What We Learned at the August 12 Data Center Meeting

On Wednesday, August 12, a room full of Cherokee County residents showed up to talk about data centers. We ran out of chairs. People stood along the walls of the community room at RT Jones Public Library in Canton until we could pass more out, and the room stayed full right up until the library closed.

North Georgia Community Action Network cohosted the evening with Roy Taylor, chair of the Cherokee County Democrats' Environment and Climate Crisis Committee, who convened the panel and carried most of the substantive content. The purpose was simple. Cherokee County has a 30 day moratorium on data center construction applications, a public hearing on a proposed 180 day moratorium is on the county calendar for today, Tuesday, August 18, and most residents had no idea any of that was happening.

Here is what was said, who said it, and what is still unanswered.

Who was in the room

Harry Johnston, chairman of the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners, gave the keynote and stayed for questions. Todd Baker, executive director of the Upper Etowah River Alliance, introduced his organization. Danielle Bell, candidate for Georgia House District 44, spoke on health and household cost. Chris Harden, Democratic nominee for Georgia's 11th Congressional District, spoke on the regional picture. Steven Rogers, candidate for Cherokee County Board of Commissioners District 4, brought a technology background to the money side of the question.

Canton City Council members Darrell Rice and Shawn Tolan attended. Residents filled the rest of the room, and a stack of comment cards came back with questions we are carrying forward.

Where Cherokee County actually stands

Johnston opened by setting expectations. "I'm not an expert on data centers," he said. "I can tell you what we know about them from the Cherokee County governing point of view."

What he laid out:

The county has already placed a short term moratorium on data center construction applications. That one the Board of Commissioners can do by simple vote. A longer moratorium requires a more rigorous legal process, which is why a public hearing is required before the county can invoke the proposed 180 day version. The stated purpose of those 180 days is to give planning and zoning time to write an actual data center ordinance.

At minimum, Johnston said, the county expects to require a special use permit for data centers. He compared it to how the county already handles warehouse facilities, which he described as having become "sort of the pariah of people who don't want those in their neighborhood." Instead of letting a use drop into commercial zoning by right, a special use permit gives the county a case by case yes or no and the ability to attach conditions.

His personal position was blunt. "I really don't think Cherokee County is the place for data centers for a number of reasons," he said. He added that Heath Tippins, who the county pays to recruit business to Cherokee, does not know of any data center with interest in Cherokee County, and that the newest large facilities need big flat tracts of land the county does not have.

On the drawbacks, Johnston named the visual scale of modern facilities, saying "you really can't hide these things." He described how closed loop cooling systems solved much of the water problem by trading it for a noise problem, since the systems work like a car radiator and rely on banks of fans that produce a constant hum. He also raised obsolescence, pointing out that these facilities are close to certain to become stranded assets when the technology behind them is replaced.

Where he landed: "In general, I'm for being tough on data centers, really just saying no unless public perception changes completely from where it is today."

The Fayette County numbers

The strongest piece of hard data of the night came from Johnston's comparison with Fayette County, where he benchmarks with his counterpart Lee Hearn.

Fayette County decided to embrace data centers. They identified a 1,000 acre tract away from neighborhoods and invited proposals. As of the day of our meeting, Johnston said, 14 data centers have committed, and the tract is close to maxed out.

Those 14 facilities, according to what Hearn told Johnston, will pay one and a half times as much property tax as everything else in Fayette County combined. School taxes included. That would let Fayette cut its tax bills to 40 percent of what they are today. A resident with a $10,000 tax bill would pay $4,000.

Johnston said Fayette is nervous about exactly that, because nobody wants to be the official who raises taxes back up when the facilities age out. He said they are considering spending the revenue rather than cutting rates outright, and that they want to come look at our aquatic center.

He also framed the tradeoff honestly for our county: "The question is, and are we willing to pay for it? I am." He added that he is watching for the day a neighboring county's tax rate drops to half of ours.

Data centers do not bring jobs

An attendee asked about employment, noting that job numbers have come in far below what was promised when data centers were pitched.

Johnston did not hedge. A large data center, he said, will literally have only 10 or 20 people working there, even at very large scale. "In no way would we be looking for data centers as a source of new jobs to be brought to the county," he said. "But no to jobs. They don't bring jobs."

