At its July 6 meeting, the Gilchrist County Board of County Commissioners voted to place a moratorium on AI data centers in the county.
The commission also asked North Florida Professional Services to look at the county’s land development code to get ahead of any data centers looking to get in the county should the county be preempted by the state similar to the solar farms.
County Attorney David Lang told the board that there are “millions and millions and millions” of dollars in possible tax revenue from data centers, but they come with several pitfalls.
Commissioner Bill Martin said data centers are not the “three-headed monster everyone’s been complaining about.”
“I’m not saying we want one in Gilchrist County,” Martin said. “I am saying they’re not as bad as everybody has been screaming about them.”
Martin added that many improvements have been made to data centers to make them quieter and more water efficient.
“And yes, they do bring millions of dollars to the counties that have them,” Martin added.
Martin added that even if Gilchrist did not allow a data center, if a nearby county like Alachua or Levy allowed one, it would still pump water out of Gilchrist’s aquifer. Meanwhile, the county that allowed the data center would reap benefit in tax revenue.
Lang said at the time, 16 counties had placed bans on data centers and several others had placed moratoriums on them.
Lang said the Florida Association of County Attorneys recommends placing a one-year moratorium while the data center issue is being studied because the permanent bans are likely to be found unconstitutional or place liability on the county under the Bert J. Harris Act because the county would be taking property without giving reasonable compensation.
After Commissioner Sharon Langford moved to place a one-year moratorium on data centers and the motion was seconded by Martin, Chairman Darrell Smith said he spoke to a commissioner from Okeechobee County who told him they were having the same discussions. Smith said Okeechobee County looked at making changes to its land development code.
Lang said that the county could use the time under the moratorium to make changes to the land development code to control where data centers can be located in the county.
Lang also warned that the companies that build and use the data centers are ahead of the county, telling the commissioners that these companies have come up with micro data centers that are the size of an air conditioning unit.
Lang said the companies offer home owners money toward their electric bill to place one of their micro data centers on their property. The companies then put out 1,000 of these units in an area, which altogether use the same amount of water and electricity as a full-size data center.
Lang said these micro data centers would not require a zoning change because homeowners can put on their house what they want to have on their house.
Smith said another thing that could happen is the state legislature could preempt the counties and force them to allow data centers to be built, similar to how it had preempted the counties over solar farms.
Lang said the FACA told him that it expects that to happen.
Martin said he was told at a workshop that the county can put restrictions on the data centers such as noise restrictions and not allowing the data centers to operate during peak electrical hours.
He added that the county can institute a profit-sharing program that puts money from the data centers back into the community.
He said there is a community in Virginia that has 22 data centers, and through a profit-sharing program, parks, theaters and gymnasiums have been built in the community.
He said the community “loves” the data centers because they have things they would not otherwise have along with high-paying jobs.
The board voted, 4-0, to approve the moratorium and have NFPS look at the LDR.