Shaena Crossland, a small business owner in Tucker County, could have a data center built within a couple miles of her shop. She said she felt powerless to do much about her objections. Going into the legislative session, Crossland believed there was some hope legislators would change the law keeping her and others in her community from having any control.
Sen. Randy Smith, R-Preston, offered a little bit of that hope in a public meeting in Tucker County last November. Smith told residents who had come to voice their protests he wasn’t fully on board with the data center legislation and would like to take another look at it.
He was referencing a bill passed last year, when lawmakers stripped municipalities and counties of any ability to enforce zoning, noise and light ordinances regarding data center development. Key details about the projects’ air emissions and water usage are also shielded from the public. Local tax revenue is also diverted to state coffers.
Smith isn’t just one state senator out of 34 — he is the Senate President. In that powerful role, he decides what bills are heard by a committee and what bills are voted on by the Senate body.
Last week, residents of Tucker, Logan, Mingo and Mason counties visited the West Virginia Capitol to convince lawmakers to rethink the state’s data center laws.
As of Monday, the last day to introduce a bill in the Senate, Smith did not introduce a bill to revisit any of the rules relating to data centers. Sen. Joey Garcia, D-Marion, offered a bill that would largely restore local control, but no committee chairs have placed it on an agenda.
Smith declined to comment on why he had neither filed a bill, nor used his power to have a bill considered that would functionally address concerns of the people in his own district.
“We were fighting for this hope, and now they just squashed a little bit more of it,” Crossland said.
But the Senate chambers isn’t the only venue where there is an opportunity for lawmakers to make a change to data center development rules.
Del. Doug Smith, R-Mercer, and Sen. Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, introduced a rules package for the Department of Commerce which vets data center projects coming to the state.
In the House, Del. Henry Dillon, R-Wayne, and Del. Chris Anders, R-Berkeley, tried to amend the bill to forbid data centers from using ground water, allow residents within 10 miles of a project the ability to vote on having it come to their community and prohibit the installations from collecting data on citizens.
“I’m not against data centers, but at the same time, I don’t want to see West Virginians being taken advantage of, and their wells dried up, their property rights trampled upon, their Fourth Amendment rights being gutted and local control being laughed at,” Anders said.
The House of Delegates voted it down 87-6.
Del. Bob Fehrenbacher, R-Wood, is a champion for data center development. He said other major projects, such as powerlines, have been blocked for years due to the objections of local governments and residents. He doesn’t want data centers to have those barriers.
“I realize that’s a trade off in enabling some of these things to move forward. I believe that data centers can be installed in West Virginia in a way that protects the environment and frankly, brings economic benefit and job creation to our state,” Fehrenbacher said.
An analysis by the Brookings Institution found while thousands of construction jobs come with building data centers, there are relatively few permanent jobs.
But people in areas where data centers are proposed, have grave concerns. Tonya Mounts, a resident in Mingo County, said the water supply on her property is already fragile, and she’s concerned about the amount of water a data center in the community would use.
“People’s wells are drying up. People have poor quality water, and they’re going to go ahead and use that water. They’re not telling us how much they’re going to use,” she said.
Del. Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, and Del. Jordan Bridges, R-Logan, tried to get that question answered by amending into the same rules bill. They added a provision that data center developers had to file a permit stating how much water a facility is projected to use.
Lawmakers shot that amendment down twice — once in committee and once on the House floor.
Bridges, who has a project coming to the edge of his district, said he pushed for it because local residents asked him to.
“It really wasn’t crazy,” Bridges said. “It was simply to locate where the water is coming from and how much they’re going to use. That way in the future, let’s say that somebody’s watershed was affected, and they didn’t realize it until 10 years down the road, there would be data.”
But on the floor, delegates said asking for water quantity would place a higher burden on data centers than any other industry in the state. Del. Dan Linville, R-Cabell, said in an interview that data centers just use the water for cooling, and the water needs to be cleaned of impurities to prevent clogging up the system. That water would be put back into a source cleaner than it came out, he said.
He said once data centers are actually established in the state, and revenue starts rolling in from them, a lot of these concerns will be allayed.
“The difficulty, I think, right now, is twofold. One is a bit of the unknown. But the second is that there hasn’t been a lot of discussion and leveling with folks as to what the benefits are,” Linville said.
But for people like Mounts, data centers don’t represent some great hope. Instead, it’s just more of the same.
She said,“There is a feeling of helplessness and frustration, because by and large, if you talk to anybody on the street, they feel that for generations, out-of-state interests and big money have come in and done what they wanted, taken what they wanted, polluted as much as they wanted, and our legislators have turned a blind eye because of money interests.”