# 2026-05 Department of Agriculture FOIA Response The Arkansas Department of Agriculture responded to the data-center water FOIA request in three stages, from a Natural Resources Division "nothing to provide" on 2026-05-20 to a substantive document production on 2026-05-22 — ten files, ingested into the wiki the same day. ## Sources The FOIA correspondence lives in Gmail; the produced files were downloaded into `raw/agriculture/water-withdrawal-2026-05-22/` and ingested as source pages: - [[Google Data Center Water-Use Registration]] — Facility ID 900055; the Google / Project Pyramid water-use registration. - [[Data-Center Cooling-Water Regulatory Correspondence]] — two unnamed data-center cooling-water projects. - [[Arkansas Water Plan 2026 Demand and Supply Draft]] — the draft statewide water plan. - FOIA request and response thread, 2026-05-19 to 2026-05-22 ([thread](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#all/19e41be376489340)). ## What happened - **2026-05-20** — Karl W. VanDevender, an engineer with the Department's Natural Resources Division, replied in full: *"I have nothing to provide."* - **2026-05-21** — [[Joshua Dunlap]] asked whether that reflected only VanDevender's own files or a complete Department search. [[Kylee Horst]], Legal Support Specialist in the Department's Shared Services Division, sent a formal acknowledgment and requested time beyond the three-working-day rule. - **2026-05-22** — Horst produced responsive records via a SharePoint folder ("Joshua Dunlap 5.19.26"): *"please find responsive records attached by links below. Redactions were made to remove information related to bank account numbers,"* and stated *"your request is considered complete."* ## Significance The Department moved from a Natural Resources Division "nothing to provide" to a substantive production — a reversal that followed the requester's challenge to the scope of the first reply, and a pattern worth noting against other agencies' thin first responses. The production is responsive and investigatively significant. It is the first in the corpus to name the **"Google Data Center"** (Facility ID 900055) at the Bollinger Road / Proctor site, and it surfaced **two further, unnamed hyperscale data-center cooling-water projects** (engineered by [[Arup]] and [[McClelland Consulting Engineers]]). Only one of the ten files — the draft Arkansas Water Plan — is generic; no responsiveness challenge is warranted. See [[Water-Use Registration]] for the regulatory-gap finding the correspondence establishes.