Sandpoint P&Z rejects draft data center ban

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Sandpoint Planning and Zoning commissioners voted unanimously Aug. 18 to deny a draft ordinance regulating data centers, referring the issue back to City Council.

Members of the commission cited a lack of clarity in the definition of a “data center,” as well as potential unintended consequences for small tech firms. They also questioned whether regulating data centers based on environmental impacts such as water and power usage was prudent, considering that would introduce rules that don’t exist elsewhere in zoning code.

Furthermore, concerns over the noise produced by data centers would be moot, since as City Planner Bill Dean pointed out, a data center of any size could only be located within Sandpoint’s industrial zones, which are already exempt from noise-based regulations.

The Sandpoint City Council directed staff at its July 15 meeting to propose a definition of “data center” so the term could be incorporated into an ordinance that would ban them from within city limits.

“I think their direction was crystal clear in one respect: Ban data centers,” Dean said. “… It wasn’t ‘evaluate methods of regulating resource consumption in a nuanced way as compared to other land uses.’ It was, ‘We don’t want data centers, let’s ban them.’”

The definition that Dean presented to P&Z on Aug. 18 stated: “A data center is a centralized physical facility that houses IT infrastructure — such as servers, storage systems and networking equipment — to process, store and distribute digital information,” and proposed a cap of 5,000 square feet.

Commissioners agreed that the 5,000-square-foot limitation was too small and “arbitrary.”

“It seems like a knee-jerk reaction,” said Commissioner William Mitchell.

Dean recognized that the proposed definition made no distinction between a “server room” or “hyperscale” data center — the latter being the types of enormous developments that have made headlines around the country. Those facilities, which can range up to nearly 1 million square feet, simply couldn’t be built within Sandpoint city limits, considering the available land and small size of the industrial zone where they could be permitted.

“You just can’t arrive at this scale and size,” he said, later adding, “The county is a different story — there are vast tracts of land [there].”

“The city level seems the inappropriate forum to do this, as opposed to the county,” Simmons agreed. “No one cares about a 10,000-square-foot server room. … It seems like what people are concerned about is the million-square-foot facilities. So this outlaws those, but where are you gonna put a million-square-foot building in the city, anyway?”