Another Central Kentucky city is taking steps to prevent the construction of data centers within its corporate limits.
The Georgetown City Council voted unanimously Monday to have its planning and zoning commission, along with legal counsel, draft regulations for a proposed ban.
Council members said Georgetown isn’t equipped for large-scale sites, which are known to draw huge amounts of resources.
“The city of Georgetown can't handle a data center,” council member Karen Tingle Sames, who made the motion, said. “We don't have the water for it. We don't have the land for it. We don't have the infrastructure for it. We don't know at this point in time how the sound, the vibrations and the things that come from it. There's not enough information out there yet to tell us if it's a positive or a negative.”
One council member, Kim Menke, voiced concerns an outright ban would have negative implications for other facilities that have small data storage onsite. He motioned for a citywide moratorium instead, but the council voted the measure down.
“There are small data centers that are operated within facilities, for that facility. If you do an outright ban, you're banning everything,” he said. “If you had an insurance complex that is processing claims, and they needed a small data center to be able to manage that data, you wouldn't be able to have that, and there'd be lots of jobs with that, because it's a processing center.”
Other council members said the proposal would define and focus on hyperscale data centers to alleviate the concern.
They also said the vote sends a message to community members.
“We don't want these hyper-things in here,” Sames said. “You don't want them, and we don't want them. And so we're making clarification that, from the council, they know that we don't want them.”
There are currently no data center proposals publicly linked to Georgetown or Scott County. But the county enacted a data center moratorium that runs through March to allow time for officials to produce regulations.
Central Kentucky communities like Woodford County, and cities like Versailles and Midway, have also enacted their own data center bans.
