AURORA | Aurora lawmakers on Monday were divided on some restrictions on future data centers built in the city but unanimously agreed to limit the water-intensive use of evaporative-cooling at the controversial centers.

City lawmakers have struggled to agree on what some of the threats of the nationally and locally controversial computing centers could be to neighboring communities, but they agreed Monday the potentially millions of gallons of water large centers could use to cool computer components is a risk to the city’s water supply.

City officials approved a resolution on Aug. 10 directing the city manager to create new data center regulations within about a month, including a prohibition on evaporative cooling and a requirement for setbacks and landscape buffers for data centers in certain areas. 

Lawmakers on Monday voted 10-0 to prohibit data centers, or any industry, from using large-scale evaporative cooling in their design.

When it came, however, to regulating the distance between future data centers and nearby residential homes, the council was split.

Currently, city officials say there are five data centers operating in the city. Restrictions would only apply to other, currently un-approved projects. The QTS data center project near I-70 and E-470 is touted as the largest data center project in the state.

Another one of those unstarted projects could be targeted by the city’s developing legislation. While city lawmakers discussed potential residential set-backs in a study session Monday night, residents of Trident at Windler data center project, possibly involving a 1.5 million square foot operation on 143 acres in northeast Aurora, flooded the later city council meeting to demand restrictions.

Residents of the Reserve at Green Valley Ranch senior living complex near the proposed site of the Trident project said they were never notified that the project was under consideration.

“For those of us living in a 55-plus community, which is literally just steps from the proposed site of the data center, quality of life matters,” resident Jacqueline Peterson told city council members. “I am especially concerned about the continuous noise from cooling equipment, air pollution, light pollution, contaminated water, diesel exhaust, and emissions from backup generators, increased demands on our water and electrical systems, reduction in property value, and long-term effects of placing a large industrial-type facility so close to an established residential community.”

It was unclear Monday night where the project is in the city’s development pipeline, and whether it would be subject to developing restrictions. In August, the council narrowly opposed a moratorium on new data centers while regulations are created and implemented. 

During the study session Monday night, the council was essentially split between progressive and conservative factions as to whether special setbacks should be imposed on future data centers, different from other industrial or commercial uses abutting residential communities.

Council members and staff slogged through trying to decide where setback perimeters would begin and end, measured from buildings, outside features, such as noisy generators, parking lots or other property lines. Lawmakers agreed to offer an arbitrary 350-feet setback temporarily and return to discuss future mandated setbacks at a future meeting.

As it stands, lawmakers agreed that setbacks be measured from the closest permanent building or critical equipment improvements, rather than parking areas, to the residential zone district. Dedicated public right-of-way and dedicated open space may count toward the setback distance.

Lawmakers disagreed on how the city should determine which data centers are subject to the most extreme future setbacks from residential areas based on data center size. Because of federal regulations, data centers do not have to make public exact usage of megawatts as a matter of anti-trust regulations. City officials are proposing a simple system of grading data centers as either those that use more than or less than 25 megawatts of electricity to operate.

Councilmember Curtis Gardner said that could be problematic because there is no direct correlation between building size and a data center operation and its above or below power usage.

City officials previously said there are five Aurora data centers in the development process and nine already established. Some regulations for data centers are already in place. 

Data centers are currently estricted in location to areas that are zoned industrial, airport districts or mixed-use office-industrial. Data centers can be built in certain mixed-use zoning restrictions under the conditional use process, which has additional requirements for public hearings and city council gets the ultimate decision. 

Water use for data centers is governed by the city’s large water user guide. For noise pollution, the city’s unified development code restricts the noise level at data centers to the same level as other businesses, with different allowances based on zoning and time.

City regulation of the centers comes as the nation grapples with controversy over federal regulations of Artificial Intelligence and the industry exploding around it. Many data centers support AI projects. But many data centers provide servers and other computer needs for applications as mundane as banking, streetlight operations or just data storage.

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