Lafayette City Council has approved an 18-month moratorium on new data center applications, giving staff time to figure out whether the city’s rules are even equipped to handle the industry’s water, power and noise demands. The pause blocks applications for building new data centers in the city during that window.
City officials said the temporary ban gives them more time to consider permanent regulations and to research potential impacts on Lafayette’s resources and the environment, according to the Daily Camera. The move comes less than two months after Lafayette adopted a new land-use code in September that, as written, treats data centers equally regardless of their size, peak electrical demand or water consumption profiles.
A Land-Use Code With a Blind Spot
That one-size-fits-all approach is exactly what’s prompting the second look. Lafayette city staff will use the moratorium period to determine whether the land use code adequately addresses data centers and their impacts, rather than letting new applications move forward under rules that may not have been built with server farms in mind.
Erin Poe, Lafayette’s deputy attorney, put it bluntly: the current definition of a data center in city code is not, maybe, as robust as we would want, and it contains little regulation of resource use and utility impacts. The code does lay out what counts as a data center in the first place, defining it as a facility for which the primary purpose is the storage, processing, or transmission of digital data, including high-density computing, server farms, artificial-intelligence training or inference, or facilities relying on industrial-scale cooling infrastructure.
Who Gets a Seat at the Table
City staff expect to involve the city’s Sustainability and Resilience Advisory Board and the Planning Commission as they work toward potential regulations. Any new rules that emerge from that process could eventually go before the City Council for consideration, though what those rules might look like remains an open question…