Doug Jones stopped in Lowndes County on Wednesday to share his platform calling for a one-year moratorium on data centers in the state.

The issue has quickly become a defining lightning rod in the Alabama governor race, where Jones is the Democratic nominee, after Republican nominee Tommy Tuberville pushed moving ahead with data centers in an interview.

And Lowndes County has been at the center of that conversation, as residents have fought back against plans to locate a 1,050-square-acre hyper scale data center to the county.

Jones told the crowd that the moratorium is not about squashing the idea of data centers in Alabama for good, but establishing guardrails and requiring transparency before communities decide on whether they’re worth having in their area.

“What I see happening in Lowndes County right now is really typical of what’s wrong with Alabama government,” Jones said. “Everything is done behind closed doors. There’s no transparency … We believe that this project needs to be halted in its tracks and we have offered at least a one-year moratorium on the new construction of any of these data centers around the state. We do not want to see Alabama become the dumping ground for data centers.”

That doesn’t mean communities shouldn’t get to decide on data centers in the future, Jones said. Instead, Jones outlined his stance that every project ought to have a publicly available economic impact study, and then the community should be given the opportunity to determine whether the potential benefits outweigh the costs.

Ensler, running alongside Jones as the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, said that this shouldn’t be a political issue.

“It’s not even just rural or urban,” Ensler said. “It’s something that is about doing the right thing for people and the right thing for communities.”

While the issue isn’t inherently political, Jones warned that people shouldn’t be mistaken: data centers will be on the ballot in November when selecting who to run the state for the next four years.

“(Tuberville) has said that all you folks sitting out here today, all your concerns are coming from China,” Jones said. “He also said that every concern that has been raised about this data center in Lowndes County, in his words, is ‘bullcrap.’ Well let me tell you folks, if there is ‘bullcrap’ going around here, it’s coming from Tommy Tuberville about these data centers.”