After a months-long cooperative effort to get the will of citizens into something enforceable under state law, the City of Lubbock took its first steps in pausing the development of large-scale data centers.
In its Tuesday meeting, Lubbock’s city council initiated the procedure to adopt a 90-day moratorium “on the acceptance, processing, and/or approval of any applications for rezoning, building permits, or any request for annexation related to the development of large-scale data centers.”
A group of Lubbock citizens, acting under the name “Save Lubbock,” had petitioned for an 18-month moratorium to be put before council; that ordinance failed in yesterday’s meeting.
Save Lubbock’s lead organizer, Stephen Sanders said he does not plan on moving to put the extended moratorium on the ballot before voters.
“We still got the result that we needed,” he said. “Which is enforceable. So we got everything we needed and we look forward to continuing the work.”
During citizen comment, Sanders thanked the council, and Lubbock Mayor Mark McBrayer in particular, for working with him to find this new direction, something McBrayer also brought up before casting his vote.
“I commend this group for doing the work of getting signatures on a petition. That's hard to do to bring that issue forward,” McBrayer said. “Of course, I believe we were actually focusing on a lot of those issues in our own way during that same time period. But Lubbock is kind of unique, and the ability to sit down and talk with one another and listen to one another and to try to reach an agreement like this.”
The 18-month moratorium did not go to an official vote from the council, as it failed without a second.
Before the moratorium can be officially declared, it needs to go through two public hearings and is expected to take another 90 days before officially kicking in.
That timeline – and its relation to the upcoming legislative session – was concerning for District 6 councilman Tim Collins, one of two who voted against initiating the moratorium procedure.
“I feel like over the course of now to the end of May, the end of the session, we are going to receive a great deal of information. A great deal of information about power requirements, a great deal of information about water needs, a great deal of information about what the state is going to require data centers to do,” he explained. “But we have one tool. We have only one tool, and that's this moratorium. And if we exercise that tool today, come June, we're out. We're out of the game. Our community can no longer say we want to add a moratorium.”
Collins said he is in favor of a moratorium, but with recent actions from Texas Governor Greg Abbott already pausing certain data center connections and permitting, Collins wants the city to wait until after the legislative session to take action.
In August, Gov. Abbott announced a moratorium on new data centers connecting to the state’s electric grid, pending an audit. And on Sept. 21, he ordered the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop issuing new permits for the developments.
The other vote against the 90-day moratorium, District 4 city councilman Tim Green, cited the potential economic benefit of new development like data centers.
“If a multi-million or multi-billion-dollar data center represents potentially billions of dollars of new taxable investment coming in this community, that's a transformational opportunity,” Green said. “[With] a data center, we could build Lake Seven with all of our drinking water. We could invest and pay police, fire, streets, and infrastructure. Using economic growth to reduce the pressure on our existing taxpayers, and that's what I want to do.”
Green said the council would not approve a data center project that threatens the city’s resources and that they could set standards without declaring a complete pause.
District 5 councilwoman Dr. Jennifer Wilson, who voted in favor of the moratorium, said it will give the city the time it needs to research, create, and establish adequate standards.
“That way, in the future, after we see what our state legislature does, and potentially a project might come to Lubbock, we can evaluate to see if it is the right project for Lubbock and our citizens here. I do want Lubbock to be open to business, but not at any cost,” she said.
Speaking to the concerns of the council, McBrayer said that while a moratorium is a “finite tool,” he believes that by the time the moratorium has ended, the state legislature will have provided guidance and research that allows the city to move forward properly.
And with the orders from the governor regarding new data centers, he also does not believe a moratorium will limit the city’s growth opportunities.
“No one's coming to Lubbock in the next year anyway with a data center. They would have to have been approved already in that batch to get into Lubbock,” McBrayer said. “So we're not saying no to any data center really that I know of that would be out there wanting to come to Lubbock. But we are staking a position that we want to wait for our legislators at the state level to give some direction, to give some further guidance in areas that only they can give guidance.”
The initiation of the moratorium procedure passed 5-2. The moratorium will require two public hearings before it can be officially instated. After it has taken effect, it can be extended for another 90 days.