An Arcata City Council meeting last night culminated in the city council unanimously deciding to adopt a data center moratorium.

The ordinance stops the city from processing and approving permits for data centers for the next 45 days, at a minimum, though they’ll probably extend it for another 10 months and 15 days before the window closes. The mechanism they chose to use is a little technical: state law allows the city to pause developers from developing property in ways that normally would be legal, but might conflict with opposing land use regulations the city is considering enacting. The development has to present a “current and immediate threat” to the public “health, safety, or welfare.” Because it’s classified as an “emergency” ordinance, the council didn’t need to host a public hearing. 

How could a facility built to house computer equipment harm the public health? The city’s regulating them by focusing on their oft-massive water and electricity consumption. Large data centers can burn through as much electricity as 100,000 homes and can use as much as 5 million gallons of water every day, about the same amount as a town of 30,000 people does. A hypothetical data center of that scale would strain Arcata’s public utility infrastructure to the point where it’d be unable to serve other customers, the staff report argues, and could potentially risk the community’s safety.

Nobody’s put in an application to build one (although one company is interested), but it gives the city some time to ponder what kinds of data centers might be appropriate for Arcata. 

There wasn’t any public comment on the item, but councilmember Sarah Schaefer came out strongly in favor. 

“As a student of history — the government has to step in to regulate speculative capitalism,” she said. “And that is what is happening here, and there is no safeguards on AI and what it is, and the people developing it. There is no federal regulation, there’s not much state regulation, and now we’re down to the local level, and we need to decide how our land use planning will impact this. So I think it’s really important for government to get involved in regulating AI, and regulating the acceleration of AI…We had regulation of child labor, and pollution standards for burning coal, and of the meatpacking industry, and all of these things that have made peoples’ day-to-day lives better, and this is no different from any of those things. So, yay, government regulation.”

Other Stuff

They also decided to grant permission for the Alcohol and Beverage Control to give liquor licenses to the revamped Alibi and Alchemy Distillery on South G Street, which will now be allowed to serve more booze than it used to to patrons. (Their current ABC license, one designed for craft distilleries, allowed them to sell up to 4.5 liters of spirits per day per customer; the new license they’re applying for, a type 48, is a typical license for bars and nightclubs and has no restrictions.)

They also adopted the city’s new economic strategic plan, which everyone said they liked very much and were certain would bring beaucoup bucks to a town that could use them. (Read our article about it here.)