Yorkville City Council Please Listen to Planning & Zoning. VOTE NO to Rezone for Another Data Center

Our Take

Credit to The Transparency Project for putting a camera in the room where this actually gets decided. Jacob Struett isn't a professional witness or a hired consultant — he's a guy whose house sits next to a proposed data center campus, telling his city council in plain terms what these projects mean for his street: grid strain, health concerns tied to backup generators and industrial noise, and a permanent headcount that, as he points out, amounts to a handful of security guards and technicians. That last detail matters. Cities get sold on "jobs" and tax revenue, but the construction crews leave and what's left is a fenced facility humming next to a subdivision, drawing power that everyone else's utility bill helps subsidize.

What makes Yorkville notable is that its own Planning & Zoning Commission already did its job — twice, apparently, going back to February — and voted against the rezoning both times. That's the process working as designed: a technical body looked at the land use, the infrastructure load, and the neighborhood impact, and said no. The question now is whether the City Council overrides its own experts under pressure from a developer, which is a pattern we've watched play out in county after county across this buildout. When elected bodies routinely reverse their own zoning commissions for data centers, it's worth asking who they're actually listening to.

Yorkville isn't unique — it's one node in a national map of towns getting the same pitch with the same fine print. Check our facility map to see what's proposed or under construction near you, and if a rezoning vote is coming to your council, our take-action page has tools to help you show up before the vote, not after.