The city of Charlotte appears to be approaching a complete freeze on data center development.
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Charlotte City Council members held a public hearing Monday to solicit community input before voting to extend the city’s 150-day data center moratorium to 11 months. Several council members expressed support for the proposal.
“I think we need time, and it’s clear,” Councilman Ed Driggs said at the hearing. “Right now we don’t have a policy, and we’re starting from scratch, so we have to give it time.”
The moratorium is scheduled to expire on November 5, a vote on whether to extend it will take place on October 26.
Charlotte imposed a moratorium in June after months of local protests against the data center, with opponents citing significant water and electricity use, noise and light pollution, and potential community displacement as the main reasons for protesting the construction.
“With the demand for artificial intelligence, we are seeing a drastic increase in the demand for data centers, and we need to provide safeguards to protect our communities, our pocketbooks and our quality of life,” Councilor Dimple Ajmera said at the hearing.
The catalyst for heavy opposition in the area was the American Tower Corp. proposal. for a 40K SF facility near Reedy Creek Nature Preserve in East Charlotte, which is currently on hiatus.
Cristopher Scalise, co-founder of Stop East Charlotte Data Center, said he hopes the council will “do the right thing and move on at least another year” because there is still “part, an enormous amount of work” left. “We are not ready to move forward as a city on this issue,” he said at the hearing.
Data center moratoriums have spread rapidly in North Carolina over the past few months, with Raleigh implementing one last week. There are 367 active moratoriums nationwide. North Carolina has become a hot spot for development, with more than 90 data centers, 40 in Charlotte, according to the Data Center Map.
When the moratorium begins this summer, Driggs said Bisnow that the extension for one year will better prepare the city for future data center development.
Local union members who attended Monday’s hearing said the moratorium should end next month as planned, because construction workers need jobs and should be protected by local regulations. But board members indicated that North Carolina is not a pro-union state and will proceed with the vote on the extension as scheduled.
Councilman JD Mazuera Arias said more needs to be done to protect against the negative impacts of the data center and emphasized the potential for the city to work together to lobby the state legislature.
“There is real great potential here for coalition building, for advocates for more than what we can do now and what we are limited to do as a local government based on state statute,” he said.
In the meantime, he said, “I support the extension of the moratorium, and I look forward to voting when the time comes.”