Ashwaubenon’s Plan Commission on June 2 unanimously endorsed writing a moratorium on large-scale data centers into law.
Amid local concerns over a data center developer’s interest in building a roughly 1-gigawatt facility in the region for artificial intelligence, officials said the move was meant as a show of transparency and a pragmatic consideration while the village is undergoing a planned overhaul of its zoning laws.
If passed by the Village Board on June 23, the 12-month-long law would forbid the village from accepting applications for any data center project bigger than 100,000 square feet or that would use more than 20 megawatts of electricity.
Permits, site plan submissions, and the like would be prohibited, according to village administrator Joel Gregozeski. Rezoning and land approvals, however, would still be allowable.
Officials said the moratorium was not a village stance in favor or in opposition to future data center proposals, for which the village has not received any to date.
“It just simply gives us that space and time to effectively address it, to engage, and to hear from our constituents, simply without any threat of a hyperscale data center from being proposed in Ashwaubenon,” Gregozeski said.
The endorsement was made the same day Brown County officials declined to explore a countywide pause on data center developments and in a time when local officials have wrestled with the legality of these pauses increasingly requested by the public.
Residents in the Village of Wrightstown, currently at the center of the region’s data center hubbub, petitioned the village board for a moratorium on June 2. Some have pointed to Manitowoc County’s moratorium, adopted April 29, as an example to follow and give time to evaluate the effects of data center projects on their health and livelihoods.
Officials from Wrightstown, who’ve shown openness to data center proposals, and Brown County have questioned the legal grounds of moratoriums. They’ve pointed to state law defining when development moratoriums are allowable: When a project is found to overburden utilities or pose health or safety risks, governments may exercise their zoning authority to pause rezoning and land approvals.
In a similar fashion to Manitowoc County, Ashwaubenon officials drew on other parts of state law to draft its ordinance, explicitly denying that its law was a development moratorium. In effect, this sidestepped having to prove health and safety consequences, which Ashwaubenon officials said were the primary concerns they’d heard from residents over the past several months.
Village officials would “research the possible environmental, economic, health, and safety impacts of hyperscale data centers” during the moratorium period, according to the law. A set of zoning laws and regulations to curb those effects would then be crafted to present for public consideration, the law said.
The moratorium would also have the effect of separating discussions on data center regulations from the rest of the village’s zoning laws currently being rewritten. Without the moratorium, Gregozeski anticipated data center discussions would likely dominate public meetings over the upcoming zoning overhaul to the detriment of other zoning issues that can affect quality of life, a situation village staff wished to avoid.
Village Board member Jay Krueger praised the measure as a way for the Ashwaubenon’s community development director Aaron Schuette to “kind of muscle this out a little bit and give the staff a chance to figure out what does this really mean to Ashwaubenon and its residents.”
Village President Mary Kardoskee called it “a well-thought-out ordinance, I think, to calm the concerns of some of the residents because no one wants to see in Ashwaubenon what they [see going] down I-43 and they have the several-hundred-acre data center.”
Jesse Lin is a reporter covering the community of Green Bay and its surroundings, as well as politics in northeastern Wisconsin. He also writes a weekly column answering reader questions about Green Bay. Contact and send him questions at 920-834-4250 or jlin@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Ashwaubenon committee backs data center moratorium as show of transparency
Reporting by Jesse Lin, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
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By Jesse Lin, Green Bay Press-Gazette | USA TODAY Network
