by Matt Merritt, Director of Public Relations, Paulsen
Rural communities and energy developers need each other. So why does every meeting feel like a fight? Because trust was never part of the site selection process.
Not long ago, I drove up to Deuel County, South Dakota, to sit in on a community meeting about a proposed data center — not a county commission hearing, just a town gathering where people tried to organize their thoughts about what was headed their way.
A hundred and fifty people showed up. Maybe two hundred. In a small county.
People talked about water use, noise, land prices and what it would mean for their kids who wanted to come back and farm. Those were valid concerns, but sitting in that room, I walked away with a different conclusion: The real issue wasn’t water or noise or property values. It was trust. And there wasn’t any.
If people don’t trust you, you can’t give them a good answer about water use. If they don’t believe your words are worth anything, you can’t give them a good answer about noise, taxes or jobs. None of it lands. You’re done before you start. That’s not a PR problem. That’s a site selection problem.
If You’re Showing Up Because You Need Something, You’re Already Late
Here’s the pattern we see again and again: A project gets 60% baked before anybody in the community hears about it. NDAs are flying. Negotiations are underway. Then somebody shows up at a county meeting with polished slides and a rehearsed Q&A. By that point, the room is a powder keg. And the developer at the podium (no matter how solid the data) looks like the classic salesman breezing into town with a pitch nobody asked for.
That first impression confirms the worst suspicion many rural residents already carry: that their land and their community exist primarily to serve distant corporate interests.
There’s a term for this: “rural burden.” When your first real interaction with a community is a public information meeting, you’ve reinforced that feeling before you’ve said a word of substance.
Community engagement can’t be the eighth item on the site selection checklist. It needs to be woven into the process itself. That means going in early and asking real questions: What’s your vision for this town? What are your problems? Where do you want to be in 20 years? Then you look at your project and ask whether it helps this community get where it wants to go.
Two Projects. Two Approaches. One Lesson.
Example No. 1: Here’s How to Do It Right
We’re not ADM’s agency, but their carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Decatur, Illinois, is worth studying through the lens of community trust. Several things stand out.
They listened before they needed something. Years before scaling to commercial CCS operations, ADM established the National Sequestration Education Center at Richland Community College, a local anchor institution. That gave them institutional presence and community familiarity long before they needed broader social license. They matched the message to the room: Their Learning Day brought geologists for landowners, first responders for safety-conscious neighbors and K-12 programming for the next generation. One message didn’t have to do all the work. And they leaned on trusted messengers, letting a community college (not a corporate logo) carry the conversation.
“Community engagement can’t be the eighth item on the site selection checklist. It needs to be woven into the process itself.”
— Matt Merritt, Director of Public Relations, Paulsen
When it mattered most, they chose transparency. After 2024 monitoring well incidents, ADM published detailed stratigraphic data and EPA assessments rather than going quiet. That’s the harder call, and they made it. Where it gets complicated: The transparency came after the incident, not ahead of it. Getting out in front of problems — not just responding well when they surface — is the harder, more trust-building discipline. But overall, ADM’s long-game approach to community presence gave them a foundation of trust that held under pressure.
Example No. 2: Here’s What We Don’t Recommend
Now compare that to a Midwest infrastructure project we consulted on early but were not retained for. The developer had a technically sound project with real economic upside for the region. But they came in late, held their cards close and relied almost entirely on economic impact data to make the case. Community outreach was limited to a handful of open houses scheduled after key agreements were already in place.
The opposition organized fast. A local Facebook group hit a thousand members in weeks. Residents who might have been persuadable felt blindsided and dug in. County officials who privately supported the project couldn’t defend it publicly because they hadn’t been given the tools or the timeline to build local support. The project stalled, regulatory headwinds intensified and the developer ended up spending far more on crisis communications than early engagement would have ever cost. The project didn’t struggle because the economics were wrong. It stalled because trust was never built.
Eight Voices, Not One Angry Crowd
What both examples illustrate is that a rural community isn’t a monolith. In our experience, it’s eight distinct voices:
- Economic Pragmatists who want cash flow projections, not vision statements.
- Property Rights Advocates for whom “voluntary” is non-negotiable.
- Community Guardians keeping score on follow-through.
- Environmental Advocates who’ll support you if you do it right.
- Next Generation Ruralists who see energy development as a reason to stay.
- Cautious Skeptics who need proof from people who look like them.
- Affected Non-Participants living with your project without a lease payment.
- Institutional Stakeholders who need political cover as much as economic data.
A couple of our team members recently attended an electric utility conference and texted back a slide showing data center development by state. South Dakota was a big hole on the map. Renewable energy investment tells the same story. That’s not because the state lacks resources. It’s because the trust deficit has become a policy problem. Opposition groups galvanized by carbon pipeline battles now show up at every hearing — data centers, transmission lines, solar farms. New regulations are being written. Tax incentives are being blocked. And these dynamics are spreading across the Midwest.
We all know what’s happening with rural America: bigger farms, smaller downtowns, fewer people. Energy is one of the biggest growth opportunities on the table. But that opportunity disappears when developers and communities can’t find a way to work together.
Trust Is the Strategy
For site selectors, this means rethinking what community readiness looks like. It’s not just available land, tax incentives and utility capacity. It’s whether a community trusts you enough to say yes — and whether you’ve earned that trust before you ever needed it.
Listen before you have answers. Match your message to all eight audiences. Make promises you can keep, then keep them. Stay long after the permit is approved. And start the conversation before the room becomes a powder keg. Somebody’s got to break the cycle. It might as well start with how we choose where to build.
Matt Merritt is director of public relations at Paulsen, a Sioux Falls, South Dakota–based marketing and communications agency with more than 75 years in the business of connecting with rural America. The agency works across agriculture, energy, rural lifestyle and manufacturing — helping clients navigate the communities, conversations and relationships that drive rural economies. Paulsen’s Rural Energy Trust Field Guide is available as a free download at paulsen.agency/rural-energy.