Gibraltar — A proposed plan to put a data center on the former McLouth Steel site on West Jefferson in Gibraltar is on hold after the city council this week imposed a year-long moratorium on data centers.
Council members unanimously approved a resolution Monday night approving the moratorium to study whether the Wayne County city should impose more local regulations on data centers. The resolution said Gibraltar should study whether data centers interfere with other land uses in the community or affect the environment, public health, safety and welfare.
The moratorium comes after Raeden, a California-based media and information company, submitted a plan to Gibraltar’s planning commission to build a data center on the site of the former McLouth Steel plant, which ended operations in 1996.
Councilwoman Kathy LaPointe, who introduced the moratorium resolution, said communities have been caught “flat-footed” by the rapid expansion of proposed data centers. She said she wasn’t expressing an opinion on Raeden’s plan, but that the city should give the Planning Commission more time to do due diligence.
“I don’t think anybody in our community saw this coming, and therefore we didn’t specifically regulate it,” LaPointe said.
The resolution leaves the door open for Gibraltar to either extend the moratorium after a year or shorten the period before it expires if city officials see fit.
A representative for Raeden declined comment Tuesday on the City Council’s vote and whether the company plans to continue pursuing a data center at the former McLouth site.
McLouth Steel operated plants on Jefferson Avenue in both Gibraltar and Trenton, which are neighboring Downriver municipalities in Wayne County. In 2023, state inspectors said calcium hydroxide, a highly corrosive compound, was leaking from the former Trenton site (which also straddles Riverview) into the Monguagon Creek.
Data centers are sprawling facilities housing information technology equipment that power the internet. Communities have raced to impose moratoriums on the facilities amid concerns including energy usage, water consumption and noise.
Jason Green, a Raeden cofounder, said during the City Council presentation that the company carefully considered its choice for proposing a data center in Gibraltar. He said Raeden has a presence in Detroit as a technology infrastructure partner of Bedrock, the real estate development company founded by billionaire Dan Gilbert.
Green said his company specializes in “adaptive reuse” of properties into development for building telecom and data centers. Raeden is seeking to develop its data center at 27800 Jefferson Ave.
The proposed land for the data center is next to a Superfund site at 28000 Jefferson, so named by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for cleanup because of heavy contamination from hazardous waste at the site. Such sites can include manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills and mines.
“How can we take something legacy and make it better? That site doesn’t have a future,” Green said. “It can just sit there, but the owner needs to sell it.”
Raeden said its plan would require 100 megawatts of power from DTE Energy and use no more than 600 gallons of water per day.
Currently, the former steel site’s zoning allows a data center, meaning the Planning Commission would not review the land use of the property under the city’s current regulations.
Lenore Bolthouse of Gibraltar told the council she’s concerned about the city losing revenue because of a state-granted sales and use tax exemption for data centers, how many employees the data center would hire locally, water use and energy costs trickling down to residents.
“I do understand that this is a smaller data center than some of the other ones that have been put up around the country and in Michigan, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still a question to ask, how much water, and do we have enough of a water supply?” she said.
Green said during his presentation he believes details of Raeden’s plan for the site allay some of the concerns of residents. For one, he said the data center is required to pay for energy that powers its infrastructure.
Green said he believes concerns about noise are overstated. He said the center would not use more than 600 gallons of water per day, which would produce minimal wastewater.
He said he sees Raeden as a partner of Metro Detroit, and the company has been assessing the site on Jefferson Avenue for more than a year.
“We’ve been here talking to people about what might work; what could work; what’s feasible. For every 200 properties that I look at, we might investigate one further,” Green said.
Raeden is scheduled to host a town hall forum at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday about the data center site plan at the Gil Talbert Community Center.
jcardi@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Gibraltar presses pause on data centers amid proposal on former McLouth steel site
Reporting by Julia Cardi, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
