The big headline out of Tuesday’s Pima County Board of Supervisors meeting was that supervisors passed a 120-day moratorium on new data centers.
There’s a catch: The moratorium exempts Project Blue and Project Gravel, the only two data center projects the county says it’s currently discussing with developers.
The vote answers a call from the county’s Board of Health (and activists) to pause approvals. It also lines up with similar moratoriums across the country.
But the exemption, added after an impromptu hour-long executive session, raises a question: What will this moratorium actually stop?
Supervisors Jennifer Allen, Andrés Cano and Matt Heinz voted for the watered-down moratorium, but Supervisors Rex Scott and Steve Christy voted against it.
A faded stop sign outside the former Kerley chemical plant, where developers want to build the new Project Gravel data center.
Technically, the moratorium could affect new projects that haven’t submitted plans to the county. That would force developers to wait 120 days, but as we learned from Project Gravel documents we got last week, it takes several months to process a data center permit anyway.
So why the change?
One of the most noteworthy things that happened on Tuesday night was the unplanned move to go into executive session right before a public discussion on the moratorium.
Since it wasn’t part of the agenda, this means the supervisors got some kind of new information at the last minute — and we are guessing it was a legal threat. Pima County Attorney Laura Conover was part of this unannounced executive session at 7 p.m., suggesting the stakes of the discussion were very high.
Our usual sources all declined to comment, and several supervisors said they couldn’t confirm or deny our theory.
But Supervisor Rex Scott — who voted for the amendment but against the moratorium — said outright that legal advice guided his votes on Tuesday night.
“I will be opposing this resolution for the same reason that I supported the amendments to it, and that is legal counsel the Board has received from the County Attorney’s Office,” he said.
Still, several supervisors praised the new moratorium as a first step to rein in data centers.
Allen, who pushed for the moratorium to come before the board, said the pause will give the county time to put new zoning restrictions on data centers, which could further restrict their spread across the county.
“We are putting a moratorium into place to ensure that our land use policy, our zoning code, actually ensures that we are making good, informed decisions,” Allen said. “Because those (decisions) are the things that are life and death for our communities.”
Heinz, who was a doctor at Tucson Medical Center before getting elected to the board in 2020, pushed for the health department to develop a metric to measure the health hazards caused by data centers and then to establish tools to collect data.
“I gave specific direction to the health department yesterday to collect additional data that potentially documents harms that could exist from these kinds of projects,” Heinz said.
Those monitoring tools would likely come in the form of dedicated air quality monitors and devices to measure how loud the constant din of data centers gets.
While the county is still working on refining new zoning guidelines, County Administrator Jan Lesher put out a six-page memo on Monday outlining some of the proposed zoning changes, including a minimum setback of 200 feet from nearby residential parcels.
Pima County’s proposed 200-foot setback draws a line that the unrelenting hum from Project Gravel might not honor.
The county is revising its zoning codes in part because the laws governing industrial projects were written before anyone could conceive of massive, sprawling data centers that would run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The supervisors are expected to vote on the revised zoning codes in December.
What’s next?
Since the timeline for the two planned data centers remains unchanged, and it’s unclear whether Project Gravel will ever appear before the supervisors, it’s worth zeroing in on the one thing that does get a public hearing — the planned electric substation to fuel Project Gravel.
Right now, plans filed with the county’s Development Services Department show that TRICO Electric Cooperative would build a new substation on the Project Gravel campus.
That would come before the supervisors, who would get to approve or reject the proposal.
There have been some concerns that TRICO could simply move the substation to Sahuarita, but Sahuarita Mayor Tom Murphy said on Facebook that “nothing (related to Project Gravel) will come to the town.”
Time will tell if that includes a substation to power Project Gravel.
The county did open a public comment period to weigh in on the proposed zoning changes.
You can give your two cents here.
Signed, sealed, delivered: After 18 months of negotiating, the Tucson Unified School District Governing Board approved its first-ever bargaining agreement with substitute teachers, Sierra Blaser reports for the Arizona Daily Star. Under the new agreement, subs will get a $200 stipend after 50 assignments in a semester, as well as pay raises for long-term subs and health insurance eligibility, among other benefits. The agreement is the first of its kind in the state and comes as Arizona struggles with thousands of vacant teaching positions, Isabela Lisco reports for KOLD.
Which party are we talking about here?: The Arizona Senate GOP Victory PAC is sending out mailers in Tucson with an odd claim, the Arizona Mirror’s Jim Small shared on social media. The mailer for Chris King, a Republican running for a state Senate seat in Legislative District 17, says “Arizona doesn’t need one-party control.” As Small pointed out “we’ve mostly had that for 60 years!”
No harm, no foul: In the wake of the new Colorado River deal, officials in Oro Valley are expecting to see a 14% cut in the town’s share of river water pumped through the Central Arizona Project canals, Dave Perry reports for Tucson Local Media. Town officials say the cut won’t cause too much trouble for residents, considering the town rarely used its full share of river water anyway, and the town has been storing water underground for years.
As local as it gets: It’s that time of year again when local voters have to sort through ballot propositions. The Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel runs down the 11 local propositions that Pima County voters will decide on in November, from the franchise agreement with Tucson Electric Power to the budget override at the Vail Unified School District.
Biding their time: The Tucson City Council isn’t quite sold on the plan from Warbird National to clean up PFAS in groundwater for a new golf course on city-owned land, KVOA’s Eric Fink reports. Councilwoman Nikki Lee said there could be other proposals in the works for the land, and council members want to give every proposal a fair shake, a thought echoed by several other council members. The council will circle back to the Warbird proposal in 90 days.
As the supervisors wrestle with AI data centers, county administration is beginning to outline what employees can and can’t do with ChatGPT and other flavors of artificial intelligence.
Top of their list?
"Any scenario where a human is not primarily responsible for hiring, promotion, or personnel decisions."
So no, Claude can't hire his agents — er, buddies — to fill county vacancies. That's still a job for humans.