Overview:
• Members of the Fayetteville City Council visited big data centers in Virginia in late July.
• The city’s regulations would allow data centers in industrial areas, and ban them from residential areas.
• Cumberland County commissioners are holding community meetings to get residents’ input on a county data center ordinance.
Fayetteville’s proposed regulations for data centers advance to the City Council on Monday with a public hearing that could be followed by a vote, the latest step in an issue that has generated heated debate for months.
Passage of the data center regulations would be a milestone as elected officials across the country grapple with the controversies surrounding the number-crunching and data-storage facilities.
The council meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. Community activists who oppose data centers plan to rally outside City Hall at 5:30 p.m.
City Council Visited Virginia Data Centers
To learn about data centers as they consider how to regulate them, Mayor Mitch Colvin and Councilmembers Malik Davis and Brenda McNair visited data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia, on July 29–30. This is near Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Three city staff, including City Manager Doug Hewett, also participated, the city said.
The group’s itinerary included data centers operated by Vantage Data Centers, Equinix, CloudHQ, and Digital Realty, and a visit with the vice chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. One of the data centers was a massive hyperscale data center.
“This is what Loudoun County did for me: It allowed me to see it, it allowed me to touch it, it allowed me to walk around it, so it’s not hearsay that I’m making a decision on,” Colvin said on WIDU radio on August 3.
“When I went to Loudoun County, we talked to some residents who live right across the street,” Davis said on the radio show. He asked a resident whether his water had been contaminated. “And he said there’s nothing that has happened to his water,” Davis said.
Colvin said the tour visited a data center built in 2007 that collects rainwater to cool its equipment, and another built in 2017 that doesn’t use any water. The second one cools the computers with the same kind of refrigerant that people have in their home air conditioner systems, he said.
Loudoun County has almost 300 data centers, providing $1.3 billion in taxes to the county budget, Colvin said, “so they have some of the best schools, parks, health outcomes.” The county has a median household income over $183,000, he said.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income in Fayetteville was $58,407 as of 2024.
On June 30, several City Council members toured three data centers—one in Fayetteville and two in the Raleigh-Durham area.
Data Center Proposal Opposed in Eastover
A data center proposal prompted the Eastover Town Council to have its attorney write a letter to Hewett on July 15. The town council opposes a 300-megawatt data center proposed to be built on Custer Avenue, less than 4,000 feet from Eastover town limit.
The land is outside Fayetteville city limits, but the developer has proposed annexing the development. It would be a short distance from the Fayetteville Public Works Commission’s natural gas powered electrical generation plant and a PWC solar farm.
“There are many ways in which the community sees these centers as a tremendous detriment including noise, traffic, light pollution, water use and electricity use,” the letter said. “The Council hopes that the City of Fayetteville would not design to allow placement of such facilities in these areas which are only nominally connected to the City of Fayetteville proper.”
Eastover residents filled the Town Council’s July 14 meeting and raised concerns and objections to data centers, Eastover Mayor Pro Tem Stan Crumpler told CityView. “The reason we sent the letter is because we take the people in Eastover seriously as to what they want,” he said.
Cumberland County Holds Community Meetings
The Cumberland County Board of Commissioners has a moratorium on data centers that runs into December, when commissioners plan to enact an ordinance to regulate them.
To help guide development of the ordinance, the commissioners held a community meeting in Stedman on Thursday and have another scheduled for Tuesday in Gray’s Creek. This will be from 6–7:30 p.m. at the J.D. Pone Recreation Center, 2964 School Road.
At Thursday’s meeting, residents told CityView they are worried about water pollution, noise, electricity demand, and light pollution from the facilities. One said she opposes data centers because some operate artificial intelligence systems used to surveil and track the general public.
Proposed Regulations
Fayetteville’s proposed data center regulations would be amendments to the city’s Unified Development Ordinance, a book of regulations for zoning, development, and related matters. Members of the public can read the proposal online.
Here are some of the data center regulations the Fayetteville City Council is considering:
- Data centers would be automatically allowed in industrially zoned areas, but those with power generation facilities would need permission from the City Council via a special use permit.
- They would be allowed, via a special use permit, in commercial oriented zones.
- Data centers would be prohibited on residentially zoned property.
Data centers built on property that adjoins residential property would have to place generators at least 150 feet away, and sometimes 200 feet away, from the shared property lines. It’s common in Fayetteville for industrially zoned land to abut residential zoned land
The facilities would need buffer zones and screening, and take other steps to avoid negative impacts on their residential neighbors. This includes tests to measure the noise coming from the data center.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
