One Law Firm, Most of the Buildout, and Now a Seat on the Board

Arizona is being rezoned for data centers faster than most people can follow. Thousands of acres in Pinal County. Hundreds more in the West Valley. Projects with power demands measured in gigawatts, sited within reach of substations that already exist.

Somebody has to walk each of those through a planning commission. In a striking number of cases, the same firm does it.

Rose Law Group advertises a data center development practice on its website. The firm says it represented the first data center to locate in Arizona, and it markets its ability to obtain approvals quickly, covering land use entitlements, real estate transactions, incentives, and, in its own words, the provision of water and power.

That last item is the part that concerns SRP customers. Water and power are not incidental to a data center. They are the product. A firm that advertises its ability to secure them is advertising access to the entities that supply them.

Look at what the firm has handled.

Court Rich, the firm’s co-founder and director of its energy and utility infrastructure department, represented Google in the clean energy agreement it reached with SRP to power its Mesa data center. The firm’s own release called it a first-of-its-kind contract in Arizona.

The firm publicly discloses representing Microsoft on data center development in Goodyear and El Mirage, including a wastewater capacity investment and a shift to air-cooled designs.

In April of this year, Rich presented the case for the La Osa Energy Center to the Pinal County Planning and Zoning Commission, a combined data center and power generation project spanning 3,385 acres south of Eloy. The commission recommended approval 7 to 2.

And on August 13, the SRP Councils seated one of the firm’s partners, Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin, on the District Board.

The buildout follows the substations

Sixty miles southeast of Phoenix, the town of Florence voted in October 2025 to rezone 1,619 acres from residential to industrial. The land had been platted as a master planned community in 2009 and never built. It is now three data center and industrial projects with combined electrical demand approaching one gigawatt.

The reason those projects are there is infrastructure. The site sits near SRP’s Abel Substation. At the planning commission hearing, the applicant told commissioners that power could be easily accessed because SRP has a solar farm and substation nearby. The developer’s representative described the substation across the street as one of the largest in Pinal County.

EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure is building on part of that site. Their proposal covers ten two-story buildings at roughly 72 megawatts each, plus four substations.

EdgeCore also gave money to Arizonans for Responsible Growth.

The committee that funded the slate

Arizonans for Responsible Growth is the political committee that spent $631,626 backing a slate of candidates in this April’s SRP election, alongside Turning Point Action. Its donors are the companies that build and fill data centers: Willmeng Construction at over $132,000, EdgeCore, VW Connect, Riggs Companies, the Arizona chapter of the National Electrical Contractors Association, and B&B Concrete. The committee’s chairman is a vice president at Willmeng, its largest donor.

Google gave $25,000 and then asked for its name off the campaign materials and part of the money back.

The candidates that committee supported won the presidency and vice presidency of SRP.

What this adds up to

None of the above is secret. Rose Law Group publishes its client work as marketing. The zoning cases are public. The campaign finance filings are public. Nothing here required a leak.

What it describes is a small system operating in the open. The companies building data centers fund the campaigns that elect the people who set the terms for serving them. The law firm that walks those projects through zoning is also the firm that has negotiated power agreements with SRP, and one of its partners now sits on the SRP District Board, which sets utility policy, approves budgets and sets prices and fees. The projects themselves are sited to sit next to SRP infrastructure, because that is what makes them viable.

Every participant can say, accurately, that they followed the rules. Developers may fund campaigns. Lawyers may represent clients. Utilities may negotiate contracts. A partner in a law firm may serve on a public board.

The question for SRP customers is a different one. When the utility decides how much of the cost of new generation and transmission gets carried by data centers and how much gets carried by households, who at the table is arguing for the households?

Gallup finds seven in ten Americans oppose a data center in their local area, majorities in both parties, and the top two concerns are water and energy. That is the public this Council answers to. Seating a lawyer whose firm sells data center approvals covering water and power, at the exact moment SRP is deciding who pays for the buildout, is, in my opinion, contempt for the customer.

I asked Mr. Galvin, before the vote to seat him, whether he or his firm currently represents clients adverse to SRP or negotiating with SRP on a business transaction. SRP’s own chief legal executive had told me in writing that a general question of that kind raised no confidentiality problem, and offered to give it to him in advance so he could prepare. He declined to answer, citing client privilege. He was seated anyway.

That was the moment to find out. There will not be another one, because SRP’s counsel also confirmed that the Council’s role ends with the appointment.

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John Travise is an SRP Association Council Member representing District 6. Views are his own and do not reflect the views of Salt River Project or the SRP Association Council.