SAND SPRINGS — Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has asked to intervene in a Tulsa County lawsuit challenging Sand Springs’ 2025 annexation of approximately 826 acres in Osage County tied to Project Spring.
The 17-page motion was filed in Tulsa County District Court Monday, Oct. 12, as Case No. CV2026-509, where Protect Sand Springs Alliance and neighboring landowners are challenging the annexation approved by the city in June 2025.
The City of Sand Springs has argued that the private plaintiffs lack standing to challenge the annexation. If the attorney general’s office is allowed to intervene the city’s argument will be moot. Drummond’s filing says the state has an independent interest in whether a municipality properly exercised annexation authority granted by Oklahoma law and should be allowed to intervene in the case.
At the center of the dispute is Ordinance No. 1434, approved June 23, 2025, when Sand Springs annexed approximately 826 acres in Osage County, opening the doors for Project Spring, a proposed 827-acre hyperscale datacenter campus just off North Highway 97 in Osage County, with plans for multiple large computing facilities, electrical substations, internal roads and other support infrastructure. Google was identified early this year as the prospective end user, while White Rose Partners is developing the site.
According to the Attorney General’s filing, Sand Springs relied on a 1966 “fence line” annexation created by Ordinance 204 to establish contiguity or adjacency between the city and the property annexed in 2025. The 1966 ordinance created a strip extending 50 feet on each side of a fence line. That strip was later extended by a 1979 ordinance.
Oklahoma law allows municipalities to annex territory that is adjacent or contiguous to existing city limits, but it also restricts the use of connecting strips created solely to establish contiguity or to capture additional territory.
The Attorney General’s filing argues that the 1966 strip cannot lawfully serve as the required connection for the 2025 annexation if it serves no municipal purpose beyond connecting Sand Springs to the Project Spring property.
The filing states that the strip contains no roads, paths, utility lines or other public infrastructure and cites Oklahoma Supreme Court precedent addressing what have been described as “shoestring annexations.”
In a conversation Monday evening, Sand Springs City Manager Mike Carter told the Keystone Gusher that neither his office, nor the city’s attorney have seen anything official regarding the attorney general’s filing.
“I do want to reiterate that we still feel the annexation was valid,” he said. Carter also said that the city contends the fence line annexation made in 1966 was still valid.
The AG’s office is not asking the district court to invalidate the 1966 annexation itself. Instead, Drummond is asking the court to determine whether that older strip may lawfully be used to establish contiguity for the 2025 annexation.
The filing addresses arguments that a challenge involving the 1966 strip is barred by the passage of time. The Attorney General argues that the state is challenging the legality of the 2025 annexation, not seeking to undo the 1966 ordinance, and that limitations periods generally do not bar the State when it acts in its sovereign capacity to enforce a public right.
If allowed to intervene, the State would attempt to compel the court to declare the 2025 annexation an impermissible exercise of statedelegated municipal authority.
Protect Sand Springs Alliance President Kyle Schmidt said the Attorney General’s involvement could get the case off high center and beyond the dispute over whether neighboring landowners have standing to sue.
“This isn’t a victory. Not yet,” Schmidt said. “It’s one battle in a long fight. But it’s a big one. For almost a year, the city’s position has been that the people who live next to this land don’t even have the right to ask a judge whether the city followed the law. Well, the State of Oklahoma has that right. And now the state is asking.”
Schmidt said that PSSA has spent more than $100,000 on the annexation lawsuit and a related rezoning case.
“The statute says in black and white that a city can’t annex a connecting strip whose only purpose is to reach the land it wants,” Schmidt said. “This strip is a hundred feet wide, almost seven miles long, and there are no city services in it. Its only job is to get to that parcel.”
A separate lawsuit, Case No. CV-2026-439, challenges the rezoning of the property for data center development. Land Legacy, which holds a conservation easement on the property, is a party in that case.
Tulsa District Court has not yet ruled on the legality of the annexation or on the Attorney General’s request to intervene. If intervention is granted, the state would become a party to the lawsuit and would then pursue its challenge to the legality of the 2025 annexation.
No time frame has been hinted at, and calls to the Tulsa County District Court were not returned by press time.