Indio Takes Another Step Toward Permanent Data Center Ban

The Indio City Council last week voted unanimously to extend its temporary moratorium on data centers for 90 days and directed city staff to draft an ordinance permanently banning the use in all zones.

“We are on such a positive trajectory with our community and in every aspect, I think,” Mayor Elaine Holmes said at the July 15 meeting. “A data center and the resources it uses, the square footage it would take up, there are just so many things that I think [it] just does not fit within the mindset and footprint of our community.”

The decision came following a recommendation by the city’s planning commission for a total ban on data centers, which was also supported by the city’s sustainability commission. 

Community Development Director Brian Halvorson told the council that his department had not yet received any applications for data centers.

“But obviously this is a community concern, and that’s why we have a moratorium,” he added.

The council’s current moratorium defines a data center as any facility used primarily or substantially for computer servers, data storage devices, networking equipment, cloud computing, colocation services, artificial intelligence model training, blockchain operations, cryptocurrency mining or other similar high-intensity computing activities.

Exempted from the ordinance are customary server or IT rooms that are incidental to the primary function of a business, ordinary office, retail, school, hospital or industrial computer equipment used solely to support on-site operations, public safety and emergency communications facilities and facilities that provide essential communications or utility services to the public.

“I do acknowledge the potential benefits in construction jobs and tax revenues, but I don’t think that these outweigh the risks of drastically increasing our consumption of water and fossil fuels, potentially contaminating our air and our water supplies and potentially exposing our population and wildlife to the impacts of constant low-frequency noise and other environmental impacts and currently unknown impacts,” Councilmember Oscar Ortiz said. “So I urge us to be conscious of what our future needs may be, as well as the current uncertainty of water in the western region of the United States.”

Ortiz, who made the motion to move down the path to a complete ban, added that the council could always revisit its decision if circumstances changed and “we see that these issues are properly mitigated with the advancement of these technologies.”

The council’s push for the ban started back in May when the council directed city staff to work with the planning commission to consider new policies, including potential bans, for data centers and other developments that would require high water, energy or land use.

The following month, the council adopted an urgency ordinance for a 45-day moratorium on data centers to allow the city time to study, consider and potentially adopt new policies regulating whether, where and under what conditions data centers and similar high-intensity computing uses should be allowed in the city. The council, at that time, also directed staff to include options to extend the moratorium and review alternatives for a permanent ban on data centers in the city.

As reported by The Indio Post, the city’s initial action followed a series of tense Coachella City Council meetings in which hundreds of residents came out in opposition of a municipal utility agreement with Stronghold Power Systems Inc. for the Coachella Valley Technology Campus.

Six of the seven people who spoke at the July 15 meeting said they supported a full ban, including Indio resident Savannah Rogers.

“I know a lot of people that are pro-AI and a lot of people that are anti-AI, but I don’t know anyone that’s pro data center here,” Rogers said. “Respectfully, I don’t think anyone would want a big, ugly, loud building in their beautiful valley.”

The final speaker, a representative for the Western Steel Council and the California Construction Labor Management Trust, said the council should modify its approach to data centers.

“I’d like to respectfully say that I think the council perhaps should take a regulatory approach as opposed to a moratorium approach,” Cherie Cabral, who lives in the Bay Area, said. “I think that enacting a unilateral moratorium effectively says that no facility has merit, and I don’t think that’s the case.”

With the urgency ordinance extended through October 16, XX said the goal was to submit a draft ordinance banning data centers to the planning commission in August. 

The commission’s recommendation would then be brought in front of the full council in September with the ban set to go into effect in late October or early November.

“If for some reason any of that schedule slipped, we would likely bring a further extension of the moratorium just to cover that small gap in time,” he said. “And that would likely come [as part of] the actual prohibition itself.”