Tucson took one more step toward establishing zoning restrictions for data centers this week.
It’s part of an ongoing effort to regulate how the facilities use the city’s land and water that began following last year’s Project Blue controversy.
The data center regulations are still a ways from becoming law. But several public forums in recent weeks and a council meeting Tuesday to review suggestions that Tucsonans made at those forums give us a sense of how the city plans to respond to significant opposition to data centers among community members — while also trying to avoid violating state law and scaring off jobs.
“I’m happy that we’re trying to build a framework that actually reflects Tucson’s values and our reality as a desert city,” Mayor Regina Romero said during a city council work session on the proposed regulations Tuesday.
The proposed zoning code amendments would regulate large data centers, defined as “a contiguous site with the same controlling ownership interest, and a gross floor area greater than 50,000 square feet.”
These large facilities would have to implement water conservation measures, follow strict noise limits, and respect setbacks of 200 feet from other commercial property and 400 feet from residential developments, among other limitations. And, perhaps most importantly, decisions about whether to locate data centers in the city would be subject to a lengthy public review process.
“We are creating guardrails that prepare ourselves to be able to institute the highest threshold that any type of development can do in the city of Tucson,” Romero said. “Which is basically coming back to mayor and council and receiving the ’yay’ or ‘nay.’ And that’s after work with the community and input from the community itself.”
The city probably can’t outright ban data centers, though some on the council and other community members have suggested that it should.
But City Attorney Roi Lusk told the council this week that state law prevents local governments from blocking certain types of development except for certain reasons and for a limited time frame. In effect, this means the city could only implement a 120-day moratorium on new data center projects.
Romero maintained that the city is not opposed to economic development or new jobs. (Although data center critics would point out that the facilities don’t actually employ that many people in the long run.)
“We’re anti-extractive development, and hyperscale data centers are extractive,” she said.
The city began this process last summer, after the council voted down a request to annex land for Project Blue, a gargantuan data center for national tech companies that would have been the city’s largest single user of water and power.
The annexation petition was central to a deal that basically involved the developers building out the city’s reclaimed water infrastructure, among other water use promises. But public outcry was swift.
Not only did critics say that, with drought and climate change, the city should not be supplying water and power to the data centers, they also panned city and (particularly) county leaders and economic development officials for making plans with the data center company out of the public view.
The developer, Beale Infrastructure, is going ahead with Project Blue on land it bought from the county.
Last August, the mayor and council assembled a group of staff and stakeholders to develop regulations for data centers. The city fielded input from an advisory committee over the winter and shared the proposed regulations with the public during a series of open meetings in February and March.
Members of the public suggested stricter setbacks and water and power requirements, requirements that data centers more clearly disclose their funding and more.
But what stood out the most is the degree to which some of their faith in the city had been broken.
“We honestly don’t know where to start,” one commenter wrote to the city. “So much needs to be corrected, fix and set up to protect Tucson. When pressed about what the committee would do with our feedback, the panel would not commit to hearing us or even truly listening. Why then have these meetings?”
The regulations will head to the city planning commission for a hearing later this month.
Working with water
The data center regulations are designed to work in tandem with standards for large water user ordinances that the city is also developing
The proposed data center regulations are technically amendments to the city’s zoning code — where things can be built, on what types of land, and under what conditions.
The large-scale water ordinance, on the other hand, imposes conservation measures and other requirements on entities that use more than 10,000 centum cubic feet (or 7.5 million gallons) of water a month.
The water ordinance is also under review by the council. First adopted in the fallout of the Project Blue saga in the summer of 2025 as an immediate measure to regulate water consumption by large industrial users, community members and stakeholders have since held a series of meetings to debate further restrictions.
But the stakeholders haven’t come to any meaningful consensus about how to further develop the ordinance.
As was communicated to the council last month, members of the working group agreed on some basic principles: The city needs to protect its surface and groundwaters and encourage the use of effluent where possible.
But the 42 community members assembled by the city to shape the water policy couldn’t agree on whether the 10,000 CCF threshold was too low or too high or whether there should be a system of tiered thresholds, nor could they agree on whether and how large users should offset their consumption of potable and reclaimed water. (Sharp minds might remember that part of the Project Blue controversy was that the facility, despite its claims of being a net-zero water user, would have to use potable water while it built out systems for using recycled water).
Some argued that any new large water use is one too many.
“Why zero? Here are a few compelling reasons: 1) we have overpumped our local groundwater for over a century, and we’re still trying to recover levels, 2) we pipe in very expensive Colorado Water that will be cut back 20-50% or more in the near future, and 3) and we are in a multi-decadal drought in a warming climate,” wrote Lisa Shipek, the executive director of the Watershed Management Group and one of the stakeholders. “Not to mention, our leaders have called upon us for decades to conserve water … The average Tucsonan has gone from using over 100 gallons per day to just over 70 gallons per day over the past thirty years. This collective effort must be respected.”
Putting it into perspective
While an individual data center can have a major impact on the water supply in specific locations, in the aggregate, data centers use a fraction of a fraction of the state’s water compared to agriculture or other forms of industry. And techies and other data center proponents have touted increasingly water-efficient cooling systems.
Still, some consumption is more than no consumption, and the Project Blue experience clearly left a bad taste in the mouth of Tucsonans: Water security and sustainability was far and away the top subject that emerged through the data center regulation stakeholder process.
