Listen Frontier

Why Tulsa is hitting pause on data centers

Data centers are coming to Tulsa. Eventually.But that momentum has hit a pause.City leaders have unanimously approved a temporary moratorium on new data center development, stepping back amid growing concerns about what these massive projects could mean for Tulsa’s power grid, water supply and long-term growth.At the same time, data centers promise jobs, investment, infrastructure and a foothold in a rapidly expanding industry. But they also come with enormous demands. So where does Tulsa go from here?On this episode of Listen Frontier, we’re talking with Tulsa City Councilors Phil Lakin and Laura Bellis about why they supported the moratorium, what questions still need answers, and what it would take for them to feel comfortable moving forward with data center development in Tulsa.Tulsa District 4 City Councilor Laura BellisDylan: What does the moratorium actually do and what does it not stop?Laura Bellis: Project Anthem’s Phase One is still moving forward, and potentially Phase Two depending on future approvals. What the moratorium does is create a nine-month pause so our planning office can update how data centers are handled in our zoning code.Right now, our code treats them like light industrial uses, which assumes they won’t have off-site impacts like noise or vibration. But that’s not what we’re seeing with large-scale, hyperscale data centers. So this pause gives us time to study best practices and update our policies.During the moratorium, no new permits can be pulled for data centers. The goal is that when it ends, we’ll have clearer rules about where they can go and whether our community has the capacity to support them.Dylan: Are there limits to what this moratorium can accomplish?Laura Bellis: This is a good first step, but it’s not a complete solution. Technology, especially AI and data centers, is evolving faster than regulation.At the city level, we can address land use and zoning, but we really need broader policy at the state and federal levels as well. My hope is that during this time, we can learn from other communities, see what works elsewhere, and start building a more comprehensive approach.Dylan: What does success look like when the moratorium ends?Laura Bellis: Success would mean we have clear definitions in our zoning code for different types and sizes of data centers, along with requirements to mitigate impacts.Ideally, we’d limit where hyperscale data centers can go and have a better understanding of how many our region can realistically support, especially when it comes to water and power. We’ll also have more information from things like the Cherokee Nation’s upcoming study and potential state legislation.Right now, we just don’t capture the nuance. By the end of this process, we should.Tulsa District 8 City Councilor Phil LakinDylan: What led you to support the moratorium?Phil Lakin: I supported it, but really as a way to take time and get policy right. The final version was the result of compromises, and that’s why it passed unanimously.Our zoning code wasn’t written with data centers in mind, and right now they could potentially be built next to neighborhoods or existing businesses. This gives us time — about 270 days — to fix that.It also allows projects already in the pipeline to continue, which was an important consideration.Dylan: How did you balance economic opportunity with community concerns?Phil Lakin: That was a big part of the discussion. On one hand, data centers bring investment, property tax revenue and franchise fees from electricity use. Those can be meaningful for the city.On the other hand, there are concerns about water use, power demand and proximity to neighborhoods. For me, the key was balance.We want to remain open for business, but we also want to be thoughtful about where these projects go. A moratorium gives us time to get that planning right instead of reacting after the fact.Dylan: What does success look like after the moratorium?Phil Lakin: The most important thing is getting the zoning code right, clearly defining where data centers can and can’t go.Beyond that, I think success is having a better public understanding of both the benefits and the downsides. A lot of people focus on one side or the other, but we need to look at the full picture.We all use data centers every day, whether it’s cloud storage, Google searches or AI. So part of this is helping people understand both the impact and the role they play in our daily lives.

Why Trump picked Markwayne Mullin for Homeland Security

Today on the Listen Frontier podcast, we’re talking about one of the more surprising political shakeups in Washington — the firing of Kristi Noem and the appointment of Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin to replace her.Noem was abruptly pushed out of her role leading the Department of Homeland Security by President Donald Trump, setting off a scramble over who would take over one of the federal government’s most powerful agencies — responsible for border security, immigration enforcement, disaster response and counterterrorism.Trump’s pick of Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin stunned many. If confirmed, Mullin would leave what is often considered one of the most secure jobs in American politics — a U.S. Senate seat — to take on a Cabinet position in an administration known for frequent turnover.To help us break down what happened, why Mullin might take the job, and what it could mean for Oklahoma politics, I’m joined by Reese Gorman.Reese is a national political reporter for NOTUS covering Congress and the Trump administration. Before that, he worked here in Oklahoma as a reporter for The Frontier.

Salty, oily drinking water left sores in their mouths. Oklahoma refused to find out why.

