The License to Hush

The secrecy privilege is becoming standard equipment on the next generation of public infrastructure.

Data center proposals need transmission lines, water mains, and tax incentives — capital decisions that used to live in council chambers. In Oklahoma, developers are answering with a document the public has never seen, and cities are signing it. Call it the public-impact hush. The trade-secret label stops working the moment a substation, a water main, or a public incentive joins the deal, and the NDA keeps the public-side consequence invisible at the moment the decision is made.

Oklahoma City University contract law professor D.A. Jeremy Telman put the load-bearing detail on the record: "Where you want to put your data center is not a trade secret. It's just a plan, a set of ideas that you would prefer not to disclose." The Open Records Act frames the conflict; some NDAs expressly recognize it, others define confidentiality broadly enough to swallow the agreement's existence. Those readings will collide the first time a citizen asks for a project already announced at a press conference.

Claremore City Manager John Feary calls NDAs standard in economic development, citing a Chick-fil-A case. That framing scales one way for a restaurant, another for a billion-dollar data center campus. Proportionality is what the practice has not been asked to defend, and a January 2026 transparency bill is starting to ask. The developer keeps the playbook; the ratepayer keeps the line. The license to operate now comes with a license to hush — and the public money is the part the contract is being written to hide.