Perris Moves Forward With Citywide Ban On Data Centers

The Perris City Council Tuesday voted unanimously to move forward with a citywide ban on data centers, though it will still have to come back to the council for final approval at a later date.

“This is going back to the planning commission, then from there, they can’t approve this, [but they’re] going to make a recommendation to come back here,” Mayor Michael Vargas said at the June 9 meeting. “You’ve got five votes already here, so this is a simple fix if [I’m looking] at it right.”

Prior to making the motion, the council heard from Principal Planner Rafael Garcia, who said the city’s current code neither defined nor regulated data centers. 

Garcia said there were no large-scale data center facilities, typically defined at being at least 250,000 square feet, in Riverside County. These facilities, he said, would typically be developed to support cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and streaming services. What the county does have, Garcia said, were smaller facilities, generally less than 40,000 square feet to support backup data and related services.

In comparing them to warehouses, of which the city of Perris has many, Garcia said they often visually resemble large-scale warehouses, just without the truck loading docks and parking lots. But it was in the operation that the differences really became clear.

“The noise that comes from data centers is constant,” he said. “There’s typically, oftentimes, a 24-hour operation to power a lot of the equipment that’s on site, and you’ll oftentimes hear, especially at nights when a lot of the ambient noise dies down, a mechanical hum.”

Data centers also require much more water, between 200,000 and millions of gallons per day, and electricity, between 20MW to 100MW. For comparison, Garcia said the average house uses between 150 to 200 gallons of water per day, and it takes about 1MW of electricity to power between 750 and 1,000 homes.

“Southern California Edison (SCE) indicated that the power could be provided to one of these facilities, however, a lot of this would be subject to an early partnership in order to ensure that the electrical grid is upgraded to properly accommodate the size of the facility,” he said. “[Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD)] also indicated that water for the cooling system associated with the centers could potentially be provided, however, early consultation is recommended, and that a recycling water system would be required as part of one of these systems.”

Garcia added that data centers created fewer jobs than warehouses, though the jobs they did create were higher paying, and would also potentially bring a higher property tax value due to the higher value of the equipment on site.

He provided the council with four potential options for moving forward: prohibit data centers citywide, allow data centers in industrial zones with a conditional use permit that allows the city to evaluate proposals on a project-by-project basis, allow data centers by right in industrial zones subject to existing warehouse development standards or take a hybrid approach that would allow them in industrial zones with a conditional use permit while also applying existing warehouse development standards.

Immediately following Garcia’s presentation, Councilmember Marisela Nava made the motion to move forward with a citywide ban and directed city staff to take the item to the planning commission for consideration to an eruption of cheers from those in the council chambers.

With a motion, and a second by Councilmember David Starr Rabb, Vargas asked if the community still wanted to speak on the issue. In total, 27 people spoke at the meeting, all in support of a citywide ban.

“It’s not my position that data centers are unnecessary; they will serve a purpose and will need to be built somewhere,” Perris resident Elizabeth Villalobos said. “My concern is they do not need to be built in Perris.”

Villalobos, and a number of other speakers, noted that Perris has become a critical logistics hub for Southern California due to its volume of warehouses, the negative impacts of which residents bear the brunt.

“Areas in the other parts of the country were used as guinea pigs when it came to data centers, and we’re seeing a lot of those effects,” Karla Cervantes, Perris resident and founder of the Mead Valley Coalition for Clean Air, said. “We were used as guinea pigs too, with the warehouses, and now we know those suck for our health. Data centers are even worse.”

The discussion was brought to the council at the request of Rabb, who in January asked city staff to research the impacts of data centers and evaluate whether they should be allowed in the city.

After the motion passed, Rabb, who attended the meeting virtually, thanked all of the residents for coming out and sharing their thoughts with the council. His sentiments were echoed by the rest of the council members, who also encouraged the community to continue showing up, organizing and making their voices heard.

“You guys should all be very proud of yourselves,” Councilmember Elizabeth Vallejo said. “Please keep on fighting the good fight, because we can beat these billionaires. So let’s do it.”

In other council action: The Perris City Council voted unanimously to extend the contract for ShotSpotter, an acoustic gunshot detection system, for one year with a request for additional information about the police technology’s effectiveness in the city.