This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
By Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News
BESSEMER, Ala.—When a representative for a hotly contested development began to speak inside City Hall here Tuesday evening, the lights went out.
A packed room of zoning commissioners and upset residents groaned, already on edge from the issue at hand: consideration of a proposal to construct a massive data center in a rural Birmingham suburb. Only a few moments passed before the power was restored and the meeting proceeded, but a day after the meeting’s conclusion, residents said they feel like they’re still sitting in the dark.
Despite universal opposition by the dozens of residents present at the meeting, commissioners voted to recommend changes to the city’s zoning laws to allow data centers in areas zoned for light industrial use and to rezone a 700-acre property from agricultural to light industrial to accommodate the construction of a hyperscale data center.
Now, one of the largest proposed data centers in the country is one step closer to construction.
“This was only a damn formality,” resident Ron Morgan yelled out after the measures passed. “Y’all have already made up your minds.”
At full buildout, the proposed data center would lead to clear-cutting of more than 100 acres of forested land and have 18 server-farm buildings that would each be larger than the average Walmart Supercenter. Projections suggest the site would consume 10 times the energy used by all residences in nearby Birmingham and more than five times the entire state’s residential consumption of water.
Scientists have also said that the project’s construction and operation could put a newly discovered fish species—the Birmingham darter—at risk of extinction because of its potential impact on waterways.
“This would nuke this creek,” Thomas Near, a Yale University biologist, has said of the project.
Resident after resident, each limited to three minutes, made their way to the podium in the packed chamber inside Bessemer City Hall on Tuesday evening to oppose both the zoning law change and the development plan itself. Only a representative of the developer, Logistic Land Investments LLC, and its law firm, Evans & Evans, spoke in favor of the plan, arguing that there would be virtually no impacts on residents or the environment.
After the meeting, the development representative, Brad Kaaber, initially refused to spell his name for a reporter.
“I’d really rather you not use my name at all,” Kaaber said, though he soon relented.
The planning and zoning commission’s recommended approval will now be sent to Bessemer City Council, which will ultimately decide the fate of the $14.5 billion project.
A meeting revisited
Tuesday’s meeting wasn’t the first time the planning and zoning commission had considered zoning changes related to the proposed data center.
In March, the body met to consider the same items and recommended approval to the City Council.
After that decision, however, a group of impacted residents filed suit over the process, arguing that Bessemer officials had not provided adequate public notice of the meeting. As a result, a Birmingham judge ordered a temporary restraining order preventing Bessemer City Council from considering the matter until a hearing was held.
Following a hearing in Bessemer, another judge, David Hobdy, said that he would allow the process to move forward if the city was willing to start again. Shan Paden, a lawyer for the city, said that while he believed the city had provided adequate public notice, officials would restart the process.
Tuesday’s meeting was the result, and residents showed up to express their concerns once again.
Commissioners first considered a request to change the city’s zoning ordinances to allow data centers to be located within sites zoned for light industrial use.
Under current law, light industrial uses include bus terminals, gas stations with garages and large billboards. Expressly forbidden from light industrial classification are facilities “which are especially detrimental to property or to the health and safety beyond the district by reason of the emission of odor, dust, gas, fumes, smoke, noise, vibration or waste material.”
The decision before commissioners, then, was whether to rewrite that zoning law to allow data centers.
Residents argued that commissioners should vote down the measure because data centers don’t fit the definition of light industrial development and aren’t comparable to facilities that are permitted under that classification.
“This is not light industrial,” Becky Morgan, an impacted resident, told commissioners. The facility’s high power consumption, security needs and sheer footprint should require its zoning in heavy industrial or another, newly created zoning category, she argued.
Data centers present complicated zoning questions because of their unique mix of impacts and resource requirements, according to experts. Some municipalities across the country have addressed this by creating a separate zoning category for the facilities, allowing governments to incorporate regulations tailored to data centers’ needs and impacts.
Bessemer planning and zoning commissioner Alfedo Acoff expressed concern over changing the law to allow data centers in light industrial zones without adding specific guardrails for their construction and operation.
“We’re not voting just for this project,” Acoff said. “So shouldn’t there be something [in the law] that protects the community when another project comes in?”
One resident told commissioners that they should be wary of any developer who requests that a city change its zoning laws to accommodate it.
