Hayward residents came looking for answers about data centers. They left confronting a larger question: Who do they trust to run their city?

By the end, nobody needed a microphone.

Residents were shouting. Mayor Mark Salinas was threatening to end the meeting. Someone called the city manager “Pinocchio.” Another accused City Hall of trying to “bullshit us.” Someone shouted about recalling the mayor.

A resident accused Salinas of “telling us lies.” Another told him, “You failed us. The children, the future.”

The mayor had come to Community Church of Emanuel to talk about progress in Hayward.

Instead, he found himself defending City Hall.

The questions came faster than officials could answer them.

How many data centers are there?

What happens to the water?

What happens to electricity rates?

Why didn’t residents know?

Who approved this?

Can it still be stopped?

Why should people trust environmental studies they believe are outdated?

And perhaps most damaging of all:

Why did City Hall seem to have fewer answers than the people demanding them?

Then, amid the shouting, somebody pointed toward another man in the room.

Tom Wong.

“Tom Wong says he can stop it.”

“That’s right.”

Then came the line that transformed an angry town hall into something unmistakably political:

“That is why you have to vote for Tom Wong.”

TWO MEN. TWO VERY DIFFERENT ANSWERS

Salinas and City officials spent much of the evening explaining what had already happened.

Permits had been issued. Environmental reviews had been conducted. Appeal periods had expired. Property rights existed. The City couldn’t simply take everything back.

Wong’s answer was different.

“I’ll try everything.”

Environmental challenges. Permit conditions. Regulatory enforcement. Moratoriums. Whatever lawful avenue remains.

Wong did not prove Tuesday night that the project can legally be stopped. Whether Hayward has grounds to suspend, modify or halt an already permitted project still depends on the law and the facts.

But that wasn’t what some people in the room were responding to.

They were responding to the contrast.

City Hall explained the obstacles.

Wong promised to look for a way through them.

After the meeting, residents approached him.

They wanted campaign information. They invited him to neighborhood meetings. Some offered to distribute his material.

One told him:

“I’ll help you pass out some of the flyers.”

Another put it less delicately:

“You fight like hell.”

For an incumbent mayor, those may have been the most dangerous words spoken all night.

WHY PEOPLE ARE AFRAID

The anger wasn’t simply about an ugly building or another industrial development.

Residents were talking about their children.

Their water.

Their electric bills.

Their air.

Their schools.

Their neighborhoods.

And whether City Hall understood what it had allowed into their community.

Data centers can consume enormous amounts of electricity. Some cooling systems can require substantial water. Large facilities can require substations, transmission capacity, backup generation, roads, sewer or wastewater infrastructure and specialized fire protection.

Hayward’s STACK project alone has an estimated electrical capacity of 76.6 megawatts. Hayward Exchange @ 92 is estimated at another 49 megawatts, and Amazon SF011 at 35 megawatts, according to City information.

Those figures don’t mean the facilities continuously consume their maximum capacity.

But they explain why residents are asking questions.

These aren’t ordinary office buildings.

And Hayward isn’t the only community discovering that.

LAKE TAHOE GOT A WARNING HAYWARD SHOULD HEAR

Look northeast to the Lake Tahoe region, where roughly 49,000 California electricity customers have found themselves caught in a fight over where their future power will come from.

Those customers are served by Liberty Utilities.

For years, Liberty has obtained most of their electricity from Nevada’s NV Energy.

Now that arrangement is changing.

NV Energy has told Liberty that it will not remain the long-term supplier of roughly three-quarters of that electricity, forcing Liberty to find another source.

That doesn’t mean Tahoe residents are being told to go shopping for electricity themselves.

Liberty must secure replacement power.

And NV Energy says it will continue supplying electricity during the transition so customers are not suddenly left in the dark.

But the timing has raised an explosive question.

Northern Nevada is simultaneously experiencing enormous growth in electricity demand from data centers.

NV Energy itself has described that growth as unprecedented.

Now the utility supplying most of the electricity for tens of thousands of California customers is telling their utility to find another long-term power arrangement.

NV Energy says those two developments are unrelated.

The company says the Liberty arrangement was always temporary after its California service territory was sold in 2009 and insists that data centers played no role in the decision.

That denial matters.

But so does the larger lesson.

Electricity is becoming one of the most valuable commodities in the AI economy.

Data centers need extraordinary amounts of it.

So do families.

Businesses.

Hospitals.

Schools.

Public agencies.

And entire cities.

Tahoe’s customers may ultimately get replacement electricity without disruption.

But the controversy has exposed a question Hayward should be asking before industrial-scale electricity demand becomes deeply embedded in its own infrastructure:

WHEN POWER BECOMES SCARCE OR EXPENSIVE, WHO GETS PRIORITY?

The families who were already here?

Or the industrial customers arriving with billion-dollar projects?

That isn’t an accusation.

It is precisely the kind of question responsible government should answer before residents find themselves fighting over the consequences.

FOLLOW THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Data centers don’t randomly land on a map.

They go where the ingredients already exist.

Reliable electricity.

Fiber.

Water infrastructure where needed.

Sewer or wastewater capacity where needed.

Roads.

Fire protection.