In our latest investigation, reporter Nick Bowlin digs into a troubling question: What happens when families report salty, oily drinking water that leaves sores in their mouths — and the state declines to determine the cause? In “Salty, oily drinking water left sores in their mouths. Oklahoma refused to find out why,” Nick traces complaints of oilfield contamination, examines how regulators responded and explains why key questions remain unanswered. In this conversation, he takes us behind the scenes of the reporting, the documents that shaped the story and what it reveals about oversight of oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma.Dylan Goforth: When you first heard about the Boarmans’ situation, what made you think this wasn’t just a private well problem but a story about the state’s oil and gas regulator? What was the moment where the story “clicked” for you?Nick Bowlin: After my initial conversations with Tammy and Chris, I sent in an open records request with the state. Once I got the files and began to read, the click happened pretty fast. I saw that officials at the OCC had found strong signs of oil and gas pollution using a number of different metrics and tests. And this was for a house that sits in the middle of a legacy oilfield, drilled in the 1940s. Old wells plugged with mud – a common practice at the time – surround their house. But all this evidence didn’t seem to lead to urgent action. The agency slow-walked testing nearby oil and gas operations and water sampling for heavy metals. And when they finally ran those tests, they found problems. People all over the state are dealing with pollution threats from historic and current oil and gas. Tammy and Chris were unusually proactive in pushing the state to help them and trying to learn all they could about their situation. If this is how the state handled the Boarmans’ case, it didn’t bode well for other Oklahomans coming to the OCC for help.Dylan: A huge part of this story relies on internal emails, test results and agency reports. How did you go about getting those records, and what was the most surprising or revealing document you found?Nick: I relied primarily on open records requests to the OCC. My first one took a while, since my request covered over a year of agency work on the Boarmans’. But after that, I could submit requests covering only a few months at a time and the agency tended to return these promptly. To my mind, the most revealing set of emails come from September 2024, after the Boarmans’ state senator got involved. His arrival seemed to spur the state to finally order long-delayed tests. I was also struck by the electromagnetic survey images: For the most part, oil and gas reporters don’t get to see the pollution we report on. Leaks happen deep below our feet, while CO2 emissions are invisible. But those images taken by the agency offered a rare and disturbing picture of the pollution plume contaminating the Boarmans’ drinking water.Dylan: There are several points in the story where agency staff appear to know more than the Boarmans do about what’s happening to their water. How did you piece together that timeline of who knew what, and when?Nick: I built out a detailed chronology, based on the records I received and interviews with the Boarmans’. It wasn’t hard to do that with the agency emails. But I also built a timeline of the evidence. There isn’t a single test that definitively proves oil and gas contamination. Instead, the state relied on an accumulation of data, evaluating things like salts, the presence of certain metals, chemical ratios and the belowground electromagnetic maps. That was a useful exercise: to see the growing pile of evidence pointing to oil and gas, compared to the agency’s handling of the Boarmans’ pollution case.Dylan: The McCoon injection well becomes central to the story. How did you figure out it might be a key suspect, and what did you have to learn about injection wells and groundwater science to understand what was going on?Nick: I looked into the McCoon simply because the state flagged it as a problem well. Internal emails noted its checkered operational history and proximity to the Boarman house. And a report commissioned by the state about the Boarman case offered a number of recommendations; the McCoon was the only nearby well singled out for further testing. But near the McCoon are a number of poorly plugged wells, all of them potential pollution threats. It’s not hard to envision these wells working together, with wastewater rising up the poorly plugged wellbores. The report I mentioned just now talks about the pollution possibly spreading through“complex pathways.” That’s the thing about these oil and gas pollution cases: they’re incredibly complex and definitively proving a culprit is an enormous challenge. The state ultimately told Tammy and Chris that it could not find where the pollution originated and closed their case.Dylan: Tammy herself becomes almost an investigator in this story, combing through records late at night. How did your reporting overlap with her own digging, and how did you verify what she was finding?Nick: Tammy has a second career as a reporter if she wants one. She probably filed more records requests than I did, and she spent many hours learning about oil and gas operations and the pollution threats they pose. In many cases, we had the same sets of documents, since I obtained her case files independently of her. So, after our interviews, it was easy to fact-check things she’d told me, and pull up the relevant documents to get to the primary source. She was also good about taking pictures of signs of the pollution around her house, helping me verify anecdotes before I began speaking to her.Dylan: You tie this one family’s ordeal to a much larger problem — tens of thousands of unplugged wells and weak oversight statewide. How did you balance telling such a personal story while also showing readers the systemic picture?Nick: This story is one in a series about oilfield pollution, produced by The Frontier and ProPublica, so I have the benefit of being able to do different types of stories about different facets of this issue. The first story in this series took an expansive, statewide view of the oilfield wastewater blowouts called purges, so, for this one, I was interested in doing a zoomed-in look at the toll of pollution on a single family. Those are the stakes of bad regulation: everyday people are harmed. But I wanted to make clear that Tammy’s story isn’t just an outlier, so we made sure to talk about the issues with legacy oilfield pollution elsewhere in the Edmond area. The West Edmond Field was one of the state’s most important oil plays in the 1940s, and now, new homes are being built on land littered with orphan and mud-plugged wells, especially in the Deer Creek neighborhood. And no one knows how much old contamination there is beneath the surface.Dylan: After months of reporting, what part of this story surprised or frustrated you the most as a reporter?Nick: I definitely felt anger at the uncertainty of it all, a lesser version of the frustration that’s been eating at Tammy and Chris for years: there’s an obvious problem with their water, the state didn’t do everything it could to investigate it and now we will likely never know the source of the contamination. And now they just have to live with it – until they can get on rural water. In that sense, the Boarmans’ are lucky. I’ve interviewed other homeowners dealing with industry pollution on their properties who have no hope of cleanup or are too far out in the country to hook up to a water system. It’s hard to witness people forced to resign themselves to such hopeless circumstances.

