PROPOSED PROTECTIONS PENDING LEGAL MECHANISM

Rights
Safeguards

The framework's core claim is that AI compute should contribute more than it consumes. That principle only has meaning if the communities bearing the costs have enforceable rights. This page defines those rights and the enforcement path proposed for them.

Status: The rights and protections described here are proposed framework requirements — they are not yet enforceable law. They require adoption through municipal ordinance, community benefit agreement, contractual commitment, or future legislation to have legal force. The framework provides the design; the enforcement mechanism requires institutional adoption.
§1 — Foundation

Why Rights Are Part of This Framework

Technical measurement alone does not protect communities. A framework that only measures what compute deployments consume, without protecting the people bearing those costs, is a monitoring system — not a governance system. The Green Code is a governance system.

The specific communities The Green Code was designed with in mind are rural communities in regions with stressed water resources — places like Texas County, Oklahoma, where the Ogallala Aquifer has been declining for decades and where a large AI compute deployment represents a material new water demand on a system that is already under stress. These communities lack the institutional infrastructure that urban or industrial centers might have to negotiate with large technology operators.

Rights in this framework are not aspirational. They are proposed minimum conditions without which The Green Code does not consider a deployment to be compliant, regardless of its NBR score.

§2 — Water Rights

Water Rights

R-01
Right to Prior Water Impact Disclosure
Before a deployment begins operation, the operator must provide to the host municipality and its residents a documented assessment of the deployment's projected water draw and consumption, prepared by a licensed hydrologist. This assessment must be publicly available for a minimum 60-day review period before any permitting decision is finalized.
PROPOSED NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUM
R-02
Right to Water Priority During Scarcity
Agricultural operators, residential users, and public water systems must have documented priority over AI compute deployments during declared water scarcity conditions. Operators must agree contractually that, during official drought emergency declarations or aquifer-level triggers set by the state engineer, compute cooling water use is reduced first before any curtailment is imposed on agricultural or residential users.
PROPOSED NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUM
R-03
Right to Ongoing Water Monitoring Data
Community members, municipal governments, and state environmental agencies have the right to access real-time or near-real-time water intake and discharge meter readings from the deployment. Data must be published in a machine-readable format. It may not be restricted to summary disclosures that obscure peak-demand periods.
PROPOSED
§3 — Anti-Displacement

Anti-Displacement Protections

R-04
Right Against Agricultural Land Displacement
Operators may not site deployments on active agricultural land without documented consent from affected landowners and a community benefit agreement reviewed by the municipality. Displacement of farming operations to create compute footprint without compensation and community consent is a disqualifying condition — a deployment that causes agricultural displacement without consent cannot achieve NBR compliance regardless of other benefit claims.
PROPOSED NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUM
R-05
Right Against Grid Impact on Residential Rates
Operators must document and disclose any projected impact of their deployment on local electricity rates for residential and agricultural customers. If a deployment materially increases local electricity costs for existing customers, the operator must provide a rate-mitigation mechanism — such as direct rate subsidies, dedicated supply infrastructure, or demand-response commitments — before deployment is authorized.
PROPOSED
R-06
Right of Small Operators Against Anticompetitive Water Capture
Operators may not acquire water rights in volumes that would effectively prevent future agricultural or residential development in the host region. Water right acquisitions above a threshold defined by the state engineer must be reviewed for regional impact before authorization. The framework prohibits speculative water-right accumulation as a barrier to community growth.
PROPOSED PENDING STATE-LEVEL MECHANISM
§4 — Transparency Rights