Police and emergency services.

And local governments capable of permitting and supporting industrial development.

Building those systems from nothing is enormously expensive.

Existing infrastructure makes a city more attractive because the developer does not have to create an entire community around the facility from scratch.

That doesn’t mean taxpayers automatically pay every data-center infrastructure bill.

Developers can be required to finance project-related improvements.

But residents have every right to demand proof that the public isn’t subsidizing private development.

Who pays for a new substation?

Who pays for transmission upgrades?

Who pays when additional fire equipment is required?

Who pays when water or sewer capacity must expand?

Who pays when decades-old infrastructure suddenly has to accommodate 21st-century industrial computing?

And if a data center eventually consumes more services than expected:

Who pays then?

City Hall shouldn’t answer those questions with assurances.

It should answer them with numbers.

OTHER CITIES ARE HAVING THE SAME FIGHT

Hayward isn’t alone.

Communities around the country are wrestling with the same questions.

San Antonio officials have pushed for a pause while examining energy, environmental and infrastructure concerns.

Nashville imposed a data-center moratorium amid opposition to a proposed development near its zoo, prompting litigation from the developer.

In Gilroy, residents reacted angrily after learning about a massive Amazon data-center project already under construction following an approval process many said they barely knew had occurred.

Different cities.

Different projects.

Same uncomfortable question:

How did something this big get this far before ordinary people understood what was happening?

That question sounded painfully familiar inside Community Church of Emanuel Tuesday night.

CONCRETE DOESN’T END DEMOCRACY

City Hall’s most powerful argument is also its simplest:

The permits have been issued.

Construction has begun.

Property rights now exist.

Those facts matter.

Government cannot lawfully revoke permits simply because a crowd becomes angry.

But construction doesn’t make a project untouchable either.

American history includes enormously expensive projects abandoned even after construction began.

Nuclear power provides some of the most dramatic examples.

Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island was essentially completed but never entered commercial operation.

A nuclear plant and a Hayward data center operate under very different laws and regulatory systems.

But the broader point remains:

Concrete in the ground is not the end of government oversight.

Permits still have conditions.

Environmental requirements still exist.

Regulators still have authority.

Inspectors still inspect.

Violations can still have consequences.

The question isn’t whether some project somewhere has ever been stopped during construction.

It is whether lawful grounds exist to stop, suspend, modify or impose additional requirements on this project.

Wong says he intends to find out.

“I’ll try everything.”

WHY WONG IS CONNECTING

Wong’s pitch isn’t complicated.

He calls it the Hayward First Agenda.

He wants City government focused more aggressively on the people who already live here.

He advocates prioritizing Hayward residents for City employment.

He proposes a pathway toward homeownership.

He wants additional emphasis on police and fire services.

He proposes property-tax relief for senior homeowners.

And now he has positioned himself against the data-center expansion that brought an angry crowd into Tuesday night’s meeting.

But perhaps his strongest political asset isn’t any individual proposal.

It is temperament.

Wong presents himself as a fighter.

That can be powerful when residents believe their government has stopped listening.

Tuesday night, some residents clearly liked what they saw.

“You fight like hell.”

That may become one of the defining contrasts of this election.

Salinas asks Hayward to judge what he has already done.

Wong asks Hayward to imagine what he would do differently.

THIS TIME, HAYWARD GETS A CHOICE

Tuesday night’s town hall began with Salinas talking about crime, fireworks, transportation and City accomplishments.

It ended very differently.

Residents had yelled “recall.”

The city manager had been called “Pinocchio.”

Salinas had been accused of “telling us lies.”

A mother told the mayor:

“You failed us. The children, the future.”

And when the meeting finally ended, the anger didn’t disappear with it.

The room erupted in boos directed at the mayor and city manager.

People continued arguing. They continued questioning City Hall’s answers.

Some gathered around Wong.

They asked for his information.

They offered to distribute campaign material.

They invited him into their neighborhoods.

The contrast could hardly have been sharper.

The data center had exposed something much larger than a fight over one development.

It exposed a breakdown in trust.

Residents want to know:

Who knew?

Who approved it?

Why didn’t we know?

Who benefits?

Who pays?

And when something goes wrong:

Who takes responsibility?

City Hall spent the evening explaining what had already happened.

Wong gave residents a different answer.

“I’ll try everything.”

For some people in that room, that was the difference they had been waiting to hear.

One resident said:

“Tom Wong says he can stop it.”

Another responded:

“That’s right.”

Then came the political declaration:

“That is why you have to vote for Tom Wong.”

And after the meeting, another resident summed up Wong’s appeal:

“You fight like hell.”

Four years ago, Salinas reached the mayor’s office without having to defeat an opponent.

This November is different.

This time, Hayward gets a choice.

And after the anger, the shouting, the unanswered questions, the cries of “Pinocchio,” calls for recall and boos aimed at City Hall’s leadership, the 2026 mayoral election may come down to one remarkably simple question:

DOES HAYWARD WANT TO DEFEND THE CITY HALL IT HAS — OR FIGHT FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT?

Tuesday night, some residents made their answer unmistakably clear.

For those looking for a fighter, Tom Wong was standing right there.