Considerations for Community Benefits Agreements

Note: Community benefits agreements (CBAs) are not suited to comprehensively protect communities from data center development. CBAs negotiate projects at an individual project level—meaning that terms in one CBA do not apply to all projects or future projects. Community benefits agreements also have the potential to significantly dilute the power of grassroots organizing when a limited set of community members trades away concessions without the buy-in from and participation of all community members. This means that policymakers must be as concerned with the process of CBA development as they are with the substantive provisions. 

For these reasons, CBAs pale in comparison to legislation or other forms of regulation. We strongly recommend pursuing policy actions that codify protection for all community members.

Community benefits agreements are contracts traditionally negotiated between developers and community members intended to ensure that benefits from a specific development project accrue to the communities that reside near the project.1 They are limited in scope and do not apply to data center development projects more broadly. 

The following recommendations are focused on where and how local governments can introduce policy guardrails to facilitate the CBA process in service of broader community participation from frontline communities.

  1. Marisa Sotolongo, “Energy Justice in Community Benefit Agreements and Plans,” Initiative for Energy Justice, June 26, 2024, https://iejusa.org/energy-justice-in-community-benefit-agreements-and-plans. ↩︎