AURORA | City council will discuss on Monday potential data center regulations to address water usage and limit facilities from being located in certain areas.
One proposed regulation would ban evaporative cooling, which is a type of cooling system data centers use that can be water-intensive, in multifamily, industrial and commercial buildings. The other would prevent data centers from being built in mixed-use office-industrial zoned areas, which can be located next to or include residential units.
City council will discuss these specific regulations, as well as what other potential regulations on data centers they would like to see, at the Monday study session.
At the Aug. 10 council meeting, city lawmakers approved a resolution directing the city manager to create new data center regulations, including a prohibition on evaporative cooling and a requirement for setbacks and landscape buffers for data centers in certain areas.
The council ultimately narrowly opposed a similar proposal that included a moratorium on new data centers while the code is adjusted. Public commenters at the meeting were overwhelmingly in support of the moratorium.
The approved resolution left the door open for other regulations, as recommended by the city manager. The city manager has 35 days from the approval to bring back recommended changes.
Other potential regulations include a requirement for data centers to complete regular noise testing and implementing setbacks from residences and landscape buffers. Another proposal would update the definition of a data center in the city code to account for differences in size and scale.
The city has said there are five data centers in the development process and nine already established. Some regulations for data centers are already in place.
Data centers are restricted in location to areas that are zoned industrial, airport districts or mixed-use office-industrial. Data centers can be built in certain mixed-use zoning restrictions under the conditional use process, which has additional requirements for public hearings and city council gets the ultimate decision.
Water use for data centers is governed by the city’s large water user guide. For noise pollution, the city’s unified development code restricts the noise level at data centers to the same level as other businesses, with different allowances based on zoning and time.