When a 600MW data center is proposed for a county with confirmed PFAS water contamination, no community impact assessment requirement, and a $400 million infrastructure gap, the question is not whether the facility is secure. The question is whether the community surrounding it can sustain it.

This session presents findings from GovParti, a civic intelligence platform that analyzed 3,127 U.S. counties across health, housing, environmental, legal, and economic indicators to produce a composite civic health score for every county in the country. The data reveals a pattern that security professionals rarely see on their dashboards: the counties attracting the largest critical infrastructure investments are often the least equipped to support them.

Using real county-level data, this talk will cover:

- How water system violations, workforce gaps, and regulatory blind spots create physical supply chain risk for facilities sited in under-resourced communities
- A case study of a proposed hyperscale data center in West Texas, where PFAS contamination, military base proximity, and absent state-level siting requirements converge
- How Texas SB 6 addressed grid-level cost allocation for large loads but left community-level resilience entirely unregulated
- What the EPA UCMR5 data, TCEQ enforcement records, and county-level health rankings reveal about the environments where critical digital infrastructure is being built
- A framework for evaluating civic readiness as a factor in infrastructure siting risk

While the primary case study is drawn from West Texas, the framework and underlying data cover all 3,127 U.S. counties, with direct applicability to data center siting decisions across the Southeast and nationally.

Attendees will leave with a concrete understanding of how to assess the non-cyber risk surface of critical infrastructure: the water, power, governance, and community capacity layers that determine whether a facility can operate reliably over its full lifecycle.