On incentives, Johnston explained that Cherokee County has offered tax abatements before, through a process approved by a constitutionally created board, but the most generous deal the county has ever offered or would offer is a 10 year ramp up. Year one, no property tax. Year two, 10 percent. Full payment by year 10. In the Fayette example, he said four of the committed facilities received abatements and the rest did not ask.

One resident pushed back on graduated abatements directly, comparing them to the old retail practice of signing a long tax free lease and moving on before the bill ever comes due. Their point: if the useful life of a data center is roughly 20 years and the abatement runs 10, the math deserves a hard look before anyone signs.

Construction jobs are real but temporary. Figures shared at the meeting for Project Bunkhouse in Bartow County put it at 8.6 million square feet, a 12 building campus, roughly 860 acres, and an estimated $19 billion. Those jobs leave when the campus is finished.

What a hyperscale facility actually involves

Roy Taylor's overview covered ground most residents have never seen laid out in one place.

Data centers come in roughly three sizes. Small ones have operated in Georgia for years, including in downtown Atlanta, without most people noticing, because they do not draw that level of power or water. The middle range starts raising questions about substations. Then there are hyperscale facilities, generally over 100,000 square feet, often requiring an electrical substation built on the same property, and potentially 20 to 30 diesel backup generators on site because the operation cannot tolerate an outage.

Those generators are a pollution and noise source in their own right, and Taylor noted they are not well regulated for how they are actually used. In places where grid power became expensive, some operators have run their generators far beyond their intended backup role. That is diesel exhaust and engine noise running as a primary power source.

On power more broadly: Georgia Power has signed a memorandum covering rates for the next three years, but Taylor pointed out that addresses only one side of the cost. Enormous infrastructure has to be built, and the cost of that infrastructure gets recovered even when only a fraction of it serves residential customers. He also noted that Georgia Power owns the gas lines that are doubling in size and running across the state from Alabama to South Carolina.

On the "bring your own power" pitch, where an operator generates its own electricity on site: when the generation is owned by the company using it, it does not face the same Public Service Commission oversight that a regulated utility does. That is a gap an ordinance would need to address.

There is a version of this that looks different. Taylor cited an article reporting that China now requires 80 percent of the power for these facilities to come from renewables, primarily wind and solar. The cheapest power available today is wind and solar. Whether through on site generation or power purchase agreements, that model exists. Cherokee County does not have the land for utility scale solar fields, but the concept is on the table elsewhere.

If you hear people at these meetings say "Beyonce," they are talking about bring your own clean energy for data centers.

Water, noise, and light

The cheapest cooling method is to pull water through the system once and dump the heated water back out. It is also the most environmentally costly, and most new facilities have moved to closed loop systems for that reason.

The tradeoff is the fans. A closed loop system cools its water with fans, and those fans produce a background hum 24 hours a day that you cannot get away from.

Cherokee County already has a strong noise ordinance that measures decibel levels at property edges, which is the right test, because the question is what the neighbors hear. Taylor argued that a future ordinance should require these facilities to sit on large parcels with the buildings placed well inside them, and require operators to submit to testing.

One point that gets lost in the water conversation: even a facility that uses very little water on site still consumes water indirectly, because coal, natural gas, and nuclear generation all use water to produce the electricity the facility draws.

These sites are also lit around the clock for security. Cherokee County has dark sky rules, and Taylor made the case that those rules need to be written into any data center ordinance so that neighbors are not living next to a permanently illuminated industrial site.

Land use and property values

The land use argument was one of the more concrete pieces of the night.

An ordinance gets to define where these facilities are allowed, and Taylor argued that heavy industrial is where they belong, not wherever a spare tract of old tree farm happens to be available.

The property value effect works like this. When a data center developer is willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre, no residential developer can compete. Several hundred acres taken off the market is several hundred acres not available for housing, parks, open space, or agriculture, which remains one of Cherokee County's largest industries. That upward pressure does not stay contained to one section of the county. It ratchets up land prices countywide, in a county that already does not have enough affordable housing.

A resident raised a related problem that almost never gets discussed: parking mandates. Local codes typically require a set number of parking spaces per square foot of building. A data center has almost no employees and does not need a parking lot, but if a million square foot facility has to meet a standard parking requirement, the impervious footprint balloons. That means stormwater runoff, pollution, and heat. The same resident noted that we do not currently require solar canopies over that pavement, and that these are exactly the kinds of rules a local government has the authority to write.

