Counties find their roles in data center development

With data center sitings and regulation happening at a rapid pace, Frederick County, Md. Executive Jessica Fitzwater was unequivocal when advising hundreds of county officials during an educational summit on the developments.

Offer no local incentives or tax breaks.

“They don’t need them, don’t give them to them,” she said. “Really, they don’t [need them]. They will pay whatever you assess them.”

She inherited a hyperscale data center, but soon after taking office formed a data center working group, which came back with recommendations that, once passed by her County Council, formed strict limits on noise vibration, expanded setbacks and clear zoning roles to ensure facilities are placed only where impacts can be minimized. That leaves, she said, roughly 1% of the total county land eligible for data center development.

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“As county executive, I’m not anti-data center or pro-data center,” she said. “Our priority has been, and always will be to rein in this industry to protect our community’s way of life while maximizing the benefits that this development can provide.”

In neighboring West Virginia, Mason County Commissioner Rick Handley and his counterparts can only wish for that kind of authority after the Legislature preempted all local control of data center sites, including exempting them from code enforcement. 

“The legislature explicitly states its intent to occupy the entire field of regulations for these entities, displacing local authority,” he said. “My opinion, that is wrong. We have to have input from the county.”

He noted that his county’s data center development funded $250,000 for some new sheriff's department vehicles and $300,000 to the local EMS company, but the in the fog of misinformation, he worries that he and his colleagues will take the heat for something over which they have no control.

“As a county commissioner, we get blamed for bringing data centers to our county,” he said. “I have no problem with the data centers, but we get the blame.”

(The West Virginia Department of Commerce published its responsible data center development plan Aug. 7.)

Fitzwater noted: ‘It would be an understatement to say that public engagement on this issue has drastically changed, resulting in a lot of frustration from our community, legal challenges, local zoning decisions, and truly more misinformation than on any other topic that I have seen in my years in public service.”

Heather Coil, senior state policy and partnerships manager at the Data Center Coalition, acknowledged the concerns local officials have regarding data center proliferation and said its members are trying to be more visible to the public.

“We’re working to develop a forum where we can have the industry available to officials like yourselves in a place where we can meet at a regular cadence and folks can answer questions,” she said. “I think that that is something that is going to make a big difference to these communities, because a lot of folks really are either interested in bringing that into their investment to their community, or they have that as their investment coming in but they don't necessarily have the right venues to answer all of their questions.”