The commission Wednesday evening unanimously voted to recommend the Board of Aldermen place a moratorium on the construction of new data centers to give staff more time to study the issue and suggest regulations.
“It is kind of frightening just how much we don’t know and how little regulation there is,” said Commissioner Cristina Garmendia, who also serves as policy director to the president of the Board of Aldermen. “There’s still a lot to learn, too, for all of us to come back with a confident set of regulations.”
Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer said she plans to introduce a bill next week that would impose a one-year moratorium immediately upon approval.
Initially she said she would introduce it Friday but said after the Post-Dispatch posted the story that she wanted to finalize the bill’s language first.
The goal is to produce thoughtful legislation that is welcoming to business without harming neighborhoods, Schweitzer said. She added that the board is “learning from past mistakes” to be pro-active, referencing the years officials spent debating rules around short-term rentals.
Mayor Cara Spencer said she supports a temporary pause to allow the city to establish “smart regulation” more quickly.
“It is important that we as a city are clear that we are not seeking to ban data centers,” Spencer said in a statement. “While I have concerns about data centers’ effects on the environment, utility prices, vibrancy and urban living, I also recognize their importance to key industries in St. Louis, including biotech, the geospatial field, agtech and health care. My office is working closely with the Board of Aldermen and key stakeholders to propose responsible regulations to allow for their appropriate development.”
The city of St. Louis already has a dozen data centers, mostly concentrated in older buildings in downtown’s central business district that have been adapted for the high-tech use.
A recent global boom in artificial intelligence, however, has kicked off a veritable gold rush of data center development, which has spurred fear and opposition in communities across the country due to their large energy use and limited job creation.
St. Charles City Council last month agreed to a one-year moratorium on all data centers after residents pushed back against a proposal for an undisclosed user. CRG, the development arm of construction giant, Clayco, had hoped to build five large data centers, described as 285,000-square-foot warehouses, on a 440-acre property along Highway 370.
Residents there also questioned the familial connections the mayor and one councilwoman had to the deal.
Large-scale data centers often use hundreds of megawatts of electricity and require millions of gallons of water to cool their equipment.
Data centers of more than 100,000 square feet typically consume 100 to 200 megawatts of power, equal to the amount used to power all homes in the Shaw, Tower Grove East and Tower Grove South neighborhoods, St. Louis staff said Wednesday.
The St. Louis Planning and Urban Design Agency acknowledged companies may be attracted to a city based on its data centers, and that those facilities also have the potential to generate construction jobs and tax revenue.
The agency wants rules to ensure data centers do not harm neighborhoods or undermine efforts to grow the city’s density. Currently, agency staff said, St. Louis has no regulations around data centers — including how they’re defined, where they could be built and under what conditions.
The city’s existing data centers typically have been categorized as industrial and critical communications infrastructure.
That designation allows them to be exempt from the city’s Building Energy Performance Standards that mandate properties over 50,000 square feet be energy efficient.
“We don’t know how much energy they’re using,” said Elysia Russell, the city’s sustainability director. “We need that type of transparency ... without knowing that, we don’t know what the impact would be on our residents and the energy burden overall.”
At least one proposal for a new data center near the Midtown neighborhood currently is before the city, though no details about the proposal were shared Wednesday. Development firm Green Street Real Estate Ventures last month filed for a permit to build a $600 million facility there and has expressed interest in erecting data centers.
If a moratorium is approved, planning staff said they would use the time to research the environmental and economic impacts of data centers, study regulations imposed in other cities and how much disclosure should be required by operators.
“Increasingly it’s becoming a hot topic and something that is very complex, very rapidly evolving and changing,” said Miriam Keller, the city planning executive. “There’s a need for the city to have — quickly — some better ways of managing this use.”
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