The Hastings Planning Commission meets today, July 27, at 7 p.m. in the Council Chambers at Hastings City
Hall. The meeting’s sole agenda item: Commissioners will consider a proposed moratorium on data centers.
KDWA spoke with Hastings Community Development Director John Hinzman for insight about the moratorium for data centers and what it could mean for the city.
“I think the important part is there’s not a data center being considered at this time. We don’t have an application, nor have we had any discussions with somebody seeking to put a data center in, and probably a few years. So it’s not in response to something that may be coming. It’s more of something to look at our zoning code to see if there’s changes that we should enact to regulate data centers. Because right now, when we look at our code, we don’t really address it very well. Really, very little specifically to data centers.
So we’d be asking. We met with our planning committee of council about a week or two ago to discuss whether just data centers in general. And the thought was, well, let’s have the planning commission look at this as well, and perhaps consider a moratorium ordinance. Now, what a moratorium ordinance is is it puts a pause on any potential development actions that could occur for a period of time. Generally, that’s going to be one year, so there wouldn’t be any applications that we could consider for approval or denial of a data center during that time period. And then during the time period, we would be doing research into changes that we may make to the city code to better regulate data centers. So that that’s what we’re doing at this time.”
If the planning commission recommends approval, the proposed ordinance amendment would then move on to the Hastings City Council for consideration.
“So it goes to the city council on two readings, is what they call it. So it would be presuming the planning commission forwards it to the council. The council would consider the first reading of the ordinance amendment coming up on their next meeting, August 3. Now that is likely, these first readings are typically on the consent agenda. So I don’t know how much that will be brought forward at that time, and then two weeks later on the 17th, there would be the second reading and adoption, in which I would expect some discussion to occur at that point.”
Hinzman says the city is trying to get ahead of something that may or may not happen.
“The data centers require a lot of space. I don’t know if we really have the space in Hastings for a large data center to begin with, but we want to make sure that we’ve got regulations in place since this is a sensitive topic for a lot of people.”
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