Transparency Rights

R-07
Right to Plain-Language Disclosure
Technical compliance reports may not be the only public-facing disclosure. Operators must also publish a plain-language summary accessible to non-technical community members — in English and in any other language that is the primary language of 10% or more of the host municipality's population. The summary must include: what the deployment does, how much water and energy it uses, what benefits it claims to provide, and how those claims are verified.
PROPOSED NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUM
R-08
Right to Audit Report Access
Full GCTS-1 audit reports — not just executive summaries — must be publicly available within 30 days of completion. Redactions are only permissible for information that meets the threshold for a legitimate trade secret under applicable state law, and every redaction must be specifically identified and justified. Blanket confidentiality claims on audit reports are not permitted.
PROPOSED NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUM
R-09
Right to Attend Community Review Sessions
Before any deployment is authorized, and annually during operation, the operator must hold a public review session in the host municipality. The session must be held in person (not only virtually), in the host community, and at a time accessible to working-hours community members. The municipality has the right to require a recorded session with transcripts published within 14 days.
PROPOSED
§5 — Data Sovereignty

Data Sovereignty

R-10
Right Against Non-Consensual Data Collection
Environmental sensor networks deployed by compute operators — water quality sensors, air quality monitors, soil sensors, acoustic monitoring — may not collect data on community members' behavior, movement, or communications without explicit community consent. Sensor data about the physical environment must be published under an open license. Data about individuals or identifiable private behavior requires separate legal authority.
PROPOSED NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUM
R-11
Right to Open Environmental Data
All environmental monitoring data collected under the GCTS-1 framework — water quality, energy telemetry, aquifer level readings — must be published under an open data license (CC0, CC-BY, or equivalent) and made available through a machine-readable API. Operators may not charge for access to this environmental data. Community members, researchers, and regulators may use the data without restriction.
PROPOSED
§6 — Kill-Switch Authority

Municipal Kill-Switch Authority

R-12
Kill-Switch Provision — Municipal Authority to Suspend Operations
The host municipality must retain — by contract, ordinance, or permit condition — the authority to order a temporary operational suspension of the compute deployment in specified emergency circumstances. This authority is not subject to operator override. It is a non-negotiable structural requirement.

Trigger conditions (proposed):
  • → Declared water emergency in the host county or watershed management district
  • → Grid emergency declared by the regional transmission organization
  • → Public health emergency where the deployment is identified as a contributing factor
  • → Confirmed material misrepresentation in the operator's NBR or GCTS-1 reports
  • → Failure to allow access to accredited auditors or government inspectors

The kill-switch is an ordered temporary suspension — not a permanent closure — triggered by defined conditions, subject to appeal, and with a documented restoration process. It is not punitive; it is protective.
PROPOSED NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUM
Legal mechanism: The kill-switch authority requires legal mechanism — most likely through operating permit conditions or a community benefit agreement with contractual enforcement provisions. No municipality has yet adopted such a provision under this framework. The proposed Texas County pilot would include kill-switch provisions as a standard term of any deployment authorization. PROPOSED
§7 — Equitable Benefit

Equitable Benefit Distribution

R-13
Right to Compute Dividend Access
Where the operator's NBR calculation includes a Compute Dividend — allocation of inference capacity to community institutions at no charge — the institutions receiving that allocation must be selected by the municipality or community, not solely by the operator. Eligible institutions include public schools, public hospitals, public libraries, local government, water utilities, and agricultural extension offices. The operator may not restrict the Compute Dividend to uses that benefit the operator.
PROPOSED
R-14
Right to Local Hiring Preference
Where the operator's NBR includes local employment as a benefit category, the operator must demonstrate good-faith local hiring through documented recruitment in the host municipality and county before recruiting from outside the region for positions that community members are qualified to fill. Local hiring preference is not a quota — it is a documented first-source commitment.
PROPOSED
R-15
Right to Infrastructure Benefits at Community Scale
Infrastructure investments claimed as Bv under the NBR calculation must benefit the community at meaningful scale. Infrastructure that is technically public but practically inaccessible to community members (e.g., industrial-grade infrastructure requiring specialized equipment to access) does not qualify as a community benefit. The municipality must attest that each claimed infrastructure benefit is practically accessible to community members.
PROPOSED
§8 — Environmental Justice

Environmental Justice Provisions

AI compute infrastructure disproportionately locates in rural or lower-income regions where land is less expensive and regulatory oversight is lower. The Green Code framework explicitly addresses this pattern.

