Wednesday, July 15, 2026 • Chance of storms. Upper 80s. ⛈️

(Editor’s note: This is a vacation week for Oklahoma Memo. The newsletter will be in your inbox every day, but it might be a little lighter on the links. Follow the Memo’s social channels for highlights from the vacay.)

Night 1: Long drive from Oklahoma City to Orange Beach, Alabama. We arrived just before 10 p.m. on Tuesday. However, we always make it a point to support Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores on every road trip, including this stop in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. One of Love’s newest designs, and it was super clean.

We received 158 votes on the Tuesday poll, “Do you support making Daylight-Saving Time permanent?”

• 106 said Yes
• 52 said No

New poll question at the bottom of today’s newsletter. (You can also suggest a poll question by emailing me at [email protected].)

By Stephen Martin, Oklahoma Watch
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When fast-food chicken restaurant chain Chick-fil-A began looking for a location in Claremore, company officials asked the city for a nondisclosure agreement.

“We don’t shout it from the rooftops that, hey, ‘Developer Smith is wanting to put in a chicken restaurant at this spot,’ because developer Smith doesn’t want his competitors to know where he’s looking at property and what markets he’s in,” Claremore City Manager John Feary said.

Feary said such nondisclosure agreements, known as NDAs, are common in economic development.

But the practice has drawn increasing scrutiny as communities across the state negotiate with developers proposing billion-dollar data centers that may require new transmission lines, water infrastructure and, in some cases, public incentives.

For decades, state agencies and municipalities have quietly signed NDAs while competing to attract new employers. But as data center proposals have spread across the state, those contracts have become the subject of legislative proposals, citizen protests and growing questions about where business confidentiality ends and the public’s right to know begins.

Nondisclosure agreements protecting trade secrets are common, said Oklahoma City University law professor D.A. Jeremy Telman. But he said he doesn’t believe the agreements Oklahoma communities are signing with data center developers are primarily about trade secrets. 

“Where you want to put your data center is not a trade secret,” Telman, who teaches contract law, said. “It’s just a plan, a set of ideas that you would prefer not to disclose.”

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