Overview:
• The tour visited Advanced Internet Technologies in Fayetteville, and two facilities in Research Triangle Park.
• Councilmembers are researching data centers as they consider whether to temporarily halt their construction and what sort of regulations to impose on them.
Six members of the Fayetteville City Council toured three data centers on Tuesday as they consider an ordinance to regulate the controversial computing facilities or impose a moratorium on them.
“I would say we’re trying to get an understanding,” Councilmember Deno Hondros said during the tour. “It’s information. We’re not subject matter experts on any of this stuff, so we’re just trying to get informed.”
One of the locations on the itinerary was Advanced Internet Technologies in Fayetteville. The other two were the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina and TierPoint’s Raleigh-RTP data center, both in the Research Triangle Park business park in the Raleigh-Durham area. The city did not publicly announce the tour. Members of the general public were not allowed in the site visits.
While six councilmembers took part, only four to five toured each of the facilities at one time, councilmembers said. If six or more had stayed together, that would have formed a quorum of the 10-person council, and potentially triggered legal requirements to notify the public in advance of the tour and allowed the public to join the tour.
The data center visits came after the council postponed for 120 days a decision on whether to impose a moratorium on data center construction. This pause was described as a time for fact‑gathering, transparency, and community input. The pause ends August 25.
Meanwhile, a public hearing on the city’s proposed data center ordinance is scheduled for August 10.
Grassroots groups have repeatedly filled City Council meetings and called for a moratorium on data centers while the city studies the environmental, utility, and land‑use impacts of the facilities.
The Cumberland County Board of Commissioners, facing similar passionate calls from concerned residents, enacted a six-month data center moratorium on June 15. The measure allows time for county staff to prepare a county data center ordinance.
‘I Learned A Lot’
Councilmembers D.J. Haire, Derrick Thompson, Malik Davis, Antonio Jones, Brenda McNair, and Deno Hondros visited the data centers, along with several city staff.
The first stop was Advanced Internet Technologies in downtown Fayetteville across Hay Street from City Hall. AIT is a home-grown internet services company, founded in Fayetteville 1995 by Clarence Briggs as the internet revolution was ramping up.
Two CityView reporters sought to visit AIT’s facility along with councilmembers, but Briggs said reporters were not invited.
Six members of Fayetteville’s 10-person City Council entered the building. Under state law, six form a quorum, meaning members of the public should have been allowed to follow and observe the elected officials. But a few moments later, Mayor Pro Tem Derrick Thompson stepped outside the building.
With only five of the 10 elected officials taking part, there was no quorum and the visit could legally remain private.
Haire rolled out on his electric scooter about 35 minutes later.
“I learned a lot,” the councilmember said.
As residents worry that data centers could cause high electricity bills, high water bills, or pollution emissions, Haire said, Briggs told councilmembers they should address these points up front and in detail. “You must make sure that it’s written in your conditions or having those types of discussions, if that’s something that you want to do,” Haire said.
AIT’s data center is about 500 square feet, Haire said, although it was larger in the past.
The data centers driving people’s concerns dwarf the size of AIT’s. Plans for one proposed to be built on Custer Avenue near Eastover show 2.28 million square feet of space spread across nine two-story buildings. Each building is 253,000 square feet.
After the AIT visit ended, five councilmembers went to Research Triangle Park, again preventing the City Council from forming a quorum. Hondros stayed behind to tend to clients at his real estate business, he said.
Councilmembers visited two sites in the business park.
One was the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, known as the MCNC. This is a nonprofit organization that the state funded in 1980 to foster technology-based economic development. MCNC now works to spread high-speed internet and technology services throughout the state. It operates the North Carolina Research and Education Network, a statewide fiber-optic network.
The other is a data center operated by TierPoint, a St. Louis-based cloud services and data center company with 40 data centers in the U.S.
TierPoint’s Raleigh-RTP Data Center facility has 70,000 square feet and four backup generators that can power it for two days, according to the company website.
Public Not Notified of Data Center Tour
The city did not issue public notices of the data center tour. CityView learned of it from a councilmember, and then Mayor Mitch Colvin and Councilmember Shaun McMillan confirmed the travel plans.
Colvin and McMillan did not attend. Colvin cited a prior commitment.
McMillan said he declined to participate because he had concerns about “the appearance of impropriety and inappropriate levels of access” while the city’s debate continues on a data center moratorium.
“Members of the community may reasonably look at this visit and conclude that we are extending an inappropriate level of access to the data center industry—access that ordinary residents do not enjoy—while that contested policy question is still before us,” he wrote in a message to CityView. “The optics of council members touring industry sites at this moment risk eroding public trust at precisely the time we should be working to strengthen it.”
Hondros said AIT is private property, and access is up to the owner.
“It’s like my house, right?” he said.
Hondros conceded that efforts to avoid a quorum, which would force public access to the meeting, “could raise questions” given the high level of public interest in data centers. And he argued that residents should remain skeptical of government rather than grant blanket trust.
“I think residents should always question the government,” he said.
Prior to the tour, Thompson told CityView he expected only four or five councilmembers on the tour. About 10 minutes later, six—a majority of the council, with the power to take actions—gathered outside AIT.
Under North Carolina’s Open Meetings Law, the mere presence of a majority does not automatically create an official meeting.
A quorum gathered socially or informally without discussing public business does not trigger meeting notice requirements, UNC School of Government scholar Frayda Bluestein wrote in a post on Coates’ Canons.
Site visits fall into a distinct category, Bluestein said. A site visit where a majority of members are receiving information about public business can still constitute the transaction of public business—even if members do not speak to one another.
“Receiving information is part of the deliberative process,” she wrote, and a gathering of a majority for that purpose may require public notice under the statute.
Government reporter Rachel Heimann Mercader can be reached at rheimann@cityviewnc.com or 910-988-8045.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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