The Lake Elsinore City Council last week voted unanimously to extend its urgency moratorium on data centers by 10 months and 15 days, for a total of one year, to allow staff time to consider potential zoning regulations or development standards for any potential future data centers in the city.
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“Since the adoption of the urgency ordinance, city staff has been reviewing the zoning code as well as other current municipal code provisions that would regulate potential data centers within the city,” said Damaris Abraham, the city’s community development director, at the October 6 special meeting. “We have also researched what other California cities have utilized to effectively mitigate impact of data centers on infrastructure, utilities and public health and safety.”
Abraham said city staff had also been working with the city attorney to ensure any future regulation would be legally defensible and consistent with state law.
The city initially adopted an urgency ordinance imposing a temporary 45-day moratorium on the approval of any data center development at its August 25 meeting, in response to growing concerns related to water, energy, air quality and land use impacts as well as fire, emergency response and public safety.
At that meeting, City Attorney Barbara Leibold said the item was brought forward by Councilmember Steve Manos following multiple meetings where community members brought forward their concerns.
“The impacts of these data centers have been reported across the country and in California as increased demand and additional entitlement applications are experienced throughout the country many times,” Leibold said. “And, as is the case in our city, these applications come for a use that our zoning code doesn’t quite provide for. In other words, the uses [have] outpaced the updates in our zoning code.”
Prior to enacting the moratorium, the council heard from eight speakers, all of whom supported the motion.
“We do not need to have a data center that can threaten our communities with fire, with pollution and especially the high use of water that they all seem to use,” Jeanie Corral, a Lake Elsinore resident, said. “I hope that we can prevent this from being a popularized situation, because this is more than just about information. This is about quality of life, property values and protecting our town.”
Manos, at that August meeting, also noted the developer of the proposed Elsinore Heights Industrial Project, which prompted concern from the community, had officially requested to withdraw the optional data center component from its project.
“It’s public record that they have formally removed that as an option and they’re working with planning staff to go ahead and update their application to go ahead and have that removed,” he said. “Which means there are currently no data centers under application at the city and there won’t be for at least the next 45 days [and] I suspect [it] could be even longer than that.”
Lake Elsinore is just one of a handful of cities in the county taking action on data centers. Palm Springs, Indio and Desert Hot Springs all have moratoriums in place. Coachella has permanently banned the land use, and Perris has directed city staff to draft a permanent ban.
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The key question for local governments is not simply whether to approve or restrict data centers. It is what evidence should be required before relying on a project’s claims about electricity demand, water use, infrastructure costs, jobs and tax revenue.
Projected benefits, contractual commitments and demonstrated outcomes are different things. Infrastructure assumptions can also change between initial approval, construction and operation.
A sound review framework should identify what is documented, which infrastructure dependencies remain unresolved, who bears the downside if assumptions fail, and what material changes should trigger reassessment.
That is the focus of Persistence Analytics Group’s infrastructure-assumption verification work: evidence before reliance, revalidation after material change.