‘The risk is moving too slow’: How Oklahoma's government wants AI to reshape the state's economy

Frontier: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of listen frontier today. I am joined by Hart Brown, the president of artificial intelligence and transformation at Saxum. He also helped author Governor Stitt's Artificial Intelligence strategy for the state. Thanks for joining us today. I wondered if you would tell us a little bit first about yourself, your background and how you got involved in this project and in this area.Hart Brown: You bet. Coming out of school, I was doing a lot of work in what we now refer to as predictive analysis, so algorithmic based decision making, using math to help understand what's likely to happen and then make the best decisions you possibly can. I had a number of people come to me and say Hart, can you build an artificial intelligence system that can do what you do on paper in real time? I answered. I said let's find out. It sounds really interesting. At that time, there was really only one system that anybody could really use, and that was IBM Watson. And so I built an artificial intelligence system on top of IBM Watson to be able to leverage this algorithm in real time. And got very good success. Frontier: So let's talk about the governor's report a little bit. The document calls itself a forward thinking approach, which is right means, in a lot of ways, that some of it is aspirational in a sense that we're at a point where we don't exactly know where we're going to end up with AI. What are some of the concrete things that Oklahoma could do in the next six months, 12 months that are realistic to embrace AI better or better understand how it’s shaping Oklahoma?Hart Brown: It’s really important to understand that we're really talking about a longer timeline. So some elements of that are going to happen closer to a two year time frame. Some may be a little bit further out now. We're transitioning from a period of time where artificial intelligence really kind of felt like a toy. It was interesting, it was fun. We all started to use it. We downloaded the apps. We were making pictures and lots of different things. Oklahoma is in a relatively low unemployment environment, meaning it's hard for Oklahoma employers to find good people to hire, and so with that, let's use the technology. Let's grow the businesses as quickly as we can by leveraging that in a responsible and reasonable way.Frontier: Is it even possible at this point to have guardrails, or to know what the guardrails would even be? At some point, it will start to affect people's jobs. You mentioned low unemployment, people having difficulty filling some of these positions that maybe AI could replace, but at some point people's jobs will be what's being replaced. And so are there guardrails to protect workers? Or how should people approach that part of the discussion?Hart Brown: From an economic productivity perspective, I need everybody working and I need everybody using the technology. If the technology replaces people in this ecosystem, I don't get the economic value out of the system at the end of the day. And really what we're seeing in the next two to three years, whichever country maximizes its potential related to artificial intelligence, is likely to be the dominant economic country for the next 75 to 100 years. So first and foremost, I need everybody in the ecosystem being productive.It doesn't make sense for us to have a broad based disruption of the employment environment, because we don't win at the end of the day. We won't be the dominant economic country. So I'm very optimistic that if we do see that turbulence, that we have enough opportunities to resolve that before it really becomes a problem.Frontier: Looking at the strategy and at this report, if we revisit it in five or 10 years, what would success look like in Oklahoma, and what would count as a failure that Oklahoma should be willing to try to avoid?Hart Brown: Five years is a great horizon. What I would love to be able to say is that Oklahoma is at the forefront of artificial intelligence and advanced technology for the country and the world, which absolutely we have that that opportunity, I would say, from an economic perspective, that we've grown our economy by 40% here in the state overall by being able to do This, and that is a benefit to every single individual here in the state. So those two things, I think, are incredibly important for us moving forward, and we can accomplish that in a five year window.

Inside the legal fight over immigration detention in Oklahoma

Immigration detention usually happens out of public view — inside private prisons, through sealed court filings, and far from scrutiny. But in Oklahoma, those cases are starting to surface.In recent months, immigrants who’ve lived in the U.S. for years — some for decades — have been jailed for months without bond hearings, even when they have no criminal convictions and deep ties to their communities. Their only path to release has been through habeas corpus petitions filed in federal court.At the same time, Oklahoma is becoming a growing hub for immigration detention as private prison companies expand their footprint.Our reporter, Ari Fie, has been digging into these cases to understand who’s being detained, why this is happening now, and what it means for due process. I spoke with her about what she found.