Overview:
• The data center moratorium lists a start date of Monday, but that is subject to change.
• A legal ad says it would be a minimum of 60 days, but otherwise, no length or end date is listed in the proposal. The county commissioners will decide.
• During the moratorium, county staff would prepare proposed regulations for data centers for when the moratorium ends.
Cumberland County’s proposed moratorium on data centers would prohibit the county’s planning staff from reviewing site plans for data centers and from issuing zoning and building permits for them, county commissioners were told Thursday.
In the meantime, the county would conduct research and as it develops regulations to impose on these projects when the moratorium ends.
“This moratorium is necessary to have sufficient time to undertake the actions that must be taken to ensure that the development controls to be adopted address and minimize the concerns of the county’s residents,” the proposal says.
The Board of Commissioners discussed the draft of the proposed moratorium on Thursday, and will receive feedback on it during a public hearing on Monday. The topic includes whether to impose a moratorium, how to structure it, and when it should start and end.
Monday’s board meeting with the public hearing starts at 6:45 p.m. in room 118 of the Cumberland County Courthouse at 117 Dick St.
People who want to speak must sign up in advance. They can do this via a form on the county website, via email to the clerk to the board, by phone at 910-678-7771, or in person at the meeting between 6:30 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. Monday.
The public can obtain a copy of the proposed ordinance from CityView or from the county website. People who cannot attend the public hearing can give the county commissioners their thoughts by emailing web.commissioners@cumberlandcountync.gov.
Data centers—warehouses filled with computers to store records, crunch numbers, generate cryptocurrency, operate artificial intelligence platforms, and do other tasks of 21st century society and commerce—have come under scrutiny locally and elsewhere. The public’s concerns include their heavy electricity consumption as electric rates rise, noise pollution from cooling systems, high water use for cooling, and potential water pollution.
These concerns were raised during a public hearing on March 23, and the proposed moratorium cites those concerns. Three of the county’s seven commissioners said at the time that they support a moratorium.
Communities across North Carolina have imposed temporary data center bans while they assess how to regulate them. Cumberland County residents have asked the Fayetteville and county governments for moratoriums of up to three years. The city has put off making a decision until August 25.
Cumberland’s Proposed Moratorium
County Attorney Rick Moorefield laid out details of Cumberland’s proposed data center moratorium to commissioners on Thursday.
The document listed a start date of Monday, but that’s not locked in, Moorefield said. “And that would be for the board to determine,” he said.
A legal advertisement says the moratorium would be at least 60 days, but the proposal does not otherwise specify a proposed duration or end date.
“I think a year is reasonable, and that’s what about everybody else is doing” with data center moratoriums in other cities and counties, he said. “But you can wait until after the public hearing and to hear any further comments from the public about this to make that decision.”
The proposal defined a data center as:
- A facility, building, or group of buildings housing “critical information technology infrastructure.”
- This includes computer servers, storage systems, networking equipment and associated components for remote storage, processing, or distribution of massive amounts of data needed for cloud services, internet applications, and artificial intelligence workloads.
- The uses include cryptocurrency mining, artificial intelligence computing, genome sequencing, application hosting, cloud storage, and video and technical streaming services.
- “Data center facilities typically include air handlers, power generators, water cooling and storage facilities, utility substations and other infrastructure to support continuous operations.”
The moratorium would “not apply to businesses with data processing equipment and infrastructure which use is clearly incidental and subordinate to a permitted principal use” and that “is intended solely to support the on-site operations of such principal use.”
For example, on-site data processing equipment at hospitals, medical facilities, financial institutions, offices, educational institutions, or similar places would not be subject to the moratorium, it said, “provided such data processing activities are not offered as a primary service to off-site users.”
The draft of the moratorium ordinance said that during the moratorium, commissioners and county staff will talk to electric utilities, continue efforts to develop public water supplies in general for the county, and could visit data centers to learn more about them to inform the development of data center regulations.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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