Local leaders from Summit County attended a statewide conference in June regarding data center regulation.
KUER reports that most of Utah’s local laws — except in Nephi — are silent on the large computing campuses that have proven controversial around the country.
But Summit County is in a good position to put new rules on the books, planners say, since it’s in the middle of revising both the Snyderville Basin and eastside general plans.
Principal planner Ray Milliner says staff have added data centers into the draft eastern Summit County general plan. Planning commissioners may vote on it later this year.
“If you probably bolster that up in the general plan some more, and then [we can] think about doing some code amendments,” Milliner told the Eastern Summit County Planning Commission July 2.
General plans are usually advisory, but they guide county code — which is legally binding.
A draft of the general plan chapter on open space “address[es] community concerns related to data centers,” according to a county staff report.
Draft policy 7.11 would “discourage large-scale industrial or utility-intensive land uses in areas identified for open space preservation,” including agricultural lands.
Commissioner David Darcey attended the Utah Association of Counties’ June 24 conference on data center regulation. He said he was surprised by how many counties would welcome those developments.
“If there's a lot of counties in the state that want these things, [that] tells me that coming to us for one — and having to go through the gauntlet of Summit County as opposed to somebody that wants one — probably would deter a lot of people,” Milliner said. “But you never know.”
Land in Summit County is expensive too, but Darcey said that’s not a deterrent.
“Project developers did confirm that land cost is so insignificant compared to the rest of the personal property, the computers and the power generation cost,” he said. “Even though they are putting them out in some pretty rural areas of Iron County or Box Elder County.”
Darcey is a former market researcher for a natural gas pipeline provider and has previously said that Summit County, like Box Elder, has that kind of infrastructure.
Using it to power data centers might bring construction jobs to Summit County — but Darcey said developers at UAC’s conference didn’t give “a definitive answer” about how many long-term jobs those campuses actually create.