“Not one drop for data,” Vivek Bharathan, a researcher and advocate with the No Desert Data Center Coalition, said during one public meeting in February. “We have a litany of reasons why — from the fact that it increases energy use at a time when we should be restricting and lowering our energy generation and consumption.”
We don’t know exactly how much water all the data centers in the state use. Individually, they range in consumption from 50,000 to 5 million gallons of water a day.
But we do know that Arizona’s drought can’t be solved by banning just one type of use. That 10,000 ccf/month threshold for large water users? That’s only about 23 acre feet a month. (A quick note: One CCF is equivalent to about 748 gallons, or about 0.002 acre feet).
No doubt, 23 acre feet is a lot of water — enough for a small neighborhood or town — but Arizona’s water problems are measured in the millions of acre feet and have been for decades.
Agriculture, of course, is the bogeyman: it uses close to 75% of the state’s water.
That’s not the responsibility of the City of Tucson, but still, as a recent Arizona State University Kyl Center report points out, there’s a fair amount of wonkiness when it comes to how people assess the hydrologic impact of large water users in their communities. Some of them, like golf courses, are frequently the target of ire and criticism. Others, less so.
“For example, golf courses, depending on size and other amenities, use between around 300 and 1,200 acre-feet per year (those with decorative lakes and ponds tend to use much more),” the report states. “Non-nuclear power generating facilities can use between 800 and 10,000 acre-feet per year. A facility in the Phoenix (Active Management Area) that produces a popular alcoholic beverage uses approximately 700 acre-feet per year, relying on wells using Type 2 non-irrigation grandfathered rights that are not subject to replenishment requirements or local water tariffs.”
In other words, your favorite craft brewery may be a less responsible water user than the hated golf course. And, depending on the age of their water rights, they may not even have to replenish water into the aquifer, as many other users in active management areas do.
But not many people are showing up to protest the water consumption of the neighborhood taphouse.
Still, as some Project Blue opponents said at the time, an acre foot conserved is still something when the state is looking at major cuts to its water supply.
“Arizona may have the very short end of the stick for (Central Arizona Project) water, especially Tucson,” one commenter wrote. “ANY extra water demands are especially important to consider as we seek water solutions to keep up with the existing people, homes and businesses.”
Getting heated: The skirmish over Tucson Electric Power’s proposed rate increase is one front in a larger election-year battle between Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and the Arizona Corporation Commission, the Arizona Capitol Times’ Reagan Priest reports. Republican Commissioner Nick Myers, who like Mayes and Commissioner Kevin Thompson is up for re-election this year, says Mayes is “using these goofy lawsuits to get her name in the public eye for campaign purposes,” while Mayes’ spokesman says Myers “should focus on fulfilling the constitutional obligations of the Commission on behalf of Arizonans so the Attorney General doesn’t have to step in and do it for them.” Mayes is a former Republican member of the Corporation Commission.
Criss-crossing the state: Gina Swoboda, one of the Republican candidates for Arizona Secretary of State, said she doesn’t want the federal government running Arizona’s elections during a wide-ranging chat with Terri Jo Neff of the Herald Review. Swoboda says she’s trying to appeal to voters of all stripes, not just Republicans. And she threw in a touch of flattery for the hometown crowd as she made her case, saying “you’re not winning a statewide election without Cochise.”
The other Hernandii lawsuit: State Rep. Consuelo Hernandez is also facing an election challenge this year in Legislative District 21, reportedly over unpaid campaign finance fines. We wrote about her sister, Alma, being challenged in neighboring Legislative District 20 yesterday. Both are being challenged on the allegation that they both have more than $1,000 in fines, which could make them ineligible to vote under state law.
Who exactly is that exemption for?: As Arizona’s housing shortage persists, Nicole Newhouse of the Arizona Housing Coalition explains in an op-ed in the Tucson Sentinel how HB2375 — which would exempt historic neighborhoods from the “middle housing” law that allows duplexes and triplexes near downtown areas — would actually turn historic neighborhoods into “enclaves for upper-income households.”
“A teacher trying to afford to live in a city she works in doesn’t show up at a city council meeting to testify about housing supply. She just moves farther away. That is who absorbs the cost of this,” Newhouse writes.
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Please take his advice: After the owner of the local comedy club died, the Bisbee City Council chambers are now the best stage in town, comedian Doug Stanhope said during Tuesday’s council meeting. Without the club, Chuckleheads, Stanhope says he’s resorting to the call to the public, Matt Hickman reports for the Herald Review.
“You get three minutes, you’ve got a crowd, you’ve got tension — this is perfect,” Stanhope said. “This is better than most open mics.”
Arizona’s Republican lawmakers are hard at work closing our borders to a scourge causing mayhem in the Grand Canyon State.
Puppies.
Or more specifically, Mexican Grey wolf pups.
Republican Sen. David Farnsworth introduced Senate Bill 1280, which would make it illegal for the Arizona Game and Fish Commission to transport Mexican Grey wolf puppies into Arizona, or spend money or public resources to transport the pups into the state.
Importing pups is a key part of federal recovery efforts for the endangered species, since Arizona’s 124 wolves are already dangerously inbred.
The bill already passed the Senate, and House Democrats had a field day with the idea in their recent caucus meeting, cracking jokes about how Republicans hate puppies. They even put together a highlights reel of them joking about it.
But the hands-down winner of the “Most Creative Opposition” award goes to Tucson’s Democratic Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, who drafted an amendment that she offered when the bill went up for Debate in the full House this week.
Needless to say, the amendment to name SB1280 the “Cruella de Vil Act” failed.