Council approves data center ban

SANDPOINT — The Sandpoint City Council approved an amendment to prohibit large data centers over 5,000 square feet in the city Wednesday.

The decision follows direction given by the council to city staff July 15 to define and bring forward an appropriate code to prohibit larger scale AI data centers after Councilor Pam Duquette discovered that data centers were permitted in one of the three city’s industrial zones. 

“What Mr. Dean came up with was what we asked for. It is simple and short. It bans, at this point, large standalone data centers, which the community appears to be behind,” said Duquette. 

Although the amendment seeks to ban large data centers, Mayor Jeremy Grimm said that facilities that yield similar impacts, such as laboratories and industrial fluids, are currently permitted in the city’s industrial zones. 

To effectively differentiate data centers from those facilities, Dean advised the council to focus on the characteristics in zoning that matter most: size and location. 

“I would steer away from trying to arrive at something through an environmental regulation because we have to put a lot of effort into even knowing if that’s possible,” said City Planner Bill Dean. 

Dean said including aspects that are used to measure data centers, such as power and water usage effectiveness, would be difficult to bake into the code. 

The uniformity clause, Dean explained, requires the city to adopt uniform standards when establishing land use regulations, creating a new set of regulations for buildings within the entire zone district. 

“If you were interested in regulating certain aspects of an industry, just data centers, you would have to go into this knowing that whatever you put on the books is going to be applied across the entirety of that zone district,” said city planner Bill Dean. 

Sandpoint resident Stuart Christoph opposed the city’s proposed policy to ban data centers, saying, “It's frankly just not good policy.” 

“By the current definition, my garage would be an illegal data center where I host websites for myself and my friends, where I store my private data that I don’t want to give to the cloud, and where I run my own AI,” said Christoph. 

Instead of handing over autonomy to the owners of OpenAI and Anthropic, he proposed that residents invest in digital tools that they can take ownership of and control themselves. 

“That is the way that we ensure it works in our interest, and we won’t get that if we ban the capacity to do it,” said Christoph. 

However, Sandpoint resident Molly O’Reilly voiced her support for the council’s proposed resolution, calling on the council to protect the city’s “scarce resources.” 

“We don’t need the constant hum of a data center in our small community,” said O’Reilly. “Neither Avista, nor Northern Lights is ready for a data center electrical load here.” 

Addressing Christoph’s comment, Councilor Kyle Schreiber asked if it would be valuable to add clarification to the amendment's definition of a data center that delineates personal ownership of a data server from a business storing data. 

Dean said he didn’t think adding that distinction was necessary. 

“Lots of things happen in homes. If this gentleman were to purchase a second washing machine, I wouldn’t say they were running a laundromat,” said Dean. “Businesses across the city have server racks. It doesn’t mean that they’re a data center.”