R-16
Environmental Justice Site Assessment
Before siting in a community designated as an environmental justice community (EPA EJScreen Category 4 or state equivalent), operators must complete an environmental justice impact assessment that documents: existing environmental burdens in the community, the additional cumulative burden of the deployment, and the specific mitigation measures and benefit mechanisms designed to address that cumulative burden. The assessment must be prepared by an independent third party and published for public comment before permitting.
PROPOSED NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUM
R-17
Right to Elevated NBR Threshold in Overburdened Communities
Deployments in communities with documented high existing environmental burden must demonstrate a higher NBR than the standard threshold. The proposed uplift is +0.5 on the applicable G-level threshold (e.g., G-2 minimum of NBR ≥ 1.5 becomes NBR ≥ 2.0 in EJ communities). This reflects the principle that communities already bearing disproportionate environmental costs are entitled to disproportionate benefit from new infrastructure, not merely proportionate benefit.
PROPOSED THRESHOLD: PENDING REVIEW
§9 — Enforcement

Enforcement Path

Rights without enforcement are aspirations. The following is the proposed enforcement hierarchy, from lowest to highest escalation:

Level Mechanism Trigger Outcome Status
1 — Community complaint Written complaint to operator and Standards Board Any community member with standing Operator must respond in writing within 30 days. Response logged publicly. PROPOSED
2 — Independent investigation Standards Board triggers review Material factual discrepancy in complaint Independent investigator reviews evidence. Findings published within 90 days. PROPOSED
3 — Remediation order Standards Board or municipality issues remediation requirement Confirmed rights violation Operator has 60 days to submit remediation plan. Progress monitored. PROPOSED
4 — Municipal kill-switch Municipality exercises suspension authority Emergency conditions (R-12) or persistent non-remediation Temporary operational suspension. Restoration requires remediation proof. PROPOSED
5 — Permit revocation Municipality revokes operating permit or utility interconnection Persistent violation after remediation order; fraud; material misrepresentation Permanent operational termination. Appeals through local administrative and judicial process. PROPOSED
6 — Legal action Civil litigation by municipality or class of affected community members Damages arising from rights violations Subject to applicable state law. Framework documents are not a substitute for independent legal advice. OUTSIDE FRAMEWORK SCOPE
Current state: No enforcement mechanism is currently operational because no deployment under this framework is currently active and no municipality has adopted the framework by ordinance or agreement. Enforcement is a future deliverable contingent on framework adoption. If you are a municipality or community organization interested in these protections, contact the framework team.
§10 — Non-Negotiable Floor

Non-Negotiable Rights Floor

Some rights protections in this framework are negotiable through community benefit agreements — the parties may agree to different mechanisms while achieving the same protective purpose. Others are non-negotiable. They cannot be waived by agreement, softened by contract, or offset by NBR score.

NON-NEGOTIABLE MINIMUMS — Cannot be contracted away
  • R-01   Prior water impact disclosure reviewed by a licensed hydrologist
  • R-02   Agricultural and residential water priority during declared scarcity
  • R-04   No agricultural displacement without documented consent and CBA
  • R-07   Plain-language public disclosure accessible to non-technical residents
  • R-08   Full audit report public access within 30 days
  • R-10   No non-consensual data collection on community members
  • R-12   Municipal kill-switch authority in documented emergency conditions
  • R-16   Environmental justice site assessment in EJ-designated communities

A deployment that contracts around any of these protections — regardless of its NBR score, regardless of what benefits it offers — is not compliant with The Green Code framework. A high NBR does not compensate for missing fundamental rights protections.

If you believe your community's rights are being violated by an AI compute deployment — regardless of whether it uses The Green Code framework — you may contact the framework team for general information. We are not lawyers and cannot provide legal advice, but we can share relevant documentation and connect you with appropriate resources. silxi@icloud.com