TULSA, Okla. – The Tulsa Planning Office will start a review of zoning standards for data centers, prompted by a City Councilor’s concerns that the current standard doesn’t reflect the actual impact of a data center development.
“Right now under our zoning code, data centers are considered industrial light, or low impact, meaning they don’t have offsite noise, vibrations, smoke, etc.,” said Councilor Laura Bellis, who asked for the review.
Bellis said the two-year-old zoning code for data centers doesn’t apply to the larger data centers now being developed throughout the United States. “To me, this is just cleanup. We now know more than we used to. We need to update it in our zoning code to reflect the genuine impacts that they do have on nearby communities.”…