The Economic Development Objectives Committee met Feb. 18 to tweak draft data center regulations introduced earlier in the month. The regulations would apply to any new developments in unincorporated Jefferson County.
This meeting was the second held to review regulations drafted by the County Services department, based on recommendations the committee made the past two months.
Councilman Bob Tullock (District 7, House Springs) said the committee may meet at 3 p.m. March 6, before the Planning and Zoning Commission holds a public hearing on March 12. Tullock said the meetings’ dates and times will be posted on jeffcomo.org when they are finalized.
Both meetings will be held at the Ken Waller Memorial Building, formerly called the Jefferson County Administration Center, 729 Maple St., in Hillsboro.
County Services Director Mitch Bair said the County Counselor’s office has reviewed the draft regulations and found little that needed to be changed in “the meat” of the regulations. He said the counselors are still reviewing the community benefits agreement (CBA) section of the draft and should have recommendations at the March 6 meeting. A CBA can include legally binding requirements, like hiring locally, expanding public services or providing grants to local schools.
“We’re 98, 99 percent there,” Bair said. “You’re never, ever on an issue like this, especially when it’s emerging, going to get to a 100 percent bulletproof, legal type. We’re going to get where this works for Jefferson County, and we’ve taken what everybody else has done and raised the bar to the maximum extent practical on the regulations.”
Bair called the county’s approach to adopting data center regulations in a committee “a little unorthodox,” but necessary. Typically, amendments to the county’s unified development order start with Bair’s staff drafting an amendment and bringing that recommendation to P and Z. Then the County Council would either approve or deny the amendment after P and Z made its recommendation.
“It was important to hit a curveball on this one, make sure that we’re moving forward in a more collaborative, proactive effort, because this is such a big topic, and obviously one of intense public scrutiny, no matter which way you go,” Bair said.
After the P and Z’s March 12 public hearing, the County Council will vote to either approve or deny the regulations at one of their April meetings, Bair said.
Committee members indicated that the March 6 meeting would be dedicated to discussing various aspects of CBAs and whether there are legal issues with certain developer requirements. The committee met on Dec. 3, 10, 17 and Jan. 7 to discuss data centers, including meetings dedicated to energy and water usage, air quality and gathering first-hand accounts from other community leaders living and working in places where data centers have been built.
A data center is a building or group of buildings that houses equipment needed for computing, such as routers, servers, switches, firewalls and storage systems.
The committee, which discusses a variety of topics related to economic growth in the county, is made up of Jefferson County Council members, as well as volunteer members Chris Howard, a Cedar Hill resident seeking the Republican nomination for Jefferson County executive in 2026; Clinton McBride, a government affairs director for LiUNA Local 110; and Bobby Kaye, an Imperial resident and president of the Lorenzen Candle Corp. Councilman Brian Haskins (District 1, High Ridge) was absent from the meeting.
The proposed regulations are on the Data Center Information tab on the county’s website, jeffcomo.org.
New section
At the Feb. 18 meeting, committee members reviewed a new section of the draft regulations on air quality. Bair said it was accidentally missing from the first draft presented at the Feb. 4 review session.
The purpose of the section is to “protect public health, ensure compatibility with surrounding land uses and mitigate air quality impacts associated with data centers by establishing standards for emissions, backup generators, cooling systems and related equipment,” according to county documents.
Developers would be required to submit an air quality impact assessment when petitioning the county to build a data center, with data on diesel generator emissions, cooling system refrigerants and leakage potential, construction-phase emissions, cumulative impacts from all development phases, and showing compliance with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and applicable Environmental Protection Agency standards.
The data center’s cooling systems must use refrigerants with a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of less than 750, according to county documents.
According to the EPA, the GWP is a unit of measure used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to compare global warming impacts of different gases. The larger the GWP, the more the gas will warm the Earth compared to carbon dioxide over a given time. For example, carbon dioxide has a GWP of 1, compared to methane, which has a GWP of 27 to 30 over 100 years, the EPA states.
County Services staff, along with the County Counselor’s office, will be working to refine a section of the regulations on the closure, decommissioning and remediation of data centers, Bair said.
Bair said it would be in the county’s best interest to put language in the regulations akin to a prenuptial agreement between couples before marriage, ensuring property once used for data center operations can be repurposed and reused if the data center shuts down.
County Executive Dennis Gannon said the committee and county staff should take into consideration how the data center operation could come to an end with the least amount of harm done to the county.
“At the end of the day, the county wants to be in a position where there is a site left, infrastructure is in place, their stuff is gone, and we still have an opportunity to do something to repurpose it,” Gannon said. “We need to ensure that we don’t have a white elephant somewhere that can never, ever be used.”