Daily Herald opinion: ‘The proper guardrails’: Aurora action raises awareness of growing concerns about data center regulation

In many ways, data centers in recent years held the promise of being something like “the next big thing” for community property tax revenue. At least it felt that way at first.

While they can take up a lot of space, they don’t come with the baggage of other commercial or residential developments, which can place new demands on police and fire resources, parks and schools, and they offer the potential for hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, in annual tax revenues.

But as the projects begin to proliferate in the suburbs, officials are recognizing that the centers may not be the inexpensive cash cows they originally seemed to be. Most apparent, they impose massive pressures on electrical grids that not only can strain local capacity but also can lead to increases in local rates. In addition, they can require millions of gallons of water to cool vast amounts of equipment, and their cooling fans and backup generators create noise pollution throughout entire neighborhoods.

With the rapid advance of power-hungry artificial intelligence systems, the centers will obviously make up a fundamental component of the technological infrastructure, but it’s also obvious — as the Aurora City Council acknowledged in action last month — that they are going to need more careful watching, and local regulation, than may have seem apparent at the outset.

Aurora’s decision last month to enact a temporary moratorium on zoning for data centers and warehouses demonstrates the kind of cautious balancing act facing local communities. The temporary pause clearly doesn’t suggest any animus toward the facilities, but it does provide an opportunity to study their impact more carefully and make sure they are managed wisely.

As Mayor John Laesch said in our Katlyn Smith’s report last week on the action, “It's just trying to give us time to make sure that we have the proper guardrails in place.”

Smith’s report also noted intensive efforts under way in Naperville to understand and manage the impacts of data center proposals, and it highlighted a particularly significant issue that extends beyond any single town — the need for consistent, if not coordinated, approaches to approval of data center operations.

City Councilman Ian Holzhauer mentioned the prospect of “across the board” standards so individual towns acting “in a silo” weren’t creating a patchwork of regulations. In particular, he cited the risk of “a race to the bottom, where the developer just chooses the community with the lowest environmental standards, the community with the cheapest whatever, because that's going to affect all of us.”

Such races to the bottom have been all too familiar in other ways as our suburbs have developed — witness the town shopping that once was commonplace among developers looking for locations for shopping centers. As data centers deepen their foothold in the suburbs, community leaders will be wise to take notice of actions like that in Aurora, both to make sure their own regulations are appropriate and to work with neighboring towns to avoid costly developments that could result in problems for everyone.