# Arkansas Department of Agriculture The Arkansas Department of Agriculture. Its Natural Resources Division administers Arkansas's water-use registration program and the Arkansas Water Plan, and is the state body that regulates groundwater withdrawal for data-center cooling. ## People - [[Kylee Horst]] — Legal Support Specialist, Shared Services Division; the Department's FOIA correspondent. - [[Katie Hartter]] — Water Use Program Coordinator, Groundwater Section; processed the Google Data Center water registration. - Karl W. VanDevender — engineer, Natural Resources Division; sent the initial "I have nothing to provide" FOIA reply. - Natural Resources Division staff appearing in the data-center water correspondence: Tate Wentz (Chief, Water Resources Management), Josh Burns (Water Resource Development), Corbin Cannon (Geology Supervisor), Blake Forrest (Geology Supervisor), and David Cowden. Mike Guess is the water-use registration contact. ## Roles in this corpus - Recipient of a 2026-05-19 FOIA request for water-withdrawal registrations and surface-water permits for the hyperscale data-center sites. - Produced responsive records on 2026-05-22 — see [[2026-05 Department of Agriculture FOIA Response]] and the production pages [[Google Data Center Water-Use Registration]], [[Data-Center Cooling-Water Regulatory Correspondence]], and [[Arkansas Water Plan 2026 Demand and Supply Draft]]. - Through its Natural Resources Division, administers the [[Water-Use Registration]] regime that governs data-center cooling wells. ## Notes The Department's production confirmed the "Google Data Center" at Proctor and surfaced two further, unnamed data-center cooling-water projects. The correspondence shows Department staff articulating a light-touch regulatory posture: a privately owned data-center well is subject only to registration and annual reporting, not Water Plan Compliance review. See [[Water-Use Registration]].