Brantley County activist Tanya Tomanek heads to court after being jailed for speech to commissioners

For most of her life, Tanya Tomanek thought of herself as a businesswoman, mother and grandmother, someone who moved to her quiet 16-acre land in Brantley County three years ago. She was more concerned with her family than politics.

That changed this summer, when Tomanek was led out of a county commission meeting in handcuffs and spent three nights in jail after delivering an impassioned plea for transparency and accountability over the hot-button issue of data centers. 

On Wednesday, Tomanek, 53, is going to court to fight charges of criminal trespass. She says the accusations are politically motivated and meant to silence her coalition of residents against tech firms and developers that are scouring Georgia for places to build data centers and the local officials tempted to bring them to her county.

A new view on government

Tomanek’s journey from an apolitical citizen to a frontline warrior in Georgia’s data center wars illustrates how voters across the state are becoming more civically engaged around an issue that many see as an existential threat to their way of life.  

At the same time, grassroots campaigns popping up across traditionally Republican rural counties like Brantley illustrate why election polls suggest that Georgia’s statewide races are so tight ahead of Election Day: voter anxiety about affordability and the potential end of their way of life is intertwined with a widespread perception that elected officials aren’t listening.

“I guess God woke me up,” Tomanek said about her relatively new political activism. “I saw good versus evil” and “ knew that I couldn’t stand by.”

The sheriff’s deputy who handcuffed Tomanek viewed the matter differently. In his incident report he wrote that Tomanek was using threatening language and refused to comply with demands that she sit down before the end of her allotted five-minute public comment. 

Tomanek was “ejected from the meeting because she broke the rules” that had been posted prior to the session,” Brantley County Manager Joey Cason told The Current GA. “Chairman Skipper Harris asked her to sit down; she said no. The officer asked her to leave, and she said that he would have to take her out in handcuffs. So the officer handcuffed her and took her out.”

Tomanek concedes that she used an expletive as her emotions ran high at the podium but denied making any threats. She says that heavy-handed tactics against voters like her will likely blowback against the political establishment at the ballot box.

“I’ve never been in politics. I don’t know politics. I didn’t participate in my local government” until this summer, she said. “They didn’t take the power from us; we gave it away. And we’re the only ones that can take it back.”

Taking a hard look at artificial intelligence

Tomanek, who grew up in Illinois and lived in Camden and Brantley counties for close to two decades, has lived through turbulent times in American history but the advent of the Artificial Intelligence era has hit home differently, she said.

As someone who helped care for elderly parents and now helps raise grandchildren on her farm, Tomanek was too busy to get in the weeds of national economic policy, or local government issues. That changed at the end of 2025. She and a friend went to a local discussion group at the Waynesville Baptist Church where the topic was data centers.

The technology’s potential to disrupt America’s economy and her grandchildren’s lives frightened her enough to drastically change her life. Her free time was concentrated in research about data centers and conversations with neighbors. She and her partner, Matt McGrath, sought to raise awareness of their concerns by using a digital billboard the two installed on GA 82.

In February, she christened her coalition Citizens United for Brantley County’s Future. Their first formal meeting, she said, was at Waynesville Primary School, where around 150 people showed up.

Later that month, a man who attended the monthly Brantley County Committee meeting was escorted out by police after speaking against a proposed zoning change to allow the construction of a data center. He was not charged.

A subsequent meeting of the Citizens United group in Nahunta attracted nearly 100 Brantley County residents, all “blue collar people,” according to Tomanek. Residents, including young families and retirees, used the opportunity to air all sorts of grievances against county commissioners. Data centers were among the topics, she said.

Tomanek and McGrath were thrilled at the unexpected turnout. The sense of community — and anger — heightened soon after when wildfires destroyed over a hundred homes and forced families to evacuate.

Some in Tomanek’s anti-data center coalition started the rumor that tech companies or developers had started the fires deliberately to clear land for such a facility. County commissioners have denied they were considering a data center in Brantley. 

But anger about the slow pace of help and rebuilding after the fire merged with frustration over higher costs and growing perception that local elected officials were ignoring urgent problems.

Tomanek felt the backlash growing in her social media chats with the Citizens United collective. By summer, her own ire concentrated on the county’s elected officials.

Her emotions led her to sign up to speak at the July 7 county commission meeting, where residents are allowed five minutes to discuss issues of importance.

Taking a stand

A video taken of Tomanek’s speech shows her at the podium, amid a room of around 20 neighbors including a sprinkling of Citizens United allies. She started by telling the commissioners her philosophy of government. Local government, she said, is like a business, and elected officials, she said, are employees of the voters. The people of Brantley, she continued, have been “really shitty business owners,” meaning that the voters have done a poor job of holding their commissioners accountable.

“They didn’t take the power from us; we gave it away. And we’re the only ones that can take it back,” she said to some cheers in the crowd.

As her emotions grew, she used an expletive. “Our county’s going fucking bankrupt,” she said. 

By that, she meant that she was worried that the commissioners were going to change the rural face of Brantley with large-scale economic development, such as data centers, a new landfill or solar farms.

At that point, a commissioner signaled for the sheriff’s deputy to remove her from the room, according to the incident report of Tomanek’s arrest. 

“Tomanek began speaking, and as she continued into her speech, her tone and demeanor became noticeably more aggressive specifically towards Board Chairman Skipper Harris,” according to her arrest report. “About 2 minutes into Tomanek’s speaking, she began verbally berating and cursing loudly for everyone in the room to hear.”

‘Terrified’

Tomanek felt a mixture of surprise and fear as she was put in the county lockup that Tuesday afternoon. “I’m terrified. If I said I wasn’t scared, I’d be lying,” she said.

Another woman already in the holding cell told her the sheriff processed people on a Wednesday, and Tomanek prepared herself for an uncomfortable night. 

The next day, her cell mate was processed. Tomanek, however, had to wait until Friday, when she was released on a $1,000 cash-only bail while she awaited a hearing on charges of criminal trespass.

She considered both decisions a symbol of retaliation for what she sees is a crusade to speak truth to power, a mission she said she feels called to perform. “None of this is me. This is nothing but the Lord,” she said about her political activism.

So far, she has not convinced the courts of her divine calling. Before her first court hearing scheduled Sept. 23, her assigned public defender told her he had to recuse himself from her case because of a conflict of interest. In private practice, he apparently does work for the county, she said. 

That has delayed Tomanek’s quest for justice. At her court appearance on Oct. 28, she’s hoping that the judge will throw out the charges.

 “I’ve had a target on my back since jump,” she said. 

“Before January, nobody stood up. Nobody was here. They could do what they wanted because we were silent,” said Tomanek. “My voice holds no more weight than the next. They didn’t do it to me. They did it to everyone. I just happened to go to jail.”