The Board of Regents holds all the authority over this project. The University’s own panel has said so at two town halls. So I wanted to know what the Board has actually been told, and when.
The minutes of every meeting are published on the University’s website. I read all of them — 39 documents, February 2022 through September 2026, covering more than fifty meetings.
Here is what’s in them.
Nothing, for the first three years
From February 2022 to October 2024 — roughly thirty meetings — the project does not appear. Not once.
I searched every file for Los Alamos, LANL, Ypsilanti, Textile, Rawsonville, data center, computing center, supercomputing, national laboratory, high performance computing, Triad, NNSA, Innovation Campus, Willow Run and the American Center for Mobility. The handful of matches in that period were unrelated — hospital metal detectors, a Department of Energy engine research grant, the Leinweber Computer Science building.
Consider what happened during that silence.
- March 2023 — the University and Triad sign a restricted non-disclosure agreement for a computing facility
in support of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Program and Weapons Physics Directorate
.2 The March 2023 meeting minutes don’t mention it. - July 2023 — the agreement is amended to add SmithGroup as architect and the American Center for Mobility as a site.3 Not mentioned.
- October 2023 — MEDC’s chief executive writes to President Ono committing up to $400 million in state support.4 Not mentioned.
- May 2024 — the University signs confidentiality agreements with MEDC and with Willow Run Arsenal of Democracy Landholdings.5 Not mentioned.
By the time the Board first votes on anything connected to this, the project has an executed agreement with a federal weapons laboratory, an architect, a named site, and a nine-figure state commitment.
The first vote: October 17, 2024
Here is the entry, in full:1
Vacant land located at 6630 Rawsonville Road, Ypsilanti Township, Michigan; Vacant land located at 10221 Textile Road, Ypsilanti Township, Michigan
On a motion by Regent White, seconded by Regent Ilitch, the regents unanimously approved acquisition of the land at 6630 Rawsonville Road, Ypsilanti Township, Michigan at the negotiated price of $1,155,000, and acquisition of the land at 10221 Textile Road, Ypsilanti Township, Michigan at the negotiated price of $1,500,000, subject to the university satisfying itself with the environmental condition of the site and otherwise completing due diligence. Bond proceeds will be used to complete the purchase.
Two addresses, two prices, a due diligence condition, and a funding source. No stated purpose.
And note the second parcel. 6630 Rawsonville Road, $1,155,000. That property has never appeared in anything the University has told this community about the project — not in the FAQ, not at a town hall, not on the postcard.
And it appears the purchase never happened. According to current Washtenaw County Register of Deeds records, 6630 Rawsonville Road is owned by Motown Holdings Inc., with no sale recorded since 2021.
So the most likely explanation is the ordinary one: the Regents authorized the purchase, the University completed its due diligence, and it walked away. The authorization was expressly conditioned on the university satisfying itself with the environmental condition of the site and otherwise completing due diligence
, which is exactly the clause you would expect to be exercised if something turned up.
That is a normal thing to do and I don’t criticize it. But it leaves two questions worth asking, because nobody has ever mentioned this parcel publicly at all:
What was Rawsonville Road being acquired for — the same project, or something unrelated? And what did due diligence find that led the University to abandon a purchase its board had already approved?
I want to be clear about the limits here. All I have is the current deed record and the vote. I don’t know the University’s reasons, I haven’t seen a withdrawal, and it is possible a transaction is pending or structured in a way the deed doesn’t yet show. If anyone can tell me more, I’ll publish it.
The second vote: June 12, 2025
10455 and 10635 Textile Road, Ypsilanti Township, Michigan
On a motion by Regent White, seconded by Regent Acker, the regents approved the purchase of the land at 10455 and 10635 Textile Road, Ypsilanti Township, Michigan at the negotiated price of $65,000 per developable acre, subject to the university satisfying itself with the environmental condition of the site and otherwise completing due diligence. Bond proceeds or central reserves will be used to complete the purchase.
Again, no stated purpose. The action request behind this vote — the document the Regents actually received — describes it as a future computing center
and says nothing more.
One small difference worth noting. The October 2024 entry records the vote as unanimously approved. This one says only approved. That may be nothing more than how the secretary wrote it up, and I’m not going to read anything into it without checking the recording.
The only two times anyone explained it
In four and a half years of minutes, the project is described to the Board exactly twice. Both times in a president’s opening remarks, neither time with a number attached.
December 5, 2024 — President Ono, after both the MOU was signed and the first land was bought, and five days before the State approved $100 million:1
He also reported on a new partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research facility, which will open new opportunities for students, faculty, and staff, create jobs, and strengthen Michigan’s position in the AI and information economy.
February 2026 — President Grasso:1
As many here know, the university has entered into a partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the State of Michigan to develop a world-class supercomputing research center. We are currently reviewing two potential sites in Ypsilanti Township. We are conducting careful due diligence, and that includes listening. Our goal is to identify a location that advances this critical research mission while also reflecting the priorities and concerns of the surrounding community.
The UM has long committed to being a good neighbor. That commitment remains firm with this project.
An AI research facility in December 2024. A world-class supercomputing research center fourteen months later. Neither matches the other, and neither matches an academic research center
from this month’s postcard.
