After nearly a year of contention and outcry from residents, DeKalb County officials voted down legislation last month that sought to regulate data center development in the county. While some count it as a victory in the fight to stop data centers, others believe the county is now in a vulnerable position.
At a June 23 meeting, the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to reject a text amendment proposed last July that laid out land use and zoning restrictions on data centers. The legislation capped data center campuses at 1 million square feet, which is equivalent to about 18 football fields, and required buffers between residential properties and the centers be at least 750 feet.
Activists and residents pushed back on the amendment, saying it wasn’t enough to protect the community from the possible damage data centers could cause to the county’s water resources and environment, and the public’s health.
Gina Mangham, an attorney and organizer with the DeKalb Citizens Coalition, a group fighting against data centers, said that although she doesn’t know what exactly led the commissioners to reject the legislation after months of contention, she sees the vote as a step in the right direction.
“First of all, we are happy that it did not pass, because in my opinion, and a lot of the coalition members, the data center text amendment as written did not give us adequate protection,” Mangham said. “The more we looked at it, it was enabling legislation, meaning legislation that would allow data centers versus an amendment that would protect us.”
The vote comes at a time where Atlanta has become one of the fastest-growing destinations for data centers in the country and as communities throughout the state have started to oppose this boom due to environmental impacts and rising energy bills.
Black households in Georgia consistently face higher “energy burdens” compared to white households due to less energy-efficient homes, historic disinvestment, and discrimination. If utility rates rise as a result of data center growth, Black Georgians could experience additional financial struggles.
While the board originally voted to defer the vote on the text amendment to Aug. 11, Commissioners Mereda Davis Johnson and Robert Patrick moved later that evening to reconsider the earlier vote and to oppose the legislation.
“After hearing the concerns raised by residents and continuing to reflect on the matter throughout the meeting, I could not in good conscience ignore the feedback provided by the community, for that reason I seconded the motion to reconsider the item and ultimately supported denying the proposed text amendment,” Davis Johnson said in a statement on Instagram.
Patrick said the decision to reconsider and then reject the text amendment had to do with the continued “public voice opposition.”
“I believed the best course of action was to remove the proposed ordinance from the discussion while we continue to work on broader context of data centers during the existing moratorium,” he said.
DeKalb Commissioner Ted Terry told Capital B Atlanta that he believes the county remains at risk to new data center developments as the county’s moratorium on the sites is set to expire in September. There are also several pending applications to build data centers in the county, including a plan for a 2-million-square-foot facility in Ellenwood in south DeKalb.
“The bottom line is that because we have no definitions of what a data center is in DeKalb, we are still very vulnerable,” Terry said. “We are going to have to do something substantial to keep the moratorium in place as we continue to work through these regulations.”
The moratorium was established last July to give the county time to draft regulations on data centers. But with the text amendment no longer in play, Terry said the county will need to put something in place to legally justify further extension of the moratorium or else it could be at risk of being sued by developers and private-property owners.
According to Dectaurish, Planning Department Deputy Director Rachel Bragg said her team, which was tasked with researching and drafting the data center regulations, is now evaluating the next steps for the county.
Terry has proposed that a study be conducted to understand the environmental and health impact data centers could have on the county and its residents. The study has been deferred by the Board of Commissioners and is next up for a vote on July 14.
Patrick said that it’s possible that the text amendment could be reconsidered if the county can better speak to the land use concerns that residents voiced.
Mangham said she ultimately would like to see the county ban data centers altogether. She pointed to cities like Palmetto and Fayetteville that updated their zoning codes to exclude or prohibit the facilities from being developed.
While no county in Georgia has banned data centers, Harford County in Maryland permanently banned data centers in June.
“There’s all the issues, water, power, but in DeKalb County we are under a federal consent decree. We’ve got a broken water system, so that’s even more to consider,” Mangham said. “If in fact we are still exposed, we need an ordinance explicitly banning data centers.”
This story has been updated.
