LOGAN – For local residents who missed an Oct. 5 open house on proposed data center guidelines in Logan, Mayor Mark Anderson has provided an online update to address any lingering questions arising from that event.
In his monthly e-mail newsletter entitled “Let’s Talk Logan,” Anderson called that event “well-attended,” drawing extensive community feedback from residents both in favor of and opposed to potential data center development within city limits.
At that event and a previous city gathering, residents raised a variety of concerns about how the development of data centers would impact neighborhoods, including issues about local power demands, water usage, noise pollution and land use, according to the mayor.
The Oct. 5 open house was the second such gathering of city residents and city officials since the Logan Municipal Council declared a 180-moratorium on data center development on June 30.
That intent of that delay, according to Council Chair Mike Johnson, was to give the city’s staff adequate time to develop regulations “ … to protect the public health, safety and welfare of Logan City by preventing potentially incompatible or inadequately regulated development during the period of study and ordinance preparation.”
While acknowledging that no developer had yet approached Logan with proposed plans for any data center within the city’s limits, city officials nevertheless favored the six-month moratorium in an abundance of caution after the well-known disastrous results of a failure to take such preventive measures in nearby Box Elder County last May.
The first of the city’s open house meetings on data center guidelines was held on Aug. 4, when nearly 100 concerned residents packed the city conference room to voice their largely negative opinions to Russ Holley, the city’s director of community development.
Based on that public input, city officials drafted proposed data center guidelines that were explained during the Oct. 5 open house.
Anderson reports that the proposed standards for small-scale data center within city limits would include restricting the development of such facilities to the city’s industrial zones; maintaining a minimum 1,000-foot buffer from any residential zones; limiting the development’s size to no more than 8 acres; and capping the size of the proposed data center to a maximum of 100,000 square feet.
In his Oct. 19 newsletter, Anderson explained that the city’s staff is now preparing a formal code amendment that will be submitted to the Logan Planning Commission prior to the end of October.
“Depending on whether the Planning Commission or the Municipal Council decide to continue discussions, the proposed package of data center guidelines will likely be voted on in January of next year,” he added.
Additional information about the data center guidelines will be posted on the city’s website along with official legal notices of exact dates for public hearings.