Following a recent training conference with other area building officials in Gatlinburg, Greeneville’s Building Official Bert Seay returned with two words for the Greeneville Municipal Planning Commission Tuesday….data centers.
Seay told commission members there is a lot more interest in the area for data centers.
HOW TO CLASSIFY DATA CENTERS
And with that interest comes the responsibility of municipality’s to determine how to classify data centers and in the process determine how they should be zoned and accordingly located.
Seay told the commission “One thing I wanted to bring up to everybody on the planning commission is this is something we probably need to look at in the near future clarifying how we view data centers, how we view the use, how we view the energy usage, how we view the noise and basically define what type of occupancy and use that would be. So if that does come up to us in the future, there’s not a debate about where they can go or where they would fit into our land use districts. That’s just something I want to put on everybody’s radar.”
“This is something that some of our other jurisdictions, other building officials are dealing with in Northeast Tennessee, and there’s even more demand for more and more of these data centers to some point, we probably want to get clarified here in the next few months.”
SOONER RATHER THAN LATER
Seay continued “our other communities are doing it through planning, building or through city council. I talked to Sullivan County. They had come up with and recently passed an ordinance. So we’ll see how these other communities have done this. I know with our cell phone towers and the telecommunication structures, we came up with an ordinance that covered those, where they could go, how we look at the use, what are the appropriate zoning districts for them to be in, what restrictions they might be in and put them in the different zoning districts that they’re allowed. So I would see that going through zoning as an ordinance change or addition to the zoning ordinance that would define those.
So, I guess, to answer your question, it’s probably going to be a little bit on the building side, because one thing that came up, the first question I ask is, to the other building officials is what occupancy do you call this in the building code? Is this a business? Well, it’s a data center, is this a manufacturing facility? What are they manufacturing? Do we call it a factory? Do we call it a hazard or a high hazard? What is the fire protection system that will be used. You’re not going to put a sprinkler system in a building that is full of a billion dollars of electronics, so you’re talking about halon or some type of a gas system. There is just not a lot of definition that we have. The one thing I certainly want Greeneville to avoid is a developer wanting to develop this and wanting to put it into an inappropriate land use district which is going to cause conflict with the neighbors. It’s going to be a combination of building, planning, zoning, all of us just clarifying exactly what this thing is and how we view it, and where we would feel the appropriate land use district for it to be.”
MORATORIUM?
Dr. Matt Hensley questioned “Do you think it might be appropriate to impose a moratorium on data centers while we’re doing all this homework so to speak”? Seay said “I don’t think it would be inappropriate to discuss a moratorium, but one thing I know by state law we cannot zone a use out so it would be temporary. We can’t manipulate our zoning in a way or put our zoning in a way to where it eliminates a use in it.
Commission member Dallas Blair followed “we probably need to create some restriction first”.
Seay continued “We would need to define what the appropriate land use district would be for it to be in. It’s just a matter of time, but I want to get that on your radar.”
MOVING FORWARD
This is something I’ll talk with Justin and Andy about. We’ll look at it and we’ll explore what some other communities have done, and maybe come up with a very, very preliminary framework for us to look at here in the next couple of months and be sure we go down that path. Town Planner Justin Schooley added “we shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel because we talked with other planners in my planning chapter that had used model ordinances or ordinances out of Virginia where there’s been a massive amount of data center developments. They come in all different scales and sizes. You can have a data center the size of this room to a huge industrial warehouse the size of Walmart. And that’s where you have to define different parameters and get into the details, which can get tedious and then you have to define the decibels because you can have low frequency, humming noise that travels for over a mile or miles. That could have negative consequences on surrounding properties. The consequences or devaluing of neighboring properties, we need to look at using an ordinance, discussing what we want as a town to be satisfied if this were to ever come to our town, to make sure that all these concerns are addressed.”
GET GEA INVOLVED
Seay said “We need to bring Greeneville Energy Authority into the conversation just because of the electrical loads that they pull.”
TIMELINE
“I think that’s something we could put together in a couple of months. We need to put it down and make it clear where our stance is on what’s the appropriate zoning district, where these things can go and just exactly what we have in the data center. We’ll be working on that. It’s not that we don’t want data centers, it’s just that we want them in the appropriate area”.
