By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
Sandpoint City Hall is aiming to get ahead of the proliferation of large-scale data centers, which have stirred up controversy in communities big and small throughout the country and, increasingly, in Idaho.
City Council members voted unanimously at their July 15 meeting to direct staff to propose a definition of “data center” so that the term can be applied to a future ordinance that would ban that type of development within city limits.
Councilor Pam Duquette brought forward the idea of a preemptive data center ban, saying, “I think people got the idea that we might be pushing data centers, and that is the farthest thing from my mind.”
Duquette said that the Industrial portion of Sandpoint Zoning Code specifically allows data centers in the Industrial Park District, which describes properties that are “suitable for technology production and development, such as data centers, medical imaging processing, business incubators, biotechnology, software development, engineering and similar technology-related industry.”
The zoning map identifies the ITP District as comprising about 19 parcels of various sizes immediately east of the airport and west of North Boyer Avenue. The Code further stipulates that, “Sites appropriate for this designation should have readily available utilities and fiber optic availability, and be characterized by large contiguous properties.”
Duquette said her effort was intended to “proactively get ahead of that so that if that was ever anything somebody thought they were going to do in the Sandpoint area — at least in the city of Sandpoint — … we can eliminate that data center as an allowed use, and have the City Council give staff direction to do so.”
Asked by Councilor Joshua Torrez if she meant “all data centers or specifically AI data centers,” Duquette responded that “data centers, to me, are the AI [facilities], and I suppose they’re a big boom in Idaho at this point. They require huge demands of electricity and water.”
Idaho House Bill 895 was signed into law following the 2026 legislative session, requiring that data center developments in the state be built with closed-loop cooling systems, which are intended to minimize water usage and waste.
While that legislation is meant to make large data centers less demanding of surrounding resources, the effects of the growth in AI data centers is already being felt by Idaho schools. According to a July 20 report from Idaho Education News, Boise-based Micron Technology moved its entire consumer parts business into AI data centers in late-2025, which resulted in spiraling costs for Google Chromebooks and other technology used in classrooms.
Those price increases are expected to affect tech products more broadly, as data centers are buying up “everything that’s on the market right now,” Idaho Ed News quoted Boise Director of People and Organization Services Will Goodman.
At the same time, some communities are pushing back, with the Pocatello City Council upholding its previous denial of a proposed $2.6 billion data center in the community, East Idaho News also reported on July 20. According to BoiseDev, that facility was planned by Lex Developments to convert a former-polysilicon plant on 49 acres into an AI data center on the west side of the city.
Sandpoint City Councilor Kyle Schreiber said that ensuring the Zoning Code protects the community from similar potential developments is critical, as “it’s common for us to become aware of loopholes in our Code only when a developer brings forth a permit, and at that point it’s too late.”
“If we change the rules preemptively, the developers don’t have that by right, and we can always decide on a case-by-case basis later,” he added. “But it’s better to have this done before we need it than wait until it becomes an issue here.”
Mayor Jeremy Grimm said doing so would be as simple as defining the term, swapping it out, striking through one line of the Zoning Code and replacing it.
“It’s about as easy as it gets,” he said, later adding that the process could be concluded in as little as two months.
While the vote to proceed with the effort to prohibit data centers in Sandpoint was unanimous, resident Stuart Christoph testified that a data center is nothing more than “a building with lots of computers in it.”
“They run the websites you visit. They store your files. When you take a picture on your iPhone and it’s backed up to the cloud — data center. When you order new bed sheets from Bed Bath and Beyond — data center. When you send an email — data center,” he said, later adding, “This makes a bunch of concerns that people gripe about a little bit more silly and, more importantly, manageable.”
He said the noise generated by such a facility is the biggest concern, but “it’s not something to fear.”
However, resident Lorna Mitchell thanked the council for addressing the issue, saying, “it’s always good to pay attention and put measures in and not just be surprised by something happening that we wished we had figured out beforehand.”