Taylor also connected data centers to surveillance. The Flock cameras already operating in Canton and across the county generate data, and that data is stored in facilities like these. How long that information is held, and who can use it, is a policy question nobody has answered locally.

The case for why local governments say yes

Steven Rogers, who brought 22 years in tech including 15 years working with the Department of Defense on what used to be called server farms, deliberately took the other side so the room would hear the full picture.

It is about the money. These buildings are filled with equipment, steel, and plumbing that all has to be purchased and installed, which produces a sales tax boom. He cited a city in Louisiana that gave its teachers $50,000 bonuses on the strength of that revenue. He noted Georgia's high technology data center exemption, which exempts qualifying sites from sales tax if they meet an investment threshold, and raised the open question of whether that exemption applies to ongoing equipment refresh.

That refresh cycle matters. Switches, hard drives, and servers have a useful life of roughly five to six years. For scale, Rogers noted the county recently bought laptops at about $1,800 apiece. A facility with a 20 to 25 year life could go through five rounds of equipment replacement, each one a potential sales tax event.

On property tax, his back of napkin figure was that the average data center brings in about $20 million to a municipality. He mentioned another city where a single large facility pays 57 percent of the property tax base, funding a hospital and parks. His observation for our county: if Cherokee had one facility bringing in $20 million right now, the M and O rate would not have gone up.

He warned that developers are not local, and they do not always show up with a check and a handshake. Sometimes they sue. Municipalities outside Atlanta and Savannah frequently cannot match the legal firepower these companies bring. His conclusion: get the ordinances in place now, because the best way to avoid being sued is to have clear rules already on the books rather than trying to fix it after the fact. He asked everyone in the room to show up on August 18 and tell the county to take the time to write the ordinance.

The health and household cost argument

Danielle Bell, a clinical social worker and community advocate whose district includes part of Woodstock and roughly two thirds of Marietta in Cobb County, spoke to the human impact.

She started with what happened in Cobb. One data center was approved unanimously. Then residents started showing up and making public comment. When a second proposal came forward, the council tabled it to gather more information about community impact. The facility in question would have sat within 200 feet of a residential area.

Her clinical concern was sleep. These are industrial facilities operating around the clock, and she compared the noise to having a highway outside the window. Chronic sleep loss contributes to anxiety, depression, impaired concentration, emotional dysregulation, and worse outcomes for people already living with mental illness. She asked the room to consider what that does to children's developing brains, night after night, over years.

Her second concern was affordability. She said Georgia Power has increased electric bills by 41 percent over the last few years, and that in her experience in Cobb County, the promise that residential customers will not absorb infrastructure costs has not held up. Financial instability, she noted, is a major driver of household stress and family instability.

She supports a moratorium so that these impacts can be studied before anything is approved.

What is moving at the state level

Bell also gave the room a count of what is currently filed under the Gold Dome. Eight House bills concerning data centers: two on state moratoriums, three on incentives and tax breaks, two on electric cost, and one on resource use. Data center equipment already receives tax breaks.

Georgia and Texas are the fastest growing states for data centers. The Texas legislature has been asked to forgive $100 million in sales tax payments.

Bell named the transparency problem directly. The chair of the House committee overseeing telecommunications and utilities has held office for 30 years, receives roughly 80 percent of his campaign funding from utility companies, and consults for those same companies when the legislature is out of session. Clean energy bills do not reach the floor. Georgia Power is not required to publish the infrastructure cost information residents keep asking for, which is why nobody in that room could answer the cost questions. The lack of an answer is not an accident. That committee chair is the incumbent she is running against in House District 44.

It was also raised at the meeting that some companies have asked elected officials to sign nondisclosure agreements, which is a significant part of why local officials cannot tell residents what is being negotiated.

One resident asked about Department of Energy lending supporting utility expansion, including new transmission lines and gas pipelines, and made the point that taxpayer backed loans are taxpayer risk.

The regional picture

Chris Harden described what he is seeing across the five counties in Georgia's 11th Congressional District.

