The Cumberland County Board of Commissioners will consider a data center ordinance on November 12 and is on track for a final vote in December, county staff told CityView.
The county’s Joint Planning Board unanimously approved the proposed ordinance on October 20 after board members and planning staff made adjustments to a previous version.
The county commission in the summer imposed a six-month moratorium on data center projects to block new construction of the controversial computing warehouse facilities while the staff and the Planning Board created the regulations. It expires December 15.
The regulations cover noise, buffering and landscaping, distance from neighbors, hours when testing of backup generators is permitted, water use, electricity use, and other matters.
The ordinance would apply to unincorporated areas of Cumberland County and the Town of Eastover, which uses the county’s zoning regulations. On Monday, Fayetteville approved its own ordinance that treats data centers like warehouses. The city is also planning to hold a public hearing on a data center moratorium.
Here is a summary of the proposed regulations and some of the changes from the previous draft:
Data Center, Defined
The ordinance defines a data center as a facility or campus primarily used to house, operate, and maintain equipment that stores, processes, transmits, or distributes digital data.
Telecommunications facilities or equipment, such as cell phone towers, would not be included. Neither would data or computing facilities that are secondary to the primary use of the property. For example, businesses, factories and hospitals that have data storage and processing facilities to support their primary operations would not be classified as data centers under this ordinance.
Placement, Distance From Neighbors
Data centers would be allowed only in areas zoned for manufacturing use, and they would need to get permission from the Board of Commissioners before they could be built. The commissioners could set requirements “to allow for consideration of site-specific conditions or community concerns,” a memo to the Joint Planning Board says.
A data center’s buildings would have to be 800 feet from its property lines. Previously, the draft ordinance set this at 500 feet. Under some circumstances, such as proximity to residential property, the setback rises to 1,200 feet.
The data center’s buildings would have to be at least 2,000 feet from some buildings, such as schools, churches, group homes, hospitals, and day care centers. There are some exceptions. The previous draft set that distance as 1,250 feet.
Noise
People who live and work near data centers have complained the noise generated by the facilities.
In Cumberland County, data centers would have to comply with the county noise ordinance. This prohibits unreasonably loud or disturbing noise, but allows for noise from manufacturing or industrial operations.
The noise ordinance sets a limit of 75 decibels for manufacturing and industrial properties. This level of sound is described by some sources as the loudness of a vacuum cleaner.
The noise ordinance further regulates noise based on whether it’s low pitched or higher pitched sounds. There are higher decibel limits on lower pitched sounds and lower decibel limits on higher pitched sounds. The restrictions at night are tighter.
The noise ordinance also prohibits “detrimental noise,” which is “noise of such character, intensity and duration as to be detrimental to the life or health of any individual” in their residence or another building.
The projects have to certify before construction that they will comply with the noise ordinance, said Rawls Howard, the county’s planning and inspections director. If there are noise complaints, the operations would have to do sound studies at their expense to see if they comply with the sound limits, he said.
Previously, the proposed data center ordinance would have limited data center sounds to 60 decibels, and down to 45 decibels if they adjoined residential property. The problem with that approach to enforcing the regulation, Howard said, is that ambient noise from wildlife and highways often reaches those decibels.
Electricity Use, Water Use
Data centers would have to connect to public utilities for water and electricity, though they also could have on-site back-up power generation equipment. They would not be allowed to operate nuclear reactors for power generation.
The projects have to verify that the water and electric utilities have enough capacity to support their operations and would not interfere with the utility services of existing customers.
For facilities using water to cool equipment, they have to use closed loop systems that recycle the water to minimize their water usage.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
