(PRISM DeKalb) -- DeKalb County Commissioner Ted Terry said Wednesday he believes a decision on zoning regulations for high-tech data centers will be delayed until early next year, as the county refines proposed rules for the massive buildings filled with energy-consuming computer servers.
The Board of Commissioners is scheduled to vote on proposed rules for data centers at its regular meeting next Tuesday. Commissioners set the date for the vote last month and specifically said there would be no public hearing, meaning there will be no comments from the public when the matter is considered.
During a community meeting on data centers held at the Porter Sanford Center on Wednesday evening, Terry urged the public to ask their commissioners for a deferral of the regulations and an extension of the existing moratorium on data centers, which expires on Tuesday.
"We do not believe we can do a permanent moratorium," he said.
Terry said he supports requiring a 500-foot buffer separating data centers from parks, trails or residential properties. He said every proposal to build or expand a data center should require a Special Land Use Permit, a separate county zoning application that would require meetings of Community Councils and the county's Planning Commission, before a vote by the full DeKalb County Commission.
"I have been consistently advocating for the regulations to be stronger to ensure our DeKalb County is protected and well-invested," Terry said in an email before the community meeting.
At the Board of Commissioners' November 20 zoning meeting, county planners said they planned to make further changes to the proposed zoning regulations that were presented that evening.
However, no updated draft of the rules has been published by the county's Department of Planning & Sustainability.
A document posted Tuesday on the planning department web site, purporting to be what commissioners will consider next week, contains a one-month-old staff analysis and a one-month-old draft of the text amendment -- the same materials that were presented to the Board of Commissioners on November 20.
Construction of data centers has grown rapidly in Georgia since 2018, when the General Assembly granted an exemption from sales taxes for the equipment in data centers. An attempt to repeal that exemption failed last year.
The Data Center Coalition, a national association representing major technology firms and the data center industry, seeks the removal of barriers to faster data-center construction and operations.
"Data centers are the digital foundation of our economy—powering everything from AI development and financial services to defense operations and secure communications. Accelerating the permitting process is critical to keeping pace with skyrocketing demand," the industry group says.