Pickens County, by his understanding, has to transport water, which limits exposure. Cherokee, based on what he heard from Johnston, is not currently a target. In Marietta, residents and elected officials are not aligned, and that fight is active. Gordon County is dealing with forever chemicals in drinking water and respiratory concerns already, and now faces data center proposals on top of that. In Bartow County, the government is welcoming them regardless of what constituents think.

"I support all the moratoriums," Harden said. "We don't want bad neighbors."

The river

Todd Baker, the new executive director of the Upper Etowah River Alliance, declined to take a position for or against. His argument was that decisions about the river need to be science based and fact driven, and that it would be unfair to the community and to the river to do otherwise.

The Alliance is working on water testing in Canton Creek with the Lions Club of Canton, installing a trash weir at Harmon Park to intercept debris before it reaches the Etowah, and planning a storm drain filtration system at the bridge over Marietta Highway. Their office is on McClure Street next to Harmon Park. He can be reached at todd@etowahriver.org.

The storage facility loophole

The issue is local even if Cherokee County never attracts a hyperscale campus.

The company that has been pushing data centers in Marietta operates on a conversion model. Its business is taking existing storage facilities and converting them into data centers. That company owns at least one storage location here in Cherokee County, at 300 Rabbit Hill Road in Holly Springs.

That is why "we don't have the land for it" is not a complete answer. A conversion does not require a thousand acre greenfield tract. Search Prime Storage on Google Maps and look at what is already sitting in our county.

Woodstock City Council was asked to match the county's moratorium and was not particularly interested, largely on the theory that there is not much room to put one. The storage facilities are the reason that theory deserves a second look. Canton has been more receptive to moving alongside the county.

What residents asked

The question period ran until the library closed, and it was the best part of the night. Questions came from the floor and from comment cards, and most of the people who asked did not give their names. Here is what they wanted to know.

Are utilities cutting deals that leave residents holding the bill? A resident said she had heard months ago that water and power companies were structuring arrangements so that ratepayers absorb most of the cost of serving these facilities, and asked whether there is Georgia specific data on it. Nobody in the room had that data, which is itself the answer. What did come back was a related point: one of the largest Department of Energy loans issued went to Southern Company to expand operations, including new transmission lines and gas pipelines. It is a loan, and it is supposed to be repaid, but it is taxpayer backed risk either way.

Where exactly is the Holly Springs storage site? A resident asked for the location. The answer was to pull it up on Google Maps and drive Rabbit Hill Road.

Do these facilities emit radiation? The same resident asked whether any studies exist, saying he can sometimes feel it near a cell tower. The honest answer from the panel was that this has not been one of the issues raised in the research so far, and that concentrating that much electricity in one place does produce fields, but nobody could point to a specific study. That question deserves a real answer, and we will look for one.

How much land are these companies actually buying? A resident described a coworker whose South Georgia town has effectively been bought by a data center, and said the acreage figure she was given was hard to believe. Panelists confirmed the pattern without confirming that specific number: these companies are acquiring hundreds of acres at a time, and one proposal in Louisiana covers more than a square mile.

What about jobs? A resident cited a roughly 70 percent shortfall between the employment numbers pitched for data centers and what actually materializes, and asked whether jobs were a deciding factor for the county. Johnston's answer is in the jobs section above. They are not.

Are more Flock cameras coming, and who controls them? This one came up because Roy Taylor had connected surveillance data to data center storage. Johnston explained that the sheriff runs the Flock camera program in Cherokee County and that the county has followed his guidance, on the sheriff's assessment that the cameras do more to solve and prevent crime than anything else available to him. Johnston gave an example he knew personally: a teenage girl lured into meeting someone she had met online, which turned out to be a sex trafficking operation. Deputies used the Flock network along with participating doorbell cameras to trace the car she got into and recovered her within about an hour.

A follow up pushed on the other edge of that. Automated license plate readers and the AI systems behind them misidentify plates, and residents have been misidentified by physical markings including tattoos. The question was what law enforcement plans to do about correcting those errors. We cut that thread short to keep the night on data centers, which was the right call for the agenda and the wrong outcome for the question. It is a real one, and we intend to hold a separate meeting on automated license plate readers and surveillance technology. If that is your issue, tell us.

What long term studies exist, and who is accountable? A resident asked about environmental and health research, and raised the accountability problem with privately held companies and hedge fund owners who do not have to open their books. Taylor said several studies are underway and that we have access to the statewide and national groups tracking them. If you signed in at the meeting, we will get that material to you.

