Dustin McAnn figured the wooden survey stake he found in front of his barn in early August marked a water leak. They’re common on his cattle farm in LaSalle Parish, so he didn’t think much of it.
A few days later, neighbors started calling. Entergy, they told him, wanted to run a massive transmission line across his pasture — slicing through where he planned to build a shop and another hay barn — carrying power almost 80 miles north to Meta’s $50 billion data center in Richland Parish.
“I didn’t find out about it from Entergy,” McAnn said. “I found out about it by a stake that was right here.”
He called his Louisiana Public Service (LPSC) commissioner, Mike Francis, and filed a complaint with his office. The state regulatory agency oversees public utilities, including companies like Entergy.
When he followed up, he said Francis’ office was less than helpful.
“They told me on the phone that the best thing they could tell me to do was get an attorney,” McAnn said. “Get an attorney for what? I have no idea what this is even for.”
He started organizing, driving around, looking for other survey stakes and contacting the landowners. Within a few weeks, he founded the Louisiana Landowners Coalition. They held their first meeting under his barn in late August.
Today (Nov. 9), they, along with two other groups, filed a lawsuit against the LPSC, arguing it violated the state constitution by adopting a fast-track approval pathway for power plants without telling the public.
The pathway, known as the “Lightning Directive,” lets utilities skip steps designed to protect ratepayers. Entergy Louisiana plans to use it in December to seek approval of seven gas plants and transmission lines for Meta’s data center.
Those lines would cross private land, and Entergy, McAnn said, is threatening to take that land through expropriation — Louisiana’s term for eminent domain.
He hopes the lawsuit will delay the vote, forcing Entergy and the commission to take more time to review it.
He’s concerned about the lack of transparency around the Meta data center. Gulf States Newsroom investigations found officials used NDAs to conceal project negotiations, including Gov. Jeff Landry and Senate-elect Julia Letlow, and an Entergy executive ghost-wrote motions LPSC commissioners filed into the record.
The commission also voted to overturn an administrative law judge’s ruling that would have forced Meta to provide key information about the data center’s power needs.
“We want our elected officials to be accountable to the people who elected them,” McAnn said, “not to corporations, not to NDAs, not to secrecy, but to the people who elected them to the office they serve.”
‘Not official notice’
The lawsuit, filed in the 19th Judicial District Court in East Baton Rouge Parish, asks a judge to declare the LPSC’s “Lightning Directive” as “invalid and of no effect,” bar the commission from enforcing it and order the PSC to adopt written procedures for how it changes its own rules.
The plaintiffs include the Louisiana Landowners Coalition, the Louisiana Citizen Advocacy Group and Save My Louisiana, Inc., a group focused on protecting private property rights and the environment.
In an interview with the Gulf States Newsroom, their lawyer, William Most, said the case is about how the commission acted, not whether the policy is good.
“The Public Service Commission was created by the state constitution,” Most said. “The constitution sets certain limits. Specifically, the commission has to give people an advance heads-up when they’re gonna change their rules so that people have an opportunity to comment.”
The commission approved the directive 4-1 at its Dec. 17 meeting in Natchitoches. Commissioner Jean-Paul Coussan proposed it, citing Gov. Jeff Landry’s similarly named “Louisiana Lightning Speed” executive order.
The directive waives a long-standing rule for new power plants that meet certain criteria. Known as the commission’s “market-based mechanisms order,” it’s meant to ensure utilities pursue the lowest-cost options for ratepayers.
To skip it, a utility must show a contract of at least 15 years with a new or expanding customer, a letter from Louisiana Economic Development (LED) confirming the customer’s interest, a projected shortfall in capacity and customer payments covering at least half of the plant’s fixed costs.
The Lightning Directive sets a fast-tracked timeline of a commission vote within eight months of an application. Utilities using the pathway must notify the commission’s executive counsel at least 60 days before filing.
The petition says the only public notice was an agenda line reading: “Directive on Commission’s Lightning Initiative. At the request of Commissioner Coussan.” There was no indication that the commission was proposing to change its own rules.
Most called it a “very vague, very confusing” statement to put on an agenda.
“There was no such thing as the lightning initiative,” Most said, “so no one in the public could have had any idea what was being proposed until after it was decided by the commission.”
In April, District 3 Commissioner Davante Lewis told the Gulf States Newsroom the item was added to the agenda 48 hours before the vote, with commissioners getting the text minutes before voting.
“We change long-standing commission policies, and we have published it nowhere but in the transcript of the hearing,” Lewis said. “That is not official notice to me.”
‘They make it up as they go’
The lawsuit leans on a 1977 Louisiana Supreme Court decision, Louisiana Consumers’ League v. Louisiana Public Service Commission. It held that the procedure for changing a commission rule must include notice and “a reasonable opportunity for interested persons to submit data or views,” or the change is “invalid and of no effect.”
The petition argues the directive fails both parts: the agenda gave no notice of what was changing, and the public heard the text for the first time at the meeting.
The petition also argues that the commission has no written procedures for its own rulemaking. Most said that “astonished” him, since most public bodies follow a written set of rules.
“The Public Service Commission, as far as I can tell, has no such rules,” he said. “They make it up as they go.”
The commission would not comment on current litigation after the lawsuit was filed. But regarding procedures for changing rules, Colby Cook, LPSC’s press secretary, pointed to the commission’s existing Rules of Practice and Procedure, though they offer little clarity.
