ORO VALLEY, Arizona — The Oro Valley Town Council voted 7-0 on Wednesday evening, October 28, to eliminate standalone data centers from the town's zoning districts, going further than its own planning commission had recommended a day earlier and setting aside, for now, any permit-based path for the facilities. The vote adopted Ordinance No. (O)26-14 in a special session that lasted about 10 minutes and adjourned at 6:10 p.m., with all seven council members present and Mayor Joseph C. Winfield presiding.

Source: Tucson Daily Brief

The ordinance amends Chapters 23, 25, 27 and 31 and other applicable chapters of the Oro Valley zoning code. Vice Mayor Melanie Barrett made the motion after Winfield turned the floor over to her. The motion adopted the code amendment that eliminates standalone data centers, while stating that “ancillary uses shall still be allowed, which was the intent of the existing code” — meaning a data facility that is a secondary part of another permitted use is treated differently from a standalone data-center building. The council did not discuss the motion before voting.

Further than the planning commission wanted to go

Only a day earlier, on Tuesday, October 27, the town's Planning and Zoning Commission had voted 4-1 to recommend a narrower approach: ban data centers using 20 megawatts of power or more, and review smaller data centers case by case through a conditional use permit. Commissioner Sandra Wilson cast the lone no vote. The commission had also toughened the staff proposal — requiring operators to report energy and water use every year with no end date, instead of five years of reporting and then on request, and shortening the town's planned review of the code from every five years to every two years.

The council instead chose the full elimination of standalone data centers and deferred the permit question. According to a staff report by Bayer Vella, the town's planning firm, cited by Tucson Local Media before the vote, Oro Valley was set to become the only jurisdiction among 13 researched in Arizona to prohibit large-scale data centers.

Source: Tucson Local Media (Explorer News)

A three-week sprint, driven by a zoning loophole

Winfield said he and Barrett first brought the issue to the council about three weeks earlier. At the council's October 7 meeting, Barrett — who initiated the discussion — said she had realised the town code may contain loopholes that “could allow for data centers in multiple of our zoning districts,” and that there were “people potentially interested in moving forward on some of those.” Her October 7 motion, seconded by Council Member Mary Murphy, directed staff to prepare an amendment making clear that data centers are not allowed by right in any zoning district, set a special planning session on or before October 27 and a special council session on October 28, and called for a moratorium, to the degree possible, while the work was done. It passed 6-0 with one abstention.

Winfield described the council's approach on Wednesday as a deliberate two-step process: first, a ban on standalone data centers now; then a more thorough analysis of the topic. The motion adopted on October 28 says future councils may choose to study power generation, water usage, noise, environmental impact and the overall benefit to residents, to decide whether a conditional use permit or another process should eventually be adopted. The mayor praised staff for producing the information quickly, but said the work needs to continue.

Next door, Pima County is writing rules instead of a ban

The same Wednesday, the Pima County Planning and Zoning Commission met to hear the latest amendments to a proposed county data-center ordinance — and took the opposite direction. Development Services Deputy Director Thomas Drzazgowski told the commission a ban is “not on the table” for the county, KOLD News 13 reported. According to KGUN 9, more than 86% of the nearly 2,000 people surveyed by the county worried that data centers would use too much water. The county rules are being written during the Board of Supervisors' temporary hold on new data-center permits, and they would not affect the already-approved Project Blue data center.

Source: Tucson Daily Brief (Oct 29), citing KOLD News 13 and KGUN 9

Water is the thread running through the whole debate. Oro Valley sits in the Sonoran Desert north of Tucson, in a region living with Colorado River cuts and tight Central Arizona Project allocations, and data centers can use large amounts of electricity and — depending on how they are cooled — large amounts of water. That is why the commission's reporting requirements, and the council's promised study of power and water use, matter to residents even though no standalone project can now be built by right.

For Arizona's small but growing Punjabi community — including truckers who run Interstate 10 through Tucson and families settled across Pima County — the decision is a reminder that the data-center boom reshaping warehouse corridors across the Southwest will now be decided town by town in the Tucson area: a full ban inside Oro Valley's limits, and a permit-and-rules regime still being drafted for the unincorporated county around it.