Town Planning Commission Gears Up for Public Hearing on Data Centers

On Wednesday, September 17, the Town Planning Commission will hold two public hearings at 7 p.m. in the Warren County Government Center, the second of which features the much-anticipated item pertaining to data centers. As they merely provide recommendations to the Town Council, in addition to the labor they perform on items like these, where, among other tasks, they articulate proposed language for text amendments, the commission will forward the item to the council, at which point the latter will review and execute it regardless of whether the recommendation is for approval or denial. As they pertain to definitions and performance standards regulating data centers in the yet unrealized situation that one comes to Front Royal, these specific text amendments have been developing among the commission and staff since their first discussion at an August 6 work session. The work session of September 3 focused on perfecting and fine-tuning the proposed draft.

The Town Planning Commission meets for a work session on the evening of Wednesday, September 3. Royal Examiner Photo Credits: Brenden McHugh.

The data center industry’s reputation for not giving a French loan word about their impact leaves the public with urgent questions about just what that impact would be. Social media has been abuzz in recent months about this hypothetical prospect for the town of Front Royal. How much water would they consume? What would be the effect on the electrical grid? What type of setbacks would be feasible? These and many other legitimate questions have been at the center of a storm of controversy. What complicates the discussion is that the industry is advancing rapidly, and therefore, previously inefficient processes are becoming obsolete. While a data center may have consumed fifty thousand gallons of water in a day, its current consumption is now comparable to that of any other industrial user. As Japan is perfecting the approach to molten salt for the cooling system, clearly, the industry is light-years away from its status quo ten years ago, and in ten more years, that will be doubly true. The question then becomes: Is Front Royal’s need for a data center so urgent that we cannot conveniently wait for technology to advance?

Deputy Zoning Administrator John Ware presents two items of business to the commission.

Through many conversations between the press and the planning director, Lauren Kopishke has reiterated the urgent need for performance standards to regulate data centers in the situation that they do come, possibly through litigation, as owners fight for the reasonable use of their property. What would be tragic is the total absence of standards in the situation where data centers win in court. The effort commission and staff are making would introduce regulations, including but not limited to noise, lighting, and setbacks, while keeping the development of the data center use restricted to Industrial Employment District (I-2) by special-use permit and requiring the applicant to complete three different impact analyses: utility, physical, and environmental. “This is being done on a rational basis,” Kopishke said in a phone interview. “It is not arbitrary.” Using facts gathered in part from comparisons to other municipalities, states, and even countries, the drafting effort has made every attempt to be comprehensive.