Letter: Is a Data Center Right for Lawrence County?

You may have missed it, but one of the newest developments in Lawrenceburg will be a 70,000-square-foot data center starting construction soon. It will be on the north side of town, slightly down from the Magna facility on Flatwoods Road. This land was recently rezoned in a public meeting on Jan. 8 by the Lawrenceburg City Council that rezoned the land from Large Lot Residential to Light Industrial. The meeting was only to vote on rezoning the land and did not vote on having a data center in our community. Having a data center built in your community can have long-term consequences. Data centers built within the last few years across the U.S. are showing the negative effects they have on the environment, residents’ health, utility costs and access to resources like clean water. At a recent LUS Board Meeting, they stated that a contract is in place with the new data center to limit their power consumption to 7-megawatts. However, most data centers of this size take between 10-50 megawatts of power to be run 24/7. This means the extra power has to come from somewhere else, most likely generators, which means noise and pollution. The machines that keep a data center running also need to be cooled, which they are installing a closed-loop cooling system for that uses clean water. Based on how the system is set up, the water has to be purged when it becomes too highly concentrated with minerals. So what’s the benefit? There will be money spent in Lawrence County to build the data center and temporary local construction work but, for long-term benefits, it will be run with less than 10 employees. Just do a quick search to see communities like ours across the U.S. that are struggling with noise and pollution that disrupts animals at nearby farms, local wildlife and makes local residents sick. Is this really what Lawrence County needs, or is it more beneficial to attract a different kind of industry that actually creates more long-term jobs and doesn’t harm the lives of the people who live nearby it? There should be a public forum where we can discuss the consequences and have our elected leaders vote publicly on building a data center in Lawrenceburg. We should get a say in what happens in our community. Elle McCann Ethridge