I Just Showed Up With a Sign and Wound Up Running for Marana Town Council

*By Jackie McGuire, Candidate for Marana Town Council. Jackie is a data scientist, former financial advisor, co-host of Enterprise Security Weekly, and a candidate for Marana Town Council. Learn more at voteforjackie.com

On December 10, 2025, I walked into the Marana Town Hall holding a homemade sign. I did not have an agenda, I did not know anyone else at the meeting, and I had not prepared a speech. I just wanted to show up for my community. The sign said “Hi! I’m Jackie, I’m a Marana resident, an economist, and a Research Analyst covering AI, data centers, and cybersecurity. Ask me anything!”

A few weeks earlier, I had emailed every member of the Marana Town Council, the Mayor, and the Vice Mayor, offering to help in whatever way I could. I am a data scientist and former financial advisor, and I co-host Enterprise Security Weekly, a podcast where my colleagues have affectionately dubbed me the Watcher of Data Center Waste.

Over the last twenty years, my career has taken me across Main Street, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. The most recent stretch has been spent digging into the economics, security, and environmental footprint of the hyperscale data center boom. I figured that might be useful information for a town council that was about to vote on whether to allow one in our backyard.

One person called me back. To John Officer’s credit, he picked up the phone. He told me he did not know much about data centers and was mostly trying to figure out where I stood. When I told him I was opposed, he seemed disappointed, and the conversation ended shortly after.

That was the first sign that something was off.

When I spoke at the Planning Commission meeting that night, I did not say anything I had not already offered for free in those emails. I talked about power and water consumption in a town that does not have utilities to spare. I talked about the parent company of the developer, Blue Owl, and the very real financial trouble it was in. I talked about the AI bubble and the nature of the debt being used to finance data centers, which will likely become part of the next financial crisis.

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The video of that speech, posted by the No Desert Data Center Coalition, has now been watched almost two million times. Celebrities shared it. Elected officials in other states shared it. Strangers in countries I have never visited shared it. I am still a little floored.

I went back on January 6 with more research. I had been digging into what protections other municipalities had negotiated when they let projects like this come in. I sent more emails. I offered, again, to help. I suggested decommissioning bonds so that if the parent company collapsed, Marana taxpayers would not be left holding the bill to tear down an abandoned industrial site. I got no response. 

The opposition to this project should have been an opportunity for Marana’s leadership to take a big step back and reassess. It was an opportunity. The pattern that emerged was a town government refusing to engage with its residents, which is a recurring, structural problem. 

It turned out this debate was not just about one data center. There were at least two more data center projects in the pipeline, plus a downtown project that the community actually wants, but that project was being financed in a way that put the town at unnecessary risk. Why weren’t our elected representatives actually representing us and our best interests?

After they saw my video and heard me speak at meetings, Marana residents started asking me to run. I declined at first. I was waiting on a biopsy. I have three kids. I have a career I care about. I am not a politician and have never wanted to be one.

When the biopsy came back negative, I celebrated by filing my Statement of Interest for Marana Town Council.

Sometimes you choose the path. Sometimes the path chooses you.

In the months since, I have been one of the residents who led the successful referendum drive to put the data center project on the ballot. We collected almost 3,000 signatures from our neighbors. I was also the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that we hope will force the Town of Marana to honor that process. Running for office was not a substitute for organizing. It is what I did alongside the organizing, because both are necessary and neither is enough on its own.

I write this because what is happening in Marana is happening in towns all over this state, and because I want to make an argument about who needs to be in these seats over the next decade.

We are in the middle of a building boom unlike anything Arizona has seen in living memory. Data centers, semiconductor fabs, master planned subdivisions, water infrastructure, transmission lines, all of it landing at once. Decisions are being made right now, at the planning commission and town council level, that will lock in water, land, and energy commitments for thirty years or more. The companies pitching these projects are sophisticated. They bring lawyers, lobbyists, engineers, and marketing teams. They know exactly what to put in the slide deck and exactly what to leave out of it.