“Y’all got your own rules, and you want to let them come in and tell you to change your rules,” he said. “That’s a big problem.”
Ultimately, the commission recommended approval of the light industrial definition change by a vote of 7 to 1.
“This is a vampire”
The commission’s next item of business considered a request by Logistic Land Investments to rezone a 700-acre parcel of woodland—the proposed data center site—from agricultural use to light industrial use and to approve its development plan.
Again, residents spoke up to oppose the project, arguing that the developers have given them almost no information about the potential impacts of construction and operation. Public officials have confirmed they’ve signed non-disclosure agreements with the developer, preventing discussion about some aspects of the project and cutting residents off from key local sources of information.
A day prior to the meeting, Bessemer police confronted 80-year-old Marshall Killingsworth outside City Hall, forcing him to remove a sign asking Mayor Kenneth Gulley to meet with him about the data center project.
What the public does know about Logistic Land Investments’ proposed data center has come from limited information provided by the developer, permitting applications and other regulatory documents submitted to state and federal entities.
Documents show that the energy and water projected to be consumed by the data center campus are staggering. If built to full capacity, the Bessemer data center campus could consume around 10.5 million megawatt hours of energy per year, based on estimates provided to residents by representatives of the data center development.
That’s more than 90 times the amount of energy used by all residences in Bessemer annually, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
A recent regulatory filing by county officials estimated that water usage by the facility could amount to 2 billion gallons per day. That’s more than five times the entire state’s daily residential usage, according to government figures.
Residents are also worried about the impacts to creeks, streams and wetlands, not only from the clear-cutting but also from the years of construction.
“This is a vampire that will drain all of our natural resources,” one resident told commissioners. “It is something that is unwanted.”
Near, the Yale biologist, has told Inside Climate News that he believes the newly identified Birmingham darter is “very likely” to be located on the site. The fish, first described in a paper by Near and his research team, has been found in nearby creeks for years, though it’s now been made locally extinct in nearby Five Mile Creek.
Protecting any Birmingham darters present in Little Blue Creek, which winds through the proposed data center site, will be critical to preventing the species’ ultimate extinction. Construction and operation of the proposed data center would leave the Birmingham darter on the brink, Near said. Because it’s only recently been identified as a distinct species, the darter hasn’t yet gone through the process of being listed as an endangered species under U.S. law—a cumbersome process that can last more than a decade.
Kaaber, the developer’s representative, said concerns over environmental impacts were the result of misinformation and appeared to reference an Inside Climate News story on the Birmingham darter.
“So there’s this, again, a lot of misinformation out there about what’s in the water,” Kaaber said. “There was an article, I think it was from yesterday, about a species that is in a stream, not on this site, but nearby. Again, we’re not impacting streams.”
If there were a concern about environmental impacts on the site, Kaaber said, his company would develop elsewhere.
“There are no recognized environmental concerns on the site,” he said.
Kaaber told commissioners that the company had completed various studies, including an environmental assessment, for the location—a detail that seemed to surprise members of the commission.
“Can I see it?” one commissioner asked.
Kaaber said he would provide the commission a copy of the report—a document that has not been made public.
Representatives of the developer have also not revealed who the end user of the data center would be. Kaaber did not disclose a name at Tuesday’s meeting but suggested it would be a Fortune 10 company—a list that includes both Apple and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
Among those in opposition to the project at Tuesday’s meeting was Jimmie Stephens, president of the Jefferson County Commission, who told zoning commissioners he was there at the request of his constituents.
Allowing data centers to be zoned in light industrial without protections for nearby residents would be foolish, Stephens said.
“It’s not right,” he told commissioners.
He also expressed concerns about fire protection for those living around the site—residents who already face low water pressure without a water-guzzling data center located nearby.
“If this is indeed coming,” he said, “let’s take time and do it right.”
In an interview after the meeting, Stephens said that he would be inclined to vote against the project were it to come before him as a county commissioner. So far, he said, the county hasn’t been approached about pitching in public money to support the project. That’s good, Stephens said, because the answer would be an easy one.
“No,” he said. “No hesitation there.”
The planning and zoning commission eventually voted to recommend approval of the zoning change for the proposed data site, from agricultural to light industrial, by a vote of 6 to 2. The measure will now head to the City Council for a final vote.