If the Dane County Board of Supervisors this week OKs a moratorium on hyperscale data centers, the fast-growing county around Madison will become the latest member of a quickly growing cadre of Wisconsin communities seeking to hit pause on the developments.
The county’s zoning and land regulation committee unanimously passed the 18-month moratorium in a May 26 vote, with the full board set to consider the proposal this week.
Dane County Board Chair Patrick Miles said the moratorium would give an advisory committee set up in the fall time to complete research into the benefits and pitfalls of authorizing the developments for the more than two dozen communities under the county’s zoning authority.
More and more local governments across the state are moving to temporarily prohibit construction of the power-guzzling facilities, amid darkening public perception and growing skepticism of their purported benefits.
Madison, the town of Cassville, Westport in Dane County, Baldwin in St. Croix County and Manitowoc County have all passed moratoriums ranging from one to two years. Oneida and Dodge counties are also considering enacting temporary prohibitions.
Hyperscale data centers are under construction in Mount Pleasant, Port Washington and Beaver Dam.
Miles said Dane County’s advisory committee is “trying to be as agnostic as possible” on the debate over data centers’ value.
“We’re not going into this with any preconceived notions or opinion as to whether this kind of development should be allowed,” Miles said.
Public opinion surrounding data centers has shifted precipitously against them in recent months, as views sour on artificial intelligence and the trillion-dollar tech companies pushing it, and residents question the economic and environmental impacts of the projects.
Some 69% of adults in Wisconsin and nationwide say the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits, per Marquette Law School polling released in March and April, respectively.
In Wisconsin, residents have been spooked by a lack of transparency surrounding massive projects in places like Port Washington and Beaver Dam and the prospective threat the sprawling campuses pose to the farmland and water that have driven Wisconsin’s economy for more than a century.
In the town of Cassville, in western Grant County, residents mobilized this spring to give their town board village leaders more zoning controls, amid concerns they would be left out of the decision-making between county officials and the unidentified developers of a proposed $1 billion data center campus.
Town leaders ultimately voted unanimously in April to pass an ordinance banning data centers for two years from the 36 square miles bordering the Mississippi.
Mount Hope resident Pete Moris helped organize local opposition as one of the leaders of the “No Data Centers in the Driftless” Facebook page.
“My theory, not gospel by any means, is there were folks who wanted a data center who didn’t think little old Cassville township could do anything to stop it,” Moris said. “It’s kind of that David and Goliath thing.”
Cassville township’s local opponents also had the backing of a broader network of data center opponents who have mobilized in the wake of the rapid push to build hyperscale data centers in Wisconsin. Among them was comedian and data center critic Charlie Berens, who spoke at a March event in Potosi that drew over 600 people.
Further north, Menomonie resident Blaine Halverson said he’s been working with officials in nearby communities who want to draft their own regulations after activists successfully blocked a $1.6 billion proposal and pushed the city council to adopt new data center regulations in January.
“This is the summer we organize and get as many moratoriums as possible,” Halverson said.
He said he’s organizing a meeting of organizers and local officials in western Wisconsin in June to educate the public and public officials about how to deal with data centers and Big Tech’s push into the region.
Halverson opposes data centers personally but says he’s focused on giving people the tools to make informed decisions.
He believes it’s up to residents and local officials, not the Legislature, to decide how Wisconsin responds to data centers’ push into the state.
Lawmakers last session introduced several bills regulating data centers and the information developers and local officials could keep secret but failed to pass any of them.
“A lot of people out there are pushing really heavily for Madison to fix this, and I’m more cynical about that, because from what I see they just literally don’t understand the issue and they’re playing political football with it,” he said.
Tricia Braun of the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition is cognizant of what she called the “fear and the misleading information and misinformation” she’s seen driving local opposition to data centers.
She said the coalition has been working with partners on emphasizing the positive economic impacts on communities and talking with local officials to help them better understand what these projects can do for their communities.
Braun is not a fan of moratoriums but said she understands why communities want to pump the brakes on data center developments.
“Cities that may want to have a data center or may think that it would be a good fit, they simply want to take the time to evaluate ‘how, what type, what size, when, what are the parameters around it?’ And that’s not a terrible thing,” she said.
On the other hand, Wade Goodsell of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce opposes any kind of effort to slow development.
He argued communities like Dane County have to decide whether they want to broadcast to businesses whether they’re “red tape or red carpet.”
With a moratorium, “the message that it sends loud and clear is we’re red tape,” Goodsell said. “Unfortunately that’s a trend line we’re seeing far too often in Wisconsin.”
Miles, the Dane County supervisor, takes issue with Goodsell’s position.
“It’s not unreasonable to pause for 18 months to do our due diligence and really understand the pros and cons, and I think the push to rush to decisions on these projects underscores why people in the public have a lack of trust,” Miles said. “If people are being pushed to make a decision rapidly, without really understanding the consequences, both good and bad, it makes people wonder why.”
Braun agrees. She said it’s on data center developers to be transparent about their goals in a community and have “a lot of two-way conversations” to reach a place of collaboration.
On the other hand, she thinks it would be a “very smart move” for local officials to engage with data centers once their moratoriums expire and they’ve laid some ground rules on the kind of developments they want to see.
“I hope that the majority of these are being put into place so that the community can do a good job of having a plan, having a process to review or determine if a project is right for the community, or to set certain parameters around what kind of scope or what type of data center that they would want in their community,” she said.
Cassville will probably not be having those conversations.
Grant County Economic Development Corp. Director Ron Bribois told WisPolitics in an email that he has not heard from the data center developer “in several weeks,” following a discussion about the lack of tax increment financing availability in the town.
Moris says residents of the Driftless community have seen the warning signs from communities like Beaver Dam and Mount Pleasant, and they believe they’re better served preserving the character of the geographically unique region.
“I don’t know that outside of people who stand to profit that there’s a real appetite for this kind of development in Grant County, no matter what the tax dollars look like. But that’s my opinion,” he said.
