The Elizabethtown City Council met for their first meeting of the month Monday.
The first reading was held on a text amendment to the city’s zoning ordinance related to the regulation of data centers in the city, which was recommended for approval by the Elizabethtown Planning Commission at their July 28 meeting.
Elizabethtown Mayor Jeff Gregory said everybody on the city council and everybody in the city’s administration is against hyperscale data centers, but the city asked staff in the Planning and Zoning office to draft the amendments in order to restrict construction of hyperscale facilities while not hurting existing businesses which have accessory use facilities.
“What you all are going to vote on in two weeks basically makes it impossible for us to have a hyperscale data center in the city limits of Elizabethtown, which is what we want to accomplish and what we heard everybody else that spoke the other night want to accomplish,” Gregory said.
Gregory said the city isn’t against passing a moratorium, but said stronger ordinance language that increases regulation and creates guardrails offers better protection, an opinion supported by City Attorney Ken Howard.
“The legal community, generally the view is it’s better to have regulations than a moratorium,” Howard said. “If you’re ready for the regulations, if you know what you want in your community, you’re better off to do that than to enact a moratorium.”
Elizabethtown resident José Torres told the council the fear he and people he has spoken with have is that they are not being heard on the issue, and the decisions being made “are only on one side of the spectrum.”
“If you look at what we’re doing in this community, we’re building, we’re building, we’re building, but we’re not building for people that make under $100,000 a year,” Torres said. “We’re not building for people that are going to have problems now feeding kids in the morning when they used to get free lunch because of HB 500. We’re no longer going to have that money.”
The text amendments will go up for adoption on the ordinance’s second reading.
In other meeting news, the council approved a $25,000 contract with CMW Inc. for the master plan of Trooper Lake, and a $60,000 contract with Lochmueller Group Inc. for engineering services on the Trooper Lake project, which will see new park facilities constructed there including mountain biking trails and a pump track. The council also approved a resolution establishing the South End Elizabethtown Economic Development Program.
The Elizabethtown City Council will next meet August 10.