Proposed Zoning Change for Data Centers and Reflections on Last Week's Council Meeting

Hey everybody. Most of this post is going to focus on the proposed zoning changes for new data center construction that we'll be tackling on the council later this year. I did want to take just a minute here to talk about Tuesday night's council meeting and the vote to terminate the interim Independent Police Monitor. 

Thoughts on Last Week's Meeting

I spoke more about this on my last blog post, and I encourage you to read that for a more thorough look at the situation and my reasoning for the vote. I knew that this meeting was going to be long and fraught, but there was no way I could have predicted what actually happened that night. We heard from over 140 people who shared their anguish, their fear, and most viscerally their anger over the course of 9 hours of public comment. It's impossible not to be affected by that, and while I'm sure it is cold comfort given how I voted, I hope the people in that room know that I heard and understand the pain they shared with us.  After that, my fellow alders and I had questions for IM Glass, City Attorney Michael Haas, and other members of city staff. These questions took up another three hours. Some of my colleagues asked questions that they already knew the answer to, either to get city staff on the record about a disputed fact or support their argument for or against the measure, which routinely drew the crowd's ire, especially as we crept closer to daybreak. For my part, every question I asked of IM Glass and Police Chief Patterson was something I genuinely needed clarity on – either because I hadn't gotten an answer prior to the meeting or because it stemmed from a comment that was made earlier that night. Either way, by the time questioning was finished, we had only minutes before we needed to leave the room so it could be used for municipal court hearings. Both the crowd and council agreed it was better to vote in that moment than delay for another day, and so we did, with the measure passing by a vote of 14-6.

Because we needed to vote so suddenly, we did not have time for debate on the council floor. None of us got to make our case or explain our reasoning beyond what we had already published on our blogs. Most of what I would have said if given the chance would sound like what I had already written, but there is one final point I wish I could have expressed that morning. Because our votes ultimately didn't change from what we had written before the meeting, I know a lot of activists opposed to the vote think that their testimony fell on deaf ears, that we didn't care about their experiences and that it was all for naught. Personally, this couldn't be further from the truth. My heart absolutely breaks for everyone who got up in front of us and shared their grief – most of all the parents and family members of those so needlessly killed by our city's police. I know that my vote caused some of these people pain I cannot comprehend, and that weighs heavily on me. But my duty as an alder is not just to the immediate emotions of the moment, but rather to the long-term health and vision of this city, chiefly here being a robust and operational future for police oversight and reform. I stand by my decision – that relieving IM Glass of her duties was the best way to serve those goals. I understand if you disagree with me on that, though I hope my thinking is at least understandable to you. If I am wrong, then it will be my burden to bear and my penance to pay, and I still lose sleep to the uncertainty of what's to come from this vote. But I know in my heart what my intentions were, and I will stand by this choice as the right one to make given everything I knew.

Beyond the vote itself, I think there is much that needs to be said about the meeting itself. I have seen large and passionate crowds in the council chambers before, but nothing like what we saw this week. The anger in that room was palpable and frankly frightening. There were chants throughout the night calling me and other alders racist and evil. There were completely baseless accusations of corruption and coverup hurled at members of the council, the mayor, and city staff. The few in the room who spoke in favor of the resolution were not allowed to speak and made to feel unsafe after they left the lectern. And most disturbingly, some protesters, egged on by a jeering crowd, made statements that were hard not to read as personal threats against members of the council. At the end of the night, as the room devolved into cacophony, I had to sneak out a side door with a couple of my colleagues, as others had to be escorted out by police for their own safety. In the days since, I have received threatening emails, and other alders, specifically my female colleagues, have received much more, with some even threatening the safety of their children. I get that tempers ran high and boiled over as that night went on. But this is completely unacceptable, and to see it cheered on by others has been scary and incredibly disheartening.

Mayor Rhodes-Conway shared a lot of these same thoughts in her letter announcing she was no longer running for re-election. I know I am not the first to say that social media, the pandemic, and the behavior of Donald Trump have radically degraded the discourse in all levels of politics. But still, we have to do something about this. I wish I knew what that was. But we simply can't continue on as a society if this level of vitriol and threats of violence are the new norm. 

Data Center Zoning Proposal

On Monday, the Sustainable Madison Committee received our first briefing on the new proposed zoning rules for data centers in the city. This presentation had already been given to the Plan Commission and made available to the public (you can find it and more information here), and I've already received scores of emails, questions, and comments about the proposal and what it means for our district and the city at large. 

