# 2026-05 Conway Corporation Interim FOIA Response On 2026-05-22, [[Conway Corporation]] sent an interim response to the data-center FOIA request concerning the announced Conway (Faulkner County) hyperscale data-center project. The reply, from Regulatory and Risk Management Director [[Chris Odom]], produced no documents: it reported "no records" for four sub-items of the utility-records request, said the remaining items remain under review for competitive and utility-security exemptions with rolling production to follow, and pointed to two publicly available City of Conway documents — the April 1, 2025 Special City Council agenda packet and minutes — as the record of the project's memorandum of understanding. The City of Conway proper responded separately the same day, through its JustFOIA portal, with a § 25-19-105(e) time estimate for the three request items directed to it. ## Sources This is a FOIA-correspondence event; its record lives in Gmail, not in `raw/`. - FOIA request, follow-up, and Conway Corporation response, 2026-05-19 to 2026-05-22 ([thread](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#all/19e41be6d2204d32)). - The two City of Conway records the response identified for request item 6 are archived as Tier-2 primary public records: the [April 1, 2025 council agenda packet with the MOU](../../web%20archive/2026-05-22/media.conwayarkansas.gov/april-1-2025-special-city-council-agenda.md) and the [April 1, 2025 council minutes](../../web%20archive/2026-05-22/conwayarkansas.gov/04-01-2025-special-council-mtg.md). ## What happened [[Joshua Dunlap]] filed an Arkansas FOIA request on 2026-05-19 to the City of Conway (City Clerk) and Conway Corporation — also lodged through the City's JustFOIA portal as Request FOIA-2026-126 — for records on the announced Conway data-center project. The request had six items: (1) developer correspondence; (2) City Council agendas, minutes, votes, ordinances; (3) Planning and Zoning records; (4) Conway Corporation electric/water/wastewater/broadband records, in five sub-parts 4(a)–4(e); (5) correspondence with AEDC, the Governor's Office, and the developer; and (6) community-benefit, host-community, PILOT, tax-abatement, and MOU instruments. A follow-up was sent 2026-05-22 after the three-working-day period of Ark. Code § 25-19-105(e) elapsed. Conway Corporation replied the same day, 2026-05-22, through [[Chris Odom]]: - **Scope split.** Items 2, 3, and 5 "appear directed to records maintained by the City of Conway rather than Conway Corporation." Conway Corporation addressed only items 1, 4, and 6. - **Exemption posture on items 1 and 4.** The materials under review "may contain information exempt from disclosure under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, including but not limited to records which, if disclosed, could provide an advantage to competitors or bidders, as well as records relating to the security and operation of municipally owned utility systems pursuant to Ark. Code Ann. § 25-19-105(b)." Conway Corporation said it is "consulting with relevant third parties regarding potentially confidential or competitively sensitive information." - **No records identified** for four sub-items of item 4: 4(a) service agreements, term sheets, and load-study correspondence; 4(b) cooling-water supply and wastewater-discharge coordination agreements (including any Tupelo Bayou treated-wastewater cooling agreement); 4(d) correspondence with Entergy Arkansas concerning bulk power service; and 4(e) cost-allocation analyses concerning capital recovery from Conway Corporation ratepayers. - **Still under review:** item 1 (developer correspondence) and item 4(c) (capacity-expansion analyses) "continue to be collected and reviewed." - **Item 6.** Conway Corporation reported that "a memorandum of understanding relating to the project was publicly discussed during the Conway City Council Special Meeting held on April 1, 2025," and gave URLs for the agenda packet and minutes (now archived; see Sources). - **Rolling production.** Conway Corporation "anticipates providing an initial production or additional status update within the next several business days, with supplemental productions to follow." > **Update (2026-05-29):** Conway Corporation delivered that rolling production — "Production 001," 26 records on Items 1 and 4(c). See [[2026-05 Conway Corporation Produces Project Stratus Records]] and the [[city-conway/conway-corp-stratus-2026-05-29/_overview|production overview]]. The "no records" findings on Items 4(a)/(b)/(d)/(e) hold; the ratepayer cost-allocation analysis (4e) the [[Black & Veatch]] Rate Analysis memorandum would supply was referenced but not produced. ## Significance The interim response produced no documents, but its item-6 pointer is substantive: the archived April 1, 2025 agenda packet contains the full Memorandum of Understanding — the corpus's first hard record of the Conway project. It names the developer, [[Forgelight Ventures, LLC]], and sets out a roughly $1 billion initial investment, a 65% property-tax abatement for 30 years via an Act 9 industrial-revenue bond, treated-effluent cooling from the Tupelo Bayou Wastewater Treatment Plant, and a Conway Corporation / Entergy Arkansas split of utility service. See [[The Conway Data Center Project]]. Read against that MOU, the four "no records" findings are coherent rather than evasive, and they are themselves informative: - **Items 4(a) and 4(c)** — no service agreements and (still being collected) no capacity-expansion analyses. The MOU expressly states that the actual service and infrastructure agreements "are being negotiated in a separate agreement" and that Conway Corporation's participation in the MOU "shall not obligate" it absent "separate MOUs, agreements or other documents." An absence of executed service agreements at the MOU stage is consistent with the project's status. - **Item 4(b)** — no cooling-water or wastewater coordination agreement. The MOU *discloses the plan* — Conway Corporation is to design, permit, and build the pump station and pipeline carrying Tupelo Bayou treated effluent to the site for non-contact cooling, plus a blowdown discharge line to the Arkansas River — but the executed *supply agreement* the FOIA item asked for apparently does not yet exist. This is a narrow, defensible reading, not a contradiction of the MOU. - **Item 4(d)** — no Entergy Arkansas bulk-power correspondence. The MOU shows [[Entergy Arkansas]] as the project's *high-voltage* supplier (230 kV and up) and the City of Conway — not Conway Corporation — as the body that will set the Entergy franchise-fee ordinance. Conway Corporation's role is limited to *medium-voltage* (13.8 kV) service. That Conway Corporation holds no Entergy bulk-power correspondence is consistent with that division of roles. - **Item 4(e)** — no ratepayer cost-allocation analysis. Relevant to the investigation's "who pays" question: if Conway Corporation builds the cooling-water pipeline, the blowdown line, and the medium-voltage expansion, how those capital costs are recovered from Conway Corporation's ordinary ratepayers is unaddressed in any record the utility has identified. Two further points. First, the **scope split**: items 2, 3, and 5 (Council records, Planning and Zoning records, and inter-agency correspondence) are the City of Conway's records, not Conway Corporation's. Later the same day, 2026-05-22, the City of Conway — responding separately through its JustFOIA portal (request FOIA-2026-126) — issued an Ark. Code § 25-19-105(e) time estimate, undertaking to add responsive records by the end of day on 2026-05-26. Second, the **exemption posture**: Conway Corporation's invocation of the § 25-19-105(b) competitive-advantage and municipally-owned-utility-security exemptions on items 1 and 4(c) echoes the trade-secret framing seen elsewhere in this corpus — including the "CONFIDENTIAL, TRADE SECRET" stamp the MOU itself carries — and will need a withholding log to be tested. Finally, the response resolves a small open question on [[Identifying the Unnamed Cooling-Water Data Centers]]: the Conway project's cooling source is now known to be **reclaimed wastewater** (Tupelo Bayou treated effluent), not a dedicated groundwater well field — so the Conway project is not either of the two unnamed groundwater-cooled data centers in the Department of Agriculture record.