The local officials sitting across the table from them are, by and large, well-meaning citizens with day jobs. Some are retired. Some run small businesses. Almost none of them have a technical background, and very few have the financial training needed to stress-test a developer’s revenue projections or a town budget. That is not a criticism of them as people. It is a description of a structural mismatch that the developers absolutely understand and absolutely take advantage of.

This is where I want to make my pitch, especially to the STEM folks reading this.

If you are an engineer, a scientist, a security analyst, an environmental researcher, a software developer, a network architect, an electrician, a hydrologist, a doctor, a nurse, a public health professional, or anyone else who has been trained to read evidence and ask hard questions about what is being claimed, your community needs you. Not as a consultant. Not as a public commenter at the back of the room with three minutes on the clock. As a decision maker. On the dais. With a vote.

I want to be clear that I am not arguing only people with advanced degrees should run for office. The opposite, actually. The single most important qualification for local office is showing up and giving a damn about the place you live. The reason I am singling out STEM backgrounds in this piece is that we are currently making infrastructure decisions of enormous consequence, and there is a real shortage of people in the room who can read a load study, a water balance, an environmental impact statement, or a corporate 10-K, and then explain simply and clearly to the rest of the council what all of it actually means.

A data center is not a magic job creator. It is a building full of servers that pulls megawatts of electricity and millions of gallons of water and produces, after construction, a small number of permanent jobs. None of that is hidden. It is all in the filings. You just have to be willing to read them.

A municipal bond is not free money. It is a long term obligation that will sit on the town’s books long after the ribbon cutting photos are forgotten. You can model the debt service. You can stress test the revenue assumptions. You just have to be willing to do the math, and to say out loud when the math does not work.

This is what STEM training gives you. Not all the right answers, but a habit of asking what is actually being claimed, what the evidence is, what the failure modes are, and who eats the cost when those failure modes happen. Those are exactly the questions our planning commissions and town councils need to be asking on every major vote, and they are too often not being asked at all.

I also want to say something to the readers who are not in STEM, who are not credentialed, who have never spoken at a public meeting, and who feel like local government is something other people do.

You are wrong about that, and I say it with love.

Local government in Marana, and in your town too, is decided by a tiny number of people. Most town council seats are won and lost by margins smaller than the attendance at a Little League game. The bar to run is mostly paperwork and shoe leather. The people currently in those seats are not a special class. They are simply the people who decided to show up.

I bought my first home in Marana in 2011. My family raised pigs, chickens, goats, and ducks on our ranch before we moved to Gladden Farms in 2022 so my kids could be closer to their schools and their friends. I am a mom of three. I had a biopsy hanging over my head when this whole thing started. I have multiple podcasts, a job, a household, and the usual stack of things that any working parent is juggling. I am running anyway, because waiting for someone else to do it is exactly how we got here.

If you have ever sat at your kitchen table reading a town agenda and thought, that does not add up, you are already doing more homework than most candidates. If you have ever shown up at a public meeting and felt out of place, that feeling is the system working as intended, and the cure is to keep showing up until it stops feeling that way.

Marana is at a hinge moment. Our water future, our energy future, the character of our open desert, and the long term financial health of the town are all on the table at the same time. We can let the next decade be written by developers whose financial interest stops at the town line, or we can elect people who will read the filings, do the math, and say no to projects that do not pencil out for the people who actually live here.

I am running because I would rather spend the next four years on the dais asking hard questions than spend the next forty years explaining to my kids why I did not.

If you have a STEM background and you live in Arizona, I am asking you to consider running for something. School board. Water district. Planning commission. Corporation Commission. Town council. Pick one. If you are not in STEM but you care about the place you live, I am asking exactly the same thing. The seat you would fill is not reserved for someone more qualified than you. It is waiting for someone willing to show up.

I showed up on December 10 with a sign. I am running because a sign is not remotely enough.