Forth Worth considers pause on data center developments

Fort Worth City Council members received 19 recommendations to regulate data centers in the city. Those include limits on water usage, distance from homes, and power use requirements too. These recommendations will ultimately lead to an ordinance from city leaders and a 90-day moratorium on data centers. Fox Sports' Vanya Castillo attended tonight's meeting and joins us live tonight from Fort Worth. Hi, Vanya. Hi Steve, yeah, local officials were really the front line across the country when people started raising concerns about data centers. In August here in Fort Worth, they started to decide to come up with some rules and part of that was creating a commission. Now that commission bringing their findings to city council today, they did have 19 recommendations which included a variety of things like addressing water, electricity, land use and economic impacts. Among them, increasing the required distance between Between data centers and homes from the current 50 feet to at least 350 feet, called a neighbor protection distance. Another recommendation is that any facility using closed-loop cooling systems, which recirculate water instead of constantly drawing in new water to cool equipment. Now, the city did not take action on those recommendations yet, but we did speak with the head of the commission. Well I think it would make a real difference. I think it would give the city a roadmap on how to move forward. It would give data center developers much more certainty. It's certainly not going to please everybody. Nothing ever does. But I think it starts to put some certainty brackets around how to move this forward. But for some residents, the recommendations don't go far enough. They say the city needs more time to study the potential impacts and more answers about what living near a data center could mean for their communities. Two months is not enough time to consider all of the issues involved with a data center. For example, YALI delivered this, what, 150-something pages after the meeting, so the public hasn't really had enough time to go through it, but I did skim through it, and there was no discussion Such enough lights. . There were no discussion on health studies of human impacts. . . . . . Today, you have an opportunity to save your seat in the next election. Listen to the cries of your people who have come before you, meeting after meeting, asking for a moratorium. If not for your people, then at least to wipe away the stain of corruption on your reputation and legacy. Well, the meeting also served as the first public hearing of the legal process that has to play out to enact a moratorium on new data center development. The moratorium would give city staff 90 days to review the commission's recommendations and decide if changes are needed to the city's zoning rules and development codes. But this would not be a permanent ban on data centers. Before the pause can take effect, city council has to hold another public hearing and vote on the proposed ordinance. The soonest it could be enacted is February of next year. Now, city staff does say that the next public hearing is planned For January 12th, if you'd like to read the findings for yourself, you can check them out on our website.