That’s now thirteen different descriptions of the same building.
Who did tell the Regents about this
Residents did, at the public comment microphone. The minutes record them by name:1
- September 2025 — Ryan McCarty, faculty, on plans for building a computing center in Ypsilanti
- February 2026 — Brenda Stumbo, community member, on proposed computational centers at Textile and Bridge Road
- March 2026 — Kara Bernas, student, on the UM/LANL Supercomputing Research Center
- May 2026 — Kerin Hayden, community member, on opposition to the Los Alamos Nuclear Facility, the Huron River, and community consent
Read that second entry again.
The Supervisor of Ypsilanti Township — the elected head of the municipality the University is building in — appears in the minutes of its governing board as “community member”, with two minutes at a microphone, eight months after they voted to buy the land.
That is the only way this township has ever been heard by the Board of Regents.
So who approved this project?
Reading all of this, the obvious question is the one I couldn’t answer for a while. If the Regents never voted on the project — only on land — but the project team keeps saying the Regents are the only ones who can stop it, something doesn’t add up.
It turns out it does add up, and the answer is more useful than I expected.
Those two votes were real estate transactions, not project approvals. Regents Bylaw 3.07 requires that all transactions involving the purchase of real property be approved and authorized by the board. That is why those items appear at all, and it explains why they read so narrowly. They are about buying land, not about building anything on it.
Construction is a separate approval, and it hasn’t happened. The University’s own capital project guidelines say that all new construction projects estimated at $3 million and higher require formal Board of Regents approval, and that it comes in two stages: Approval of Project and Authorization to Appoint an Architect, then Approval of Schematic Design and Authorization to Proceed with Construction.6
The same guidelines state it plainly: before a capital project can officially begin, the president must support the project and the Board of Regents must approve it.
Nothing like that appears anywhere in four and a half years of minutes.
Which means the decision is still in front of them.
When the panel says the Regents have the power to stop this, they are telling the truth — not because the Regents approved it, but because they haven’t yet approved the part that matters. A $1.25 billion facility has to come back to that board, in public, with a named architect, a stated cost, and a description of what is being built.
Could it have happened behind closed doors?
I wondered, given how many confidentiality agreements surround this project. The answer is no, for three reasons.
No closed session appears in any of the 39 documents. I searched every one. Entering closed session requires a two-thirds roll call vote and the purpose must be recorded in the minutes. There is no such entry anywhere in this period.
Decisions cannot be made in closed session. Michigan’s Open Meetings Act permits a body to discuss certain matters privately — including the purchase of real property, which is likely how the land deals were handled — but requires that all decisions be made at a meeting open to the public.
And university boards face a stricter rule than most. Article VIII, Section 4 of the state constitution requires the formal sessions of university governing boards to be open. The Michigan Supreme Court applied that directly to this board in 1993, in a case about a presidential search conducted in private.7 It comes from the same article that grants the autonomy at the center of this whole dispute.
A confidentiality agreement between a university and a laboratory cannot suspend a provision of the state constitution. The agreements themselves concede the parallel point — every one that addresses disclosure preserves the University’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act.
What I’m not saying
I’m not saying the Regents were kept in the dark. I can’t know that.
Committee meetings are summarized only briefly in the minutes, and I can’t see what was discussed in them. Briefings can happen outside formal sessions. It is entirely possible that eight people knew exactly what they were approving, and I’d expect them to have asked.
What I am saying is narrower, and it is checkable by anyone with an afternoon:
The public record of the Board of Regents, across four and a half years, contains two land votes with no stated purpose, two sentences of explanation from two different presidents that don’t agree with each other, and four residents at a microphone.
If there is more, the University can produce it.
A note on reading these yourself
If you go looking, one thing will trip you up. The files are named for the meeting at which the minutes were approved, not the meeting they record. The file called 2024-12 contains the October 17, 2024 meeting. The June 12, 2025 vote is in the file called 2025-09.
I lost an hour to that, so you don’t have to.
Sources
- University of Michigan Board of Regents, published meeting minutes, February 2022 through September 2026 (39 documents). regents.umich.edu
- Non-disclosure agreement RSNDA-23-0076, March 2023 (PDF)
- First amendment, NDA-23-0173, July 2023 (PDF)
- Letter from MEDC CEO Quentin L. Messer, Jr. to Dr. Santa Ono, October 27, 2023 (PDF)
- MEDC confidentiality agreement, May 24, 2024 (PDF) · Willow Run Arsenal of Democracy agreement, May 2024 (PDF)
- University of Michigan Office of the Provost, Capital Project Guidelines for the Ann Arbor Campus. PDF · Bylaws of the University of Michigan Board of Regents, Sec. 3.07. regents.umich.edu
- Michigan Constitution of 1963, Article VIII, Section 4 · Michigan Open Meetings Act, MCL 15.261 et seq., particularly MCL 15.263 · Booth Newspapers, Inc. v. University of Michigan Board of Regents, 444 Mich 211 (1993). I am not a lawyer; these are the provisions I relied on and you can read them yourself.
Every quotation above is from the University’s own published minutes. I read all 39 documents and searched each for every term I could think of; if I missed a mention, tell me and I’ll add it and say that I did.
