EDITORIAL: The wrong place for nation’s biggest data center

The Port Washington data center development is out of control. It has blown up into a colossus of such staggering dimensions that its developer is proud to announce it will likely be the biggest data center in America.

It is hard to imagine a worse place in America to put a city-sized complex of 11 very large data processing buildings, three office buildings, five electric substations and a utility plant than the farm and residential land in the Town of Port Washington being claimed for the development.

The site, in the countryside north of the City of Port Washington, parallel to Lake Michigan, is mostly fertile cropland, a sea of green during the growing season, with homes on or close to the site and several residential subdivisions nearby.

The gargantuan industrial mass of the data center complex will be an alien presence that will degrade the character of its surroundings and be an inescapable nuisance for many residents, not only with the sound and light of its operation, but also with massive construction projects going on for many years.

Make no mistake, this is a not-in-my-backyard issue, but it is not one that should be minimized by applying the silly NIMBY acronym.

The data center complex is going to be in Port Washington’s back yard, and that is the wrong place for the largest facility of its kind in the U.S.

Data centers, of course, have to be some place. The right place is an industrial district, a vast space designed expressly for large-scale 24/7 operations, far enough away from other types of land uses to avoid conflicts, served by networks of highways. Those are the types of places where most data centers in this country and abroad are located. It is inconceivable that any new ones will be built in places that are anything like the Port Washington site.

In a message to Port Washington residents meant to soothe worries about the impact of the data center, Mayor Ted Neitzke wrote: “We control the process.”

Here is an example of the city’s idea of controlling the process: The city ordinance creating a special zoning district for the data center states that “the maximum building height shall not exceed 100 feet.” 

Port Washington data center buildings could be 10 stories high.

The zoning ordinance has specific requirements for berms and plantings (if the buildings get anywhere near the allowable heights these cosmetic touches will be irrelevant), limits its around-the-clock noise to 70 decibels and has some light restrictions, but nothing in it will prevent or discourage the development from becoming the biggest data center complex in the country.

The zoning ordinance is as much about paving the way for the data center as controlling it. The city’s elected officials, however, do have an effective means to control the size of the development. They could limit the area of land to be annexed to city to no more than the 562 acres approved by the Plan Commission as a first-stage annexation.

The message to the developer should be: Make do with 562 acres instead of the 1,900 earmarked for data center behemoth.

The Common Council has the means to do this. All it takes is the will to stand up to the development company by setting a land area maximum that would limit the size of the data center complex.

There would be no downside for the city. A smaller data center would still come with the benefits from the development city officials are promising. Tax revenue, when it finally arrives after the expected TIF is retired, will be more than enough to support budgets that will comfortably fund city services and projects. Even when the data center plan was introduced as a modest billion-dollar valuation (modest as opposed to the multibillions of value projected in the latest iteration), there was talk of the owner seeking a break because taxing on the full valuation would result in such an enormous property tax bill.

Predictions that the presence of the data center will turn Port Washington into the Silicon Valley of the Midwest with spinoff tech businesses are no doubt exaggerated, but in any case the smaller development would have the same effect.

The Port Washington data center is nearing the inevitable stage. The city’s elected and appointed officials are all in and then some, state development officials are blessing it and the director of the Ozaukee County Development Corp. is singing its praises as something that is “going to improve our county.” 

All of that cheerleading doesn’t change the fact that many residents of the Port Washington community rightly view the development as more a nuisance than an improvement. Its unavoidable negative impacts would only grow as the size of the data center grows.

The last thing Port Washington needs is the 

“honor” of hosting the biggest data enter in the country.