Denver City Council has discovered a fascinating new phase of the permitting process: regret.
According to a 9NEWS report, council members unanimously approved a one-year moratorium on new data center construction after publicly apologizing for allowing CoreSite’s massive facility in the Globeville-Elyria-Swansea neighborhood to get as far as it has. Denver currently has no zoning rules written specifically for data centers, no energy requirements for them and no water-use regulations. The moratorium will pause new applications while the city tries to write rules covering energy use, water consumption, noise and where these facilities should actually go.
I am not anti-data center. Quite the opposite. I believe these facilities are becoming critical infrastructure, increasingly important to modern life in the same broad category as water, sewer and electricity. Which is precisely why local governments should stop treating them like another warehouse with extra extension cords. These projects need thoughtful, predictable siting standards written before the concrete trucks arrive, not a tearful council meeting after everybody realizes nobody wrote the damn code.
The Bullet Point Brief
- Denver is hitting pause because Denver never wrote the rules. The one-year moratorium stops the city from accepting and processing new zoning permits and site-development plans for data centers while officials finally work on regulations. That may be necessary. It is also an engraved invitation to ask why a city that produces regulations with the enthusiasm of a Labrador producing tennis balls had no data-center-specific zoning, energy or water rules in the first place.
- The CoreSite project is the rake Denver just stepped on. The facility under construction at 49th and Race is in Globeville-Elyria-Swansea. According to 9NEWS, the campus includes plans for 14 backup diesel generators, and Councilmember Sarah Parady highlighted their proximity to Tepeyac Health Center, saying the generators would be about 70 feet from a clinic treating patients with asthma and other respiratory conditions. Denver spends enormous amounts of rhetorical oxygen on environmental justice, then apparently needed construction underway before discovering proximity matters.
- Water was not exactly a hidden issue either. CoreSite’s facility is designed to use up to 230,000 gallons of water per day at full load. Councilmember Paul Kashmann noted the obvious reality that even in non-drought years, Colorado water is precious. Correct. This is the sort of revelation that ideally occurs during code writing, not during the municipal apology portion of the program.
- Council was not completely powerless in the project’s history. Because the property was already zoned industrial, CoreSite did not need a council vote simply to build there. That matters. But council did vote in 2023 to relinquish a city easement that CoreSite said was needed for an electrical substation supporting the full campus build-out. Then the Johnston administration later brought forward a proposed $9 million tax incentive. Council raised concerns and never approved that incentive. Parady now says she believes council could have used its land-use authority to stop the project after rejecting the tax deal. Her description of failing to do so: her “single biggest regret” on council.
- Now comes the working group. Naturally. The moratorium creates a group of city officials, community members, industry representatives and utilities to recommend policy before the year is up. Good. Use the year. Write the code. Solve the problem. Because if twelve months from now Denver has produced seventeen listening sessions, four equity frameworks, a glossy PDF and no durable rules, then this was not leadership. It was government kicking the can with a name badge.
My Bottom Line
Data centers are coming. Pretending otherwise is foolish. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, digital commerce, hospitals, finance, communications and just about every other modern system are driving demand for enormous computing capacity. Communities that approach these facilities intelligently can benefit from investment and infrastructure. Communities that approach them casually can create conflicts over power, water, noise, backup generation and incompatible land uses.
That is why I remain frustrated with local government on this issue, including my own world in Weld County. Stop waiting for the application to land on somebody’s desk and then improvising public policy one project at a time. Sit down. Decide where these facilities make sense. Establish setbacks. Deal with water. Deal with power. Deal with noise. Deal with emergency generation. Protect neighboring residents. Create predictable standards for industry. Then enforce them.
Weld County has started to do this – we defined in code what a data center actually is, where they can be built (industrial zones), and placed noise limitations on them. That’s a good start. But it is my opinion that we need to dig in deeper to give Weld residents certainty about the broader impacts of the facility wishing to locate here.
The code cannot be patchwork, and a moratorium is only as good as what government does with the time it buys. If Denver spends the next year doing the hard work and comes back with clear rules that recognize data centers as important infrastructure while protecting surrounding communities, great. That is exactly what a pause should accomplish.
But the apologies are a little rich. Council President Amanda Sandoval said she was sorry. Parady called the project her biggest regret. Another council member said the city should never have approved the location. These are elected officials, not tourists who wandered into the council chamber because the Rockies game got rained out. They have voting buttons. They have planners. They have attorneys. They have an administration. They have more process than a Soviet toaster factory.
Denver loves environmental justice, climate responsibility, equity and community engagement right up until the machinery of government actually has to make a hard land-use decision. Then apparently the preferred sequence is approve first, regret later, impose a moratorium, convene a working group, and announce that lessons have been learned.
Maybe they have.
We will know in a year.
Because stepping on the rake is a mistake. Holding a listening session about the rake is government. Writing the code so nobody steps on it again is leadership.
Source: 9News
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