Henderson City Council rejects data center moratorium

The Henderson City Council rejected a proposal Tuesday to implement a six month moratorium on new data center applications, instead choosing to change the city’s development agreement process.

The vote followed nearly two hours of public comment from community members who largely urged the council to move forward with a proposal introduced by Henderson Mayor Michelle Romero to implement a 180-day pause on applications for new data centers. 

Council members directed staff to develop a framework that could be used to update development agreement standards for data center applicants. Those standards would address water consumption, electrical demand, noise impact, and a distance limitation from residents. 

Romero agreed an update to the city’s development agreement process would allow the city council to evaluate data center applications “on a case-by-case basis” using a framework based on the best available information. 

“A development agreement proactively gives us the ability to change the codes now and adaptively update them as technology changes,” Romero said. “We may or may not ever get an application, but at least we would be ready with a framework that we can rely on.”

Henderson Community Development and Services Department Director Eddie Dichter said the City of Henderson has not received any new data center applications, but added that city staff has been working on revising the city’s development agreement process since April with data centers in mind. Currently a Google data center is the only one in the city.

“A moratorium is temporary to some degree, they are only defensible for up to a certain point, usually that’s up to 12 to 18 months before you have to make some permanent changes to your code,” said city attorney Nicholas Vaskov.

City officials said the new framework would include public input across two public meetings.

Across Nevada the rapid rollout of data centers has pushed local municipal governments to address the growth of data centers in the state. 

In June, the Reno City Council voted to implement a temporary data center moratorium before adopting new regulations sometime next year. A month before, the Nye County Water District Governing Board unanimously approved an emergency order requesting that the Nye County Commission place a moratorium on data centers in the Pahrump Valley.

In May, the Boulder City planning commission voted unanimously not to recommend the construction of Townsite Solar 2 LLC’s data center on city-owned land. The developer responded by moving to get the construction of the data center approved on federal land.

The Boulder City Council followed by unanimously voting to appeal the approval of the first data center on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land.