Common Misconceptions

First things first, I want to dispel some common misconceptions I've been seeing in those comments and elsewhere online:

• This is not finalized. No committee has voted on these new rules – they were drafted by city staff as a potential starting point for what zoning could look like after our one-year moratorium ends. They will need to make their way through relevant committees before coming to the Common Council for a final vote, and they can (and almost certainly will) be amended at any step in that process.
• This does not allow Hyperscale data centers. There is some confusion about the use of the terms “small", “medium", and “large" to describe the different types of data centers in this proposal. While the “large" data centers of 50,000-100,000 sq ft are bigger than any data centers we know about in Madison right now (more on that later), they are nowhere close to the size of the hyperscale data centers that have been built recently elsewhere. As a point of comparison, the planned expansion of the Microsoft AI Data Center in Mount Pleasant will increase its size from 1.2 million sq ft to 5.9 million sq ft, almost 60 times larger than the largest that would be allowed under this plan.
• There are no data centers currently proposed or being developed. A lot of people have misread the map released by our planning team and think that it shows places where data centers will be built, or where the city would like them to be built. This is not accurate. The map shows only where “large" data centers could be built under this proposal based on current industrial zoning. There are no proposals that have been received by the city for new data center construction, nor would those proposals be automatically greenlit under this plan.
• There are currently data centers in Madison. This misconception is understandable, because most of us picture gigantic hyperscale, AI-centric data centers when we hear the term. But data centers come in many different sizes and for many different purposes, only sharing the fact that they are a centralized location for computing power. There are at least 4 standalone data centers in Madison at the moment, maxing out at about 30,000 sq ft in size. As I said before, those are only the ones that we know of – since there hasn't been a separate designation for data centers in the past, planning staff could only infer which buildings in our city are data centers based on their size and water consumption. It is incredibly likely that the University, for example, has a data center larger than that on site, but because they don't have to disclose it to the city, we can't know for sure how large it is. Either way, data centers of the small and medium size have existed in the city for years, largely unnoticed.

Why Zoning Changes Are Needed

The biggest question I get from people around this proposal is why we need to allow any data center construction at all. This makes sense if you are just thinking about the gargantuan hyperscale data centers that dominate the news. To be clear, I am absolutely opposed to hyperscale data centers, but I don't think that this moratorium makes sense when applied to more modest operations that already exist in our community. The “Small" classification of data centers are only up to 10,000 sq ft, take up only part of a building, and usually just store data for another business on-site. They do not use a substantially larger amount of water or energy compared to other business uses and don't typically impact people living nearby. “Medium" data centers are up to 50,000 sq ft (a little smaller than a football field) and are used to provide server capacity for multiple off-site businesses. As I said before, there are already data centers of this category in Madison and its suburbs, usually confined to business parks and industrial areas. They do use more energy than their smaller counterparts, about the same as 1-4 grocery stores over the course of a year, but not enough to have a noticeable impact on the power grid or energy rates. 

It's also worth noting that, because these types of data centers do not have substantial capacity, they are not used for AI processing. This means that there is not a high demand from the business sector to build these types of data centers, since their server space can't be sold to the AI companies who are driving up demand. I do not expect that many more of these types of data centers will be built once the moratorium is lifted, beyond what is needed to support the computing needs of our local businesses.

The “Large" data centers in this proposal are 50,000-100,000 sq ft, which is larger than any data centers in Madison that we know of. 100,000 sq ft is just barely big enough to start being used for AI purposes, but still well smaller than the data centers that have been proposed around the state. Under the proposal, these data centers would only be allowed in industrial zones and could not be within a buffer zone of housing or parks. Right now, that means that there are only two areas in our district where zoning for these data centers could even be possible – in the industrial areas by the water treatment facility on Moorland Rd and along Post Rd between Fish Hatchery and Syene Rd. Both of these areas could be made smaller or even eliminated based on how large we make the buffer zones and what else we include in the list of prohibited neighboring uses (e.g. schools, daycares, residential areas of other municipalities). 

In general, I am not sure that we need to allow these “Large" data centers. They present greater risks to our grid resiliency, may produce harmful “sub-frequency" noise which is harder to measure and regulate, and are less likely to support other local businesses, providing less benefit to the rest of the local economy. I will continue exploring this with city staff and others who are more educated in this space to see if this classification needs to be part of our city's plans. If they are allowed, I want to make sure we have more stringent requirements through our noise and light pollution ordinances to protect nearby residents. One major issue we are facing is that we are not able to regulate things like energy consumption or water usage, which is why we are framing these regulations around square footage, which is the most analogous factor we have the power to regulate. For more information on this and to share your feedback, I'd recommend attending the Public Information Session on Tuesday, October 27th at 5:30. Please continue to share your feedback with me, and I will update this blog as we have more information and the proposed changes advance through committees.