Stephen Martin

For decades, state agencies and municipalities have quietly signed NDAs while competing to attract new employers. But as data center proposals have spread across the state, those contracts have become the subject of legislative proposals, citizen protests and growing questions about where business confidentiality ends and the public's right to know begins.

Amid the farm fields of northwest Oklahoma City, a place where high-voltage power lines converge has attracted interest from two data center developers, each seeking to build at the western terminus of a new $72 million transmission project.

Kim McGuire had already spent nearly two weeks at St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City when a hospital case manager delivered the news: her insurance would not cover a transfer to a rehabilitation facility.