Beaver Dam Public Comment & Testimony
This is the page for public comment and testimony regarding QTS, a hyperscale developer owned by BlackStone. To have your own public comment posted officially to the page, please submit your testimony to the Public Inquiry Project, or email ward@publicinquiryproject.org with your public comment, documents, video, pictures, and anything else you would like included. We will review your submission and add to our page if it meets our mission.
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June 21, 2026
My name is Maily Kocinski. I am a lifelong Wisconsin resident, educator, and property owner in the Town of Trenton, downstream from the Meta data center construction site in Beaver Dam. For over a year, I have been trying to get answers through the Wisconsin DNR about dramatic changes to the water system on and around my property.
For over 48 years, a natural creek has flowed through our land. It was steady and predictable. But after large-scale construction began upstream on the data center in May of 2025, the creek began repeatedly stopping completely, then returning suddenly without rainfall, sometimes cloudy, opaque, and forceful enough to cause severe erosion and damage. Although there is a quarry between my property and the data center, the DNR mining geologist informed me in September 2025 that it was not believed to be causing the water quantity issues affecting my creek. That led us to look more closely at the massive construction activity occurring upstream at the data center site. Neighboring wells have gone dry. My own water testing now shows elevated strontium levels requiring filtration because the water is unsafe for us to drink. From the first moment in May of 2025, I contacted the DNR.
Wardens came out. Samples were taken. Multiple departments became involved.
And I want to be clear: the staff I spoke with were professional and trying to help. But what I encountered was not a coordinated system.
My reports were transferred between departments and lost during staffing changes, and I was repeatedly referred to new contacts and asked to start over. Different divisions handled separate parts of the issue, but no clear lead authority coordinated them together in the investigation. Meanwhile, residents are left carrying the burden themselves: documenting, paying for testing, researching, and trying to navigate a process that feels fragmented and unclear.
I have reported issues consistently for months, multiple times per week. And today, over a year later, I still do not have a clear answer about what happened to our water system, who is responsible for determining that, or what protections exist for residents living near projects like this. I also want to address the hydrology study prepared for Meta. It was a desktop review, not an independent field investigation, and it did not include field monitoring data capable of fully ruling the project out. What many of us are asking for is an independent, transparent investigation using real field data capable of either responsibly ruling the project out or identifying impacts if they exist.
It feels as though attention keeps shifting elsewhere, while the one area requiring the most thorough independent evaluation, the active construction site itself, still has not undergone that level of study. Meanwhile, residents are still living with these impacts every day. I need your help to recognize that residents need a clearer path to answers, accountability, coordination, and communication when serious environmental changes are reported.
I cannot drink my water.
When ordinary citizens follow the process and still cannot get answers, trust in that process begins to break down, and we the people are suffering the consequences
Thank you for your time.