Dallas-based Compass Datacenters filed rezoning plans with the city of Statesville for a five-building center spanning 340 acres off the Interstate 40 Stamey Farm Road exit in rural west Iredell.
Compass representatives unveiled their plans at an information meeting on Aug. 14 for surrounding property owners. The meeting drew a standing-room only crowd in the Statesville Civic Center media room.
The city requires the meetings before the Statesville Planning Board and Statesville City Council consider a rezoning, Statesville Planning Director Sherry Ashley told The Charlotte Observer on Friday.
Ashley said 60 people attended Thursday night’s meeting, considerably more than the number of property owners mailed notices by the city.
Plans filed by Compass with the Statesville Planning + Zoning Department will be available Tuesday on the city of Statesville website, Ashley said.
The center would sprout beside high-voltage transmission lines, with primary power supplied by a Duke Energy substation less than a mile away, according to informational displays at the meeting.
The I-40 exit would be the primary access to the center, and Highway 70 the secondary access.
Compass has built data centers in several states; Montreal and Toronto, Canada; Dublin, Ireland; Milan, Italy; and Tel Aviv, Israel, according to its website.
Its 22,000-square-foot data center in Raleigh-Durham’s Research Triangle Park was awarded LEED Gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.
Compass datacenters “make lives better, and when we say that, we mean not just for customers, but also for employees and for the communities where we live and work,” Katy Hancock, Compass datacenters vice president of public relations, told the Statesville crowd, according to a recording of her comments.
“Our culture has been firmly in place since day one,” Hancock said. “We were founded in 2011 by Chris Crosby, who’s still our CEO today, and he is dogged about our culture. It really guides everything we do and all of our actions.”
“... We’re in a young industry, and it’s growing fast,” she said. ”And we want to do that well and responsibly.”
“Has our county become so money hungry?” opponent asks
The Stamey Farm Road site is the second location pitched by a developer for a data farm in Iredell County this year.
JLL, a global commercial real estate developer based in Chicago, Ill., has begun marketing the property as a data farm site.
Lynne Taylor, a lead opponent to Teresa Earnhardt’s defeated rezoning request for a $30 billion data center in east Mooresville, attended Thursday’s meeting to learn about the Stamey Farm Road plans.
Teresa Earnhardt is the widow of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt.
Colorado developer Tract pulled its rezoning request for Earnhardt’s project after Mooresville Mayor Chris Carney told the company that neither he nor the Town Board would vote in favor of the rezoning, Carney said Wednesday.
At least 200 neighbors packed Mooresville Town Board meetings to oppose the project.
“In less than 48 hours, we learn that Iredell County is spared of a data center in Mooresville that would have destroyed our ecosystem, only to find that a much larger and more harmful data center in Statesville will destroy existing farmlands and homes,” Taylor told the Observer on Friday.
She sent the Observer pictures and video she took of the Stamey Farm Road site showing lush green acres and the nearby zoning hearing sign.
“Has our county become so money hungry and profit driven that it will continue to ignore the natural resources we’ve been blessed with?” she said. “Will we continue to model for future generations that fresh air, clean water and wide open spaces for nature to exist aren’t worthy of saving?”
Residents established a Facebook group against the Stamey Farm Road rezoning.
The Statesville Planning Board is scheduled to hear the request at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 26, at City Hall, 310 S. Center St.
The City Council will consider the rezoning at 6 p.m. Monday, Sept. 15, and again at 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 6, and the developer’s annexation request on Oct. 6 and Oct. 20.
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