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The City of Eureka is moving forward with a temporary ban on data centers.

At last night’s meeting, the city council unanimously voted to adopt an urgency ordinance establishing a 45-day moratorium on data center siting in the city’s inland and coastal zones. The urgency ordinance will prevent the development of data centers while city staff develop zoning standards and regulatory controls for the facilities. 

While the nationwide push to restrict data center development is largely in response to the proliferation of AI support facilities, City Attorney Robert Black acknowledged that impacts associated with data centers vary significantly.

“Data centers are a complex subject because they have impacts in so many different ways, in terms of water, energy, water rates, energy rates, disposal of cooling water [and] different technologies,” Black said. “[I]f this council was interested in siting a data center in the City of Eureka, I’m pretty sure that you would not want to do so without a well-thought-out regulatory plan.”

He informed the council that the 45-day moratorium would be followed by a public hearing, which would give staff a chance to share their findings and council members an opportunity to offer further direction on what uses should be limited or restricted. The council could choose to extend the moratorium up to two years.

Councilmember Leslie Castellano acknowledged that the issue of data centers is a “sensitive matter in the community,” and asked if the city has received any proposals from developers. 

“We don’t have [any] application[s], but we have had inquiries for properties that are within city limits for data centers,” City Manager Miles Slattery said.

A little later in the discussion, Castellano emphasized that she doesn’t want to see the city squander potential economic development opportunities in the technology sector by eliminating the possibility of data centers. “I think the scale, the scope [and] the type need to be discussed.”

Moulton | Screenshot

Councilmember Kati Moulton asked how staff is defining data centers, and how the facilities differ “from a building that has a lot of servers in it for a different reason.”

Black said data centers are often associated with “the AI project,” and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. 

“[They’re] not physically dissimilar to the other type of computer center that you described,” he said. “The computers go to work, and there’s a tremendous amount of power being used [and] … a huge amount of cooling that’s involved because those processes incorporate a lot of heat. I don’t have a precise definition of data center, but I do think we are talking about banks of computers in stacks that occupy warehouses. In some cases, acres and acres worth of computing power.”

Moulton also asked how the city could stop “potentially dangerous or detrimental business[es] from getting a foothold” in the city, versus local businesses that need “a lot of computing power” to support operations.

“I think that would be one of the questions we would try to answer in the initial 45-day period, and come back to you with greater precision than this [urgency] ordinance was intended to convey,” Black said.

Councilmember G. Mario Fernandez also spoke to the differences between AI data centers and facilities that house regular web servers. “That needs to be differentiated so we’re not becoming Luddites, for lack of a better term.” 

“It’s more the concern of saying ‘no’ outright to data centers completely because we do have to take into account the way that we function as a culture and as a society,” Fernandez said a little later in the discussion. “I’m not saying ‘Yes,  let’s build a 10-story, however long [facility],’ but let’s take into consideration what that would look like.”

Black agreed, noting that staff would differentiate between the types of data centers in the draft ordinance that will eventually return to council.

During public comment, Eureka Planning Commissioner Deborah Dukes acknowledged that she is a “YIMBY on almost everything,” but said she is adamantly opposed to data centers in Humboldt County.

Dukes | Screenshot

“We’ve had situations where PG&E couldn’t even hook up new buildings in Southern Humboldt, and everything that I have read … indicates that people — the ratepayers who surround these data centers, however you define them, and I would encourage you to define them very broadly — wind up paying a lot to subsidize these things,” Dukes said. “They’re big, they’re loud, they slurp water and discharge it warmer than they got it in, and they use a tremendous amount of energy.”

“This is a hill I will die on,” she added. “I don’t want it here.”

Following public comment, Moulton made a motion to approve the urgency ordinance, which was seconded by Councilmember Scott Bauer, who attended the meeting via Zoom.

Like Fernandez, Bauer acknowledged the “practical needs and uses” of data centers, but felt large-scale facilities would conflict with the city’s character. “A Victorian village with a massive square building on the waterfront? I don’t think any of us would want to see that,” he said. 

Councilmember Renee Contreras-DeLoach agreed. She raised concern about the amount of energy used by data centers and questioned whether PG&E would be able to supply the electricity needed to power such a facility.

“The overarching theme [is] that communities exist for the human beings that live in them,” she said. “I’m not anti-technology, but I have been watching what’s going on around the country, so I’m glad that we’re kind of addressing this ahead of time. Not sure what we can do if that were challenged down the line, but I think it’s good for us to define what we want to do and why we want to, and along with that, protecting our resources, protecting animal and plant life and human beings.”

The council passed the urgency ordinance in a 5-0 vote. The 45-day moratorium will take effect immediately.