‘No rezoning, no data center’: McCormick County planners side with residents opposing development
The short version: McCormick County's planning commission backed residents and recommended a 9-month pause on data centers until proper rezoning rules are in place.
Our Take
Credit to WRDW News 12 for covering a story that's becoming a template nationwide: a small county planning commission telling developers that "no rezoning" really does mean "no data center." McCormick County residents pushed back, and instead of waving projects through on existing industrial zoning loopholes, the commission recommended a nine-month timeout to actually write rules before the next server farm proposal lands on a rural parcel.
That pause matters more than it sounds. Once a data center is permitted and under construction, the leverage residents have over water allocations, substation upgrades, noise, and tax deals evaporates. A moratorium buys a county time to ask the boring but essential questions: how much water will cooling towers pull from local systems, who pays for the transmission upgrades, and what happens to property values and tax bills for everyone else on the grid. McCormick County planners just modeled what due diligence looks like before the concrete trucks show up, not after.
This is exactly the kind of local fight we track across the country — where zoning boards, not Congress, end up deciding who eats the costs of the AI buildout. Check our facility map to see what's proposed near you, and if your county hasn't had this conversation yet, our take-action page has tools to get it on the agenda.
This is GridWatch the USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WRDW News 12, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.