Sep 6, 2022 WCBOS Authorization for Data Center Hearing

Our Take

Credit to Lewis Moten for sitting through a marathon Warren County Board of Supervisors meeting and pulling out the moment that mattered: buried at item 19 on the consent agenda, two-plus hours in, the board authorized advertising a public hearing to amend zoning code specifically to accommodate data centers in Light Industrial districts. Consent agendas are supposed to be for the boring stuff — the stuff nobody needs to debate. Rewriting the rules that govern where and how hyperscale facilities can plant themselves in your county is not boring stuff.

Notice the details here, because they're the pattern, not the exception. This was framed as a procedural step — just "authorization to advertise" — yet the clip shows it turning into a substantive early conversation about how the industry gets welcomed in. And one supervisor had already left the room by the time it came up, meeting having run long. That's not a conspiracy, it's just how local government erodes: attrition, fatigue, and consent-agenda placement do a lot of the work that a contested public vote never could.

This is exactly why we track these hearings county by county — because the zoning ordinance is where the real deal gets cut, long before residents ever see a substation or hear a chiller bank humming at 2 a.m. Check our facility map to see what's already landed near you, and if your county is quietly rewriting its code, our take-action page has tools to help you show up before the room empties out.