Are graduated tax abatements a trap? A resident compared the 10 year ramp up structure to the old big box retail practice of taking a long tax free term and moving on before the full bill ever arrives, and pointed out that a facility with a 20 year useful life against a 10 year abatement is a very different deal than it first appears.

What about parking mandates and pavement? The same line of questioning produced one of the most practical suggestions of the night, covered in the land use section above. A facility with almost no employees should not be required to build a parking lot, and we should not be paving hundreds of acres for cars that will never arrive.

What would it take to ban them permanently? A resident asked directly, noting that moratoriums buy time and that developers count on angry residents getting tired and going quiet. Johnston's answer: "Our intent at this point is not to ban, but to regulate and to provide the opportunity for us to, case by case, turn them down." He said he believes that approach is more sustainable in court than an outright ban, and that the county would not necessarily object to a small facility of the older type. On the large ones he was direct: "I don't anticipate saying yes to a hyperscale data center, though, to be honest with you."

She pressed, saying that other jurisdictions, including some in California, have banned them permanently, and that she was asking what the path to that looks like rather than asserting it is the county's plan. That specific question did not get answered. The exchange that followed was an honest one about tradeoffs: we all carry phones, we all order packages, and our photos and our data are stored somewhere. The response from the room was that it cannot be all or nothing, and that the real work is figuring out what good rules look like. Fair. We would still like to see the research on how other places got to a permanent ban, and we will go find it.

What if a city inside the county does not act? A Woodstock resident named Jose raised a Clayton County case where a municipality moved forward despite a county moratorium, and asked what would stop Woodstock or Acworth from doing the same. Johnston acknowledged that cities control zoning inside their own limits and can annex adjacent property, and said the cities need to undertake the same kind of evaluation the county is doing. He added that a site needing hundreds or thousands of acres is less likely to be available inside a city, which is true for new construction and not true for a storage facility conversion.

Will the county bring in scientific expertise? A comment card asked whether the county will engage a scientific advisor during ordinance development, and whether there will be any evaluation of the quality and quantity of scientific data. Johnston's answer: "Honestly, I somewhat doubt it." He said the county is approaching this from a governmental and regulatory standpoint, focused on the power to attach conditions and to say no.

That is a gap. An ordinance written without technical review is an ordinance written by whoever shows up with the most confident consultant, and that is usually not the residents.

What happens next

The Cherokee County Board of Commissioners meets tonight, Tuesday, August 18. The public hearing on the 180 day moratorium is on the agenda, and there will be roughly 20 minutes of public comment. That is not much time for a room the size of the one we had last week, so a small number of prepared speakers will carry the community's concerns forward, built from the comment cards collected at the meeting.

What we are asking the county for:

1. Pass the 180 day moratorium.

2. Require a special use permit for any data center, at every scale.

3. Restrict siting to heavy industrial, with substantial setbacks and buffers.

4. Write noise limits measured at the property line, with mandatory testing and enforcement.

5. Fold the existing dark sky rules into the ordinance.

6. Regulate backup generators specifically, including how often and how long they may run.

7. Address impervious surface and parking requirements so a facility with 15 employees is not paving 800 acres.

8. Bring in independent technical review before the ordinance is finalized.

And we are asking the cities in Cherokee County, including Woodstock, to match the county's timeline rather than leaving an open door inside city limits.

Get involved

We launched Tech Watch specifically for this kind of work. It means reading agendas for city council and county meetings across Cherokee and surrounding counties and flagging when something like this is coming up, so residents find out before a vote instead of after. If you care about data centers, surveillance technology, or how these decisions get made in our area, that is where to plug in.

Danielle Bell is also hosting an event with Peter Hubbard of the Public Service Commission on August 22. If you have questions about rates, infrastructure cost allocation, or who ends up paying for the buildout, that is the room to ask them.

One last thing worth repeating from the meeting. Do not be discouraged if you ask a question nobody on the panel can answer. Those are exactly the questions that need to be asked out loud, in public, on the record. When residents ask them, elected officials have to go back and figure out what the answer is going to be.

Thank you to Roy Taylor, who made this meeting happen and brought the speakers together.

Show up tonight.