The Cabot Lore Repository

Cabot, Arkansas

The Cabot Lore Repository

A narrative topic page compiled from council records, the Arkansas Leader, and the other sources listed at the bottom of the page. Resident discussion from Facebook groups is paraphrased into themes; no posts are quoted.

The Crypto Mine and Act 314

The story

In the fall of 2024, residents of the Grayhawk subdivision, off South Rockwood Road south of Cabot, noticed construction on a wooded, swampy parcel at 494 Grayhawk Circle — in the county, outside Cabot's city limits, but inside the city's planning district and less than five miles from the front gate of Little Rock Air Force Base. It was a cryptocurrency mine, and nobody had told them. The fight that followed united Cabot's mayor, its county judge, its state senator, and its state representative against the project; produced the city's planning-district ordinance fix in February 2025; and then, five weeks later, produced the strangest turn in the story: the same state senator voted to repeal the legal authority the fix rested on.

The backdrop: state law moved first (2023). In April 2023, Arkansas passed the Arkansas Data Centers Act (Act 851 of 2023), which barred local governments from discriminating against digital asset mining businesses — including noise rules that singled them out. Local governments raced the state anyway: in July 2023, both the Lonoke County Quorum Court and the Cabot City Council passed noise-restriction ordinances aimed at crypto mining centers, the county hoping to have rules in place before state preemption foreclosed them. Cabot's data-center noise ordinance had its first reading July 17, 2023. The county's 2023 ordinance also required mines to notify residents within a half-mile before operating.

Discovery and the cease-and-desist (August–November 2024). The 26-acre parcel was purchased in August 2024 for $500,000 by Interstate Holdings, an investment firm based in Sarasota, Florida, with a central office in Bryant and owners/management including auto dealers Steve Landers Jr. and Steve Landers III; the operating entity was Interstate Holdings Blockchain Arkansas. The site sat near an Entergy substation and a cell tower. Work began without the studies the county required — company representatives had told Judge Doug Erwin the project would be a mini-storage facility, according to Sen. Ricky Hill — and Entergy ran three-phase power to the site. Resident Marvin Waddle confronted the crew, who told him it was for cryptocurrency; neighbors organized (the subdivision's bill of assurance bars commercial development and loud noise). After Erwin, Hill, and state Rep. Brian Evans visited the site, residents received a letter from Interstate Holdings Blockchain vice president Dustin Curtis saying a new data center was being built. The company later said it had notified city and county officials in June and residents in November. On November 27, 2024, Judge Erwin issued a cease-and-desist order: the construction was in a floodplain and violating county ordinances.

December 2024: the united front, and the federal overrule. On Monday, December 2, 2024, Grayhawk residents gathered before the Cabot City Council meeting to press their concerns with Erwin, Hill, and the city. That night, during the council meeting (the moment is at about 59:28 in the meeting video), Mayor Kincade raised the facility — in the county, inside Cabot's planning district, where the city's Unified Development Code regulated residential development but not commercial uses — and invited Hill to speak. Hill urged the council to pass an emergency ordinance, suspend the rules, and add the commercial part alongside the existing residential ordinance. No vote was taken that night. Two days later the Democrat-Gazette covered the officials' protest, with Hill citing national security — the site sits under five miles from Little Rock Air Force Base, over which the Air Force flies training routes — and saying he had contacted Attorney General Tim Griffin to check whether the mine was foreign-owned; Kincade noted the site was a short distance outside city limits but within the planning jurisdiction, giving the city zoning authority there. On December 16, the council heard resident Darlene Bird ask about crypto-mine sound, and City Attorney Ben Hooper explained the city had begun the process to extend its planning jurisdiction to cover this type of commercial enterprise — while cautioning the city could not stop the project. Around the same days, the four officials — Kincade, Erwin, Hill, and Evans — held a press conference on the City Hall steps pledging to do everything within their legal power to block the mine. It was not enough: FEMA issued a permit for the $1.85 million mine in the floodplain, and in mid-December Erwin lifted the cease-and-desist, the Leader reporting that the feds had overruled local officials. Landers told Arkansas Money & Politics the order was lifted after the company showed all FEMA requirements had been met, and that he intended to proceed with building the mine as planned.

