The local governments of Murray and Calloway County met last week discussing data center ordinances, intending to regulate the controversial national matter.
The Murray City Council held a public hearing on a proposed ordinance where citizens continued to give input, criticism and cited issues they found. Meanwhile, the Calloway County Fiscal Court held the first reading of its own ordinance, calling for a year-long moratorium.
Murray City Council
The Murray City Council held a public hearing on its proposed ordinance last week during a special called meeting. The council held the first reading of the ordinance at another special called meeting June 18. The city posted the proposed ordinance on its website for public review ahead of the public hearing.
In contrast to the Murray Planning Commission’s June 9 public hearing on the proposed ordinance, which drew more than 100 attendees and about 20 speakers, roughly two dozen people attended Thursday’s hearing, excluding media and city officials.
Only five people spoke during the public comment period. Among them was Murray resident Ken Wolfe. He expressed his concern for the city’s impoverished residents, whom he said would receive increased hardship if a data center is allowed — and the overall privacy of citizens.
“I think you've taken the bull by the horns in even addressing data centers,” Wolfe said to the city council, “but we need to remember the key word is data … (there are people) invading our privacy to a great extent.”
He urged council members to ask any company wanting to build a data center inside city limits questions about the data they store.
”Who's going to collect the data? How is it going to be used? When and where is it going to be used?” he said. “Let's protect the privacy we have left in this country.”
Tara Lynn Kallaher, a Calloway County resident, said the ordinance does not include risk for a data center’s responsibility for damage to the city and community.
Kallaher asked the council to add mandatory risk management requirements like comprehensive liability standards, quarterly independent inspections and compliance surveys. She said these items must be included in the ordinance itself.
“These are essential for protecting the public health, safety, and welfare of our community,” Kallaher said, “There is no reason that core risk management standards cannot be established directly in the ordinance and applied consistently to every proposal. … We deserve proactive provisions in the ordinance that anticipate these risks with strong baseline safeguards in law, not reactive fixes after problems emerge.”
Kallaher also submitted documents in writing to the city council, which she claimed would withstand litigation.
The council is expected to move forward with its second reading – which will require a roll-call vote – no later than Aug. 13.
The Calloway County Fiscal Court held the first reading its own ordinance, but instead of attempting to regulate data centers in the county, Paul Rister, district 4 magistrate, presented an ordinance enacting a 12-month moratorium.
Rister said the moratorium will give county officials the time needed to study the electrical demands and how an ordinance will make a data center “perfectly” fit in Calloway County.
“It's not a moratorium to say that we don't want data centers,” Rister said. “This moratorium allows us time to gather our thoughts and research, and the legislators' time to respond to how the state's going to step in to any regulations on data centers.”
He also addressed the data center owned by Soluna, called Project Sophie; which is a bitcoin mining facility which is not hyperscale. Rister said the company has received a draft of the ordinance through Corey Childs, a Soluna administrator.
“(Childs) has sent a copy to his bosses in New York, who have not complied yet,” Rister said. “The moratorium does outlay any expansion or any footprint expansion of their facilities. Corey unofficially said that he doesn't know of any plans for Soluna to expand, but he could not officially say that because his boss is in New York, but he had no issue personally with this moratorium.”
Kenny Imes, county judge-executive, said it takes two readings to enact an ordinance and that he wants to see a clearer explanation of what a data center is. This way, Imes said, the county knows how to restrict one or at the very least regulate it.
“There's no thing that says we have to do it in the next month. Data centers are new to everybody, and the irony of the thing is that we get our data probably from some data center somewhere, and I guess the question is whether we're willing to allow whatever (that) in Calloway County.”
Yet Imes said the court does not want Calloway to get backed into a corner.
“I think what we're trying to do here is to get the people of county to be aware before they sell land or buy land or anything,” Imes said, “so we don't get into spot zoning, and you get in all these regulations and that's the reason we rely on base law or at least travel very slowly into you know doing what's best for Calloway County.”
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