At its meeting on Tuesday, June 9, the Coffee County Commission unanimously approved a 12-month data center moratorium. The moratorium passed with no discussion from the commission.
A data center is a facility that houses computing infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking equipment, to store, process, and manage digital data for businesses, cloud services, and applications. Data center development has come under national scrutiny due to concerns such as the facilities’ high resource consumption and noise pollution.
County Mayor Dennis Hunt proposed the idea of a moratorium at the May 26 meeting of the county’s planning commission. Hunt asked for a six-month moratorium to give the county time to consider adopting stricter regulations around data center development.
“What I’ve always been told is that we cannot zone out any legal activity, that we must have a place for all legal activities,” Hunt said on May 26. “Having said that, we can apply restrictions, and that’s what this body is going to be charged with.”
The Planning Commission unanimously recommended that the full Commission approve a 12-month moratorium on data center moratorium, doubling the amount of time Hunt had requested.
Find more reporting on the Planning Commission’s discussion here.
Four Coffee County residents spoke in favor of the moratorium at the full Commission meeting on June 9, citing concerns about a data center’s potential impacts on the county’s resources.
“I’m very thankful that you guys are taking a look at the moratorium on AI because of its impacts on our water supply,” county resident Steven Arnold said during the public comment period. “And we need to look at a lot of different factors including the fact that AI firms are still building water-guzzling AI systems, not just closed loop systems.”
Arnold said that even closed loop water systems could result in water that is hard to treat.
One speaker, Maureen Burke, asked that the county include the regulation of solar farms in its research, saying solar farms had already negatively impacted Coffee County.
The Planning Commission met in a special called work session on June 10 to review a resolution prepared by the county’s professional planner, Amanda Rhinehart Harrington. The resolution concerns data center regulation and was constructed based on a resolution recently passed by Knox County.
The Planning Commission’s goal during the work session was to strengthen the resolution. Planning Commission members’ discussion included water supply protections, noise pollution regulations, light pollution regulations, height limits, setback requirements, and community impact fees.
The Planning Commission will meet again on Tuesday, June 16 to continue discussing the resolution.
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