBD. A virtual presentation from the Brookins Institute covers rural communities. At 11 a.m., "Partnership Possibilities" is presented by Amazon, COMPASS and Taurus, three of the entities with the most to gain from county cooperation. The closing remarks come from MAS-MC President Demarrio Booth of Jefferson Davis County.

One name is conspicuously absent from the speaker list: any representative of a community that has already said no. Jackson's City Council passed a 183-day data center moratorium on July 14 by a 5-2 vote, with the delay taking effect 30 days later because the vote was not unanimous, according to WLBT and WAPT. Ridgeland adopted a 500-foot residential buffer in April. Clinton amended its zoning in June to require conditional-use permits and limit data centers to industrial zones. Those are the local experiments the convening could study. They are not on the agenda.

The timing is not accidental. County boards across the state are being asked to grant ad valorem exemptions and rezone agricultural land faster than they can hire planners to review the applications. The PSC's April decision in Docket 2026-AD-10, declining to issue a declaratory opinion sought by developer Gabriel Prado, left the private-power question exactly where the Legislature wrote it, which means the land use and tax decisions fall back to counties and cities.

The convening is billed as informational, and much of it is. But a two-day agenda is also a statement of priorities. State regulators, state agencies, a university center, a national engineering firm and three corporate sponsors get the microphone. The supervisors in the room will leave with a clearer picture of how to say yes.

The harder question is whether they leave with a clearer picture of how to say no. That answer will not come from a ballroom. It will come from the first board that votes a project down, and the lawsuit that follows.