Room four · Case four
Doña Ana County, New Mexico approved $165 billion in bonds for Project Jupiter, with Oracle and OpenAI as anchor tenants, 4 to 1, after a contested meeting. A promised town hall was, by reporting, quietly converted into a developer-run career fair instead.
A county official, reported, June 9, 2026
Referred to the gathering as "their event" — the developers'.
A resident in the gallery, shouting back, same meeting
"It was supposed to be our event."
Lanham Napier, BorderPlex chair
Project Jupiter is becoming "a platform for better jobs, stronger infrastructure, and generational opportunity" for the region. At the bond-approval meeting, he stated only 17% of residents opposed the project — a figure reporting describes the audience greeting with cynical laughter.
Kacey Hovden and David Baake, environmental attorneys, in active litigation
Hovden does not believe the project's revised fuel-cell microgrid plan is the clean-energy solution it's being presented as. Baake estimates the resulting carbon pollution, absent a true renewable pathway, could offset roughly twenty years of the state's prior environmental progress.
What would an authentic stakeholder win in a case like this actually require — and why has this project not yet found one to report, here or anywhere else?