An Alabama City Recommends Changing Its Laws to Accommodate One of the Country’s Largest Proposed Data Centers - Inside Climate News
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Despite overwhelming public opposition, officials in Bessemer voted to recommend changes to city zoning ordinances to allow the massive development. Its operation could strain the state’s water and power supplies and leave an already imperiled fish species at risk of extinction.

Despite universal opposition by the dozens of residents present at the meeting, commissioners voted to recommend changes to the city’s zoning laws to allow data centers in areas zoned for light industrial use and to rezone a 700-acre property from agricultural to light industrial to accommodate the construction of a hyperscale data center.

Now, one of the largest proposed data centers in the country is one step closer to construction. “This was only a damn formality,” resident Ron Morgan yelled out after the measures passed. “Y’all have already made up your minds.”

At full buildout, the proposed data center would lead to clear-cutting of more than 100 acres of forested land and have 18 server-farm buildings that would each be larger than the average Walmart Supercenter. Projections suggest the site would consume 10 times the energy used by all residences in nearby Birmingham and more than five times the entire state’s residential consumption of water.

Scientists have also said that the project’s construction and operation could put a newly discovered fish species—the Birmingham darter—at risk of extinction because of its potential impact on waterways. “This would nuke this creek,” Thomas Near, a Yale University biologist, has said of the project.

Resident after resident, each limited to three minutes, made their way to the podium in the packed chamber inside Bessemer City Hall on Tuesday evening to oppose both the zoning law change and the development plan itself. Only a representative of the developer, Logistic Land Investments LLC, and its law firm, Evans & Evans, spoke in favor of the plan, arguing that there would be virtually no impacts on residents or the environment.

After the meeting, the development representative, Brad Kaaber, initially refused to spell his name for a reporter. “I’d really rather you not use my name at all,” Kaaber said, though he soon relented.

The planning and zoning commission’s recommended approval will now be sent to Bessemer City Council, which will ultimately decide the fate of the $14.5 billion project.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
    8·
    20 hours ago

    I feel like at some point people will get fed up with not being heard when they use their words, and they’ll use something else.

    Hopefully non violent protest first, but I’m not going to be mad if whatever equipment is used to clear cut the woods gets broken.