Town Council’s Data Center Dialogue Plays Out Against September 11 Backdrop

As of this morning, Foreign Affairs, a journal where policy experts opine on what has happened, is happening, and will happen on the international scene, has released a bouquet of articles remarking on the passage of the September 11 era. As the Front Royal Town Council’s discussion of the best way to regulate or forbid “data centers” continues, questions formulate like: why should a more efficient technology process be made available in a world full of people who would profoundly misuse it?

The Town Council met for a work session on September 8. Royal Examiner Photo Credits: Brenden McHugh

With the decline of Al-Qaeda, the question becomes: has the world become a place where cutting-edge computing techniques can safely be released on the market?

Until that question is answered, the council’s data center dialogue may seem to go in a circle.

On September 8 at a work session, council members reviewed a suggested revision by outside legal counsel of the Town Planning Commission’s prohibition product, which the council, on June 22, directed the commissioners to produce. This came after roughly a year of developments in which the commission was at one time developing performance standards to regulate the arrival of a data center; as the year progressed, it became evident that the council had an increasing appetite to prohibit such arrival.

But how does one prohibit what has not been defined? It became necessary in that direction to request not only a definition but a contrast with “technology business”, known for telecommunications, software development, and other capacities that are vital to any community. As the commissioners undertook that effort, a threshold of 500 kilowatts of energy use became a focal point, at which or above which the computing entity hits the limit that makes it a data center and therefore puts it beyond what the Town can accommodate.

Outside legal’s suggested revision takes an exclusionary approach, striking through the prohibition language and everything pertaining to the threshold and the wire that can be tripped, suggesting instead an ordinance in keeping with Town code section 175-9.3 wherein the revised ordinance would exclude data centers except in the case that they are a legal, non-conforming use, such as existing businesses that may call themselves data centers although they would never trip any kind of wire. The ensuing discussion among council members made it clear that the document is heavily susceptible to interpretation. One focus of the discussion was the potential removal of a key phrase in the revision featuring “by right” and “special-use permit.”

The mayor herself admitted that she needs more time to absorb and reflect upon the document in front of them. This extends the September 28 deadline, pushing a vote as far out as the end of October, thus necessitating an extension of the application moratorium.

Watch the Front Royal Town Council Work Session of September 8, 2026