The ordinance fix (February 3, 2025). The council did what Hill had urged, on the regular timetable. Planning staff presented Unified Development Code changes covering commercial development in the city's planning jurisdiction, expressly including cryptocurrency mining sites, data centers, call centers, and technology centers, with revised definitions. The council adopted them on February 3, 2025 as Ordinances No. 8, 9, and 10 of 2025 — filed by the Planning Commission and adopted on Council Member Corey Spangler's motion.

The statehouse sequel (January–August 2025). The fight moved to Little Rock on two tracks that ran in opposite directions:

The "betrayal" framing. Spangler — who moved the February 3 adoption — has called Hill's Act 314 vote a betrayal, and a turning point: in December, Hill had stood in the council chamber and urged the council to use the planning-district authority to reach the mine; in March, he voted to abolish that authority statewide. That is Spangler's characterization, presented here as his; the roll call itself is a matter of record, and Hill's stated concerns about the mine (national security, notice, studies done after the fact) are documented above. Hill was not a sponsor of HB1510.

Where the mine stands. Construction was cleared to resume in December 2024, and the company said it would proceed. Beyond that, the record in this corpus goes quiet: no Leader issue through October 28, 2026, and no source reviewed for this page, confirms whether the Grayhawk mine was completed, is operating, or was quietly abandoned. The Leader's Jeffrey Smith did win a state press award (reported July 2, 2025) for coverage of stopping a crypto venture from expanding in the Cabot area — evidence the paper kept working the story — but the site's current operating status is a named gap, not a fact this page can state.

What critics said

The Facebook discourse

The groups saw this story early — in some respects before the formal record did — and their conversation is the fullest surviving account of how it felt to live next to it. Targeted searches surfaced one dominant thread and a long tail:

The early-warning system (December 2024–January 2025). On December 5, 2024, a Cabot Strong member asked simply where the proposed crypto plant location was — the discourse's first phase was pure information-seeking. The peak came on January 14, 2025, when a resident alerted Cabot Strong that a crypto mine was coming to the Republican Road area, on land owned by the Landers family of Benton (72 comments). Read the comments as a primary source and you can watch a community assemble a story out of fragments: a commenter reported that an unnamed resident had many drone videos of the Grayhawk site and flew over it daily keeping tabs; others traded location corrections (Republican Road is Jacksonville; it is actually on Grayhawk off the access road; a second rumored site near Highway 319 and Apple Hill church — "are they putting in 2?"); one commenter compiled a running business-news summary with the 494 Grayhawk Circle address and a "projected opening date: ?" that was never answered in the thread; another linked KATV's December 4 article and noted it had been in the news last month; several cross-posted a link to a dedicated public Facebook group about bitcoin-mining issues, treating Cabot's fight as one front in a national one. The substantive frames were the ones the officials later used — noise (including the argument that a racetrack would not be allowed to run 24/7), electricity ("they also use a ton of electricity"), the air base ("the Air base is fighting it due to national security concerns"), and property anxiety ("if it's within 5 miles of me, I'm selling right away"). And the town's precedent file was in there too: a commenter pointed to Vilonia, which had gotten a mine out before it started by organizing around a noise ordinance — the same instrument Cabot and the county had reached for in 2023.

The countercurrent. The thread was not unanimous. One commenter called the misinformation in the comments astounding and insisted another participant had the story correct. Others shrugged: you typically cannot hear a data center outside its doors; it will be a beautiful warehouse and you will not know it is there; and the standing NIMBY jab — if it were a Buc-ee's moving in, everyone would be excited. The discourse, in other words, contained its own fact-check argument in real time, which is precisely why it is worth treating as a primary source rather than a mood sample: it preserves both the alarm and the dissent, timestamped.

The long tail (2025–2026). After the January thread, the local conversation thinned fast — BCOC searches surface almost nothing on the mine, a reminder that the fight lived in meetings and the paper more than in the largest group. What persisted was the generalized frame: in April–May 2025, Cabot Strong shares warned that "it's coming for you" in every county and asked whether Cabot would face the same issue — the Grayhawk fight reprocessed as a statewide data-center warning, in the season Act 314 passed. By September 2026, a BCOC post complained that data centers' costs to Arkansas citizens keep piling up, and a Cabot Strong (uncensored) post lamented the rejection of a bill that would have protected natural resources from data centers. The specific mine had faded from the discourse; the category had not. Notably, the groups' conversation never picked up the Act 314 vote itself or Hill's role in it — the "betrayal" frame lives in Corey's telling and the council record, not in the group archive search can reach.

What the record shows

Connected threads

Sources