Commissioners have the discretion to suspend or modify the rules immediately. But the provision spells out a process for changing them, such as requirements for advance public notice or an opportunity for public comment.
The petition cites the commission’s secretary saying in 2024 that the commission has not “formally adopted Robert’s Rules of Order” but “loosely follows” them.
The meeting
At the commission’s Dec. 17, 2025, meeting, its executive counsel read the directive's final text aloud. Commissioners and members of the public then discussed it for about 40 minutes before the 4-1 vote.
Coussan said he had made “conciliatory changes” for unspecified stakeholders and that “we’ll circulate this language, obviously, after this meeting.”
He also thanked Gov. Landry for “really inspiring me on this matter,” after Landry called for a “Lightning Speed” initiative at LED, joking that some people had assumed the name referred to a “lightning amendment” for the commission’s energy efficiency program.
“And I said, no, I want to be done with the efficiency program. This is lightning,” Coussan said, stressing the ‘n’ in lightning.
The exchange underscores the plaintiffs’ argument that the name told the public little about what was proposed.
Defending the directive, Coussan said it doesn’t suspend “the regular process of the ability to intervene,” and that its text says nothing that could limit any party’s participation in a certification case.
Skrmetta defended the directive as “the same policy” the commission used in approving Entergy’s plan for Meta’s Richland Parish data center in 2025, with “racing stripes.”
Lewis questioned LPSC staff directly.
Was the directive permanent?
Staff said it would be memorialized in a special order and, “yes, it would be in perpetuity,” adding that they had discussed the procedure “on the way up here.”
Did it define who qualifies?
“I don’t think it really even discusses a large load,” a staff member said.
Another staff member said the intent was projects likely to need new generation, “500 megawatt-plus projects would be my guess.”
Lewis, the lone vote against the directive, said he did not oppose the intent but the method.
“I do think we should have done this in a more transparent, representative way,” he said.
He wanted “the evidence, the research, the knowledge that brings us to this table.”
After the vote, Lewis told the Gulf States Newsroom the commission had “changed it in the blink of an eye,” calling the market-based mechanism “one of our most basic protections” for ratepayers.
Later in the meeting, Lewis introduced a separate directive to open a formal rulemaking on how large electricity users connect to the grid and how costs are shared, the standard route the petition says the Lightning Directive skipped.
Commissioners voted 4-1 to postpone it, after Coussan called it “a solution in search of a problem.”
‘In the books’
A few groups spoke on the directive before the LPSC’s vote, and the Louisiana Energy Users Group, an industrial customer group, had sent the commission a letter with proposed edits days earlier.
Randy Young, the group’s attorney, told commissioners the letter objected to a provision requiring electric service agreements of at least 10 years. The final version said 15, and Young thanked the commission for the change, suggesting at least one outside group had seen earlier text.
Most said the claim that people had a chance to weigh in “makes it even more concerning if certain interest groups were given secret access to an advanced copy, but the public was not.”
“That’s exactly the kind of thing we shouldn’t have our government doing,” he said.
After the vote approving the Lightning Directive, Francis, the commission’s chairman, said it’s “in the books.”
The petition says it is not.
It does not appear among the commission’s General Rules and Regulations, Rules of Practice and Procedure, amendments or special orders. Commission staff said at the meeting it would be memorialized in a special order.
The petition says that never happened, and that when an Alliance for Affordable Energy representative asked about it in January, she was told, “There won’t be one.”
“It is buried inside the minutes of an old meeting where no one would think to look for rule changes,” Most said, and utilities know where to find it “because they’re citing it in their filings.”
The commission may adopt the same policy again after proper notice, Most said.
“The key,” Most said, “is an opportunity for the people of Louisiana to have a say in how their government works.”
Lightning and land
Although it does not appear in the LPSC’s books, the Lightning Directive is being put to use.
In March, Entergy Louisiana invoked it in its application for a $21.37 billion plan to power a new Meta data center in Richland Parish. It’s being used for Applied Digital’s data center in Rapides Parish. And Entergy will invoke it next month at the LPSC’s Dec. 10 meeting to seek approvals for seven new gas plants to power Meta’s data center.
The Gulf States Newsroom sought comment from Entergy but did not receive a response before publication.
The directive itself covers approval of new power plants. As read aloud in December, it doesn’t mention transmission lines or land, and the petition, which describes the plaintiffs as taxpayers, challenges only how the commission adopted it.
The Landowners Coalition’s members include people “whose land is being proposed to be seized by Entergy to run transmission lines” for the Meta project, Most said. And Entergy will soon ask the commission for approvals that would “facilitate its seizing land.”
“This is not hypothetical or theoretical questions of transparency,” Most said. “This is concrete for real people.”
The commission’s sign-off is the link, McAnn said. If the commission certifies Entergy’s projects as serving the public necessity, he expects Entergy to cite that finding to a judge in expropriation cases.
“You can’t call it public necessity when you sign the agreement with Meta that triggered the need anyway,” he said. “We don’t expropriate property for future growth, and we don’t expropriate property for a private economic development project.”
He’s “always been pro-property rights” and “would never vote for something like this to happen to someone else,” he said.
But the stakes are closer to home. The farm is his legacy for his daughter and future grandchildren.
“I never thought that it would happen right here,” he said. “But when it did, what it told me was that if I don’t stand up and do something, it won’t just be my land; it’s gonna be my neighbors.”
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
