The City of San Antonio on Thursday passed its first significant restrictions on data center development, requiring each of the computing facilities to seek City Council approval on a case-by-case basis before construction can begin.
City Council approved the amendment to the city’s Unified Development Code (UDC) on a 9-2 vote, with District 9’s Misty Spears and District 10’s Mark Whyte — the council’s two conservatives — casting the dissenting votes.
In addition to requiring council approval for each data center, the code amendment also limits the development of such facilities to the city’s heavy industrial and commercial zones.
Additionally, the amendment gives council flexibility to require increased setbacks for certain facilities, depending on the surrounding area. An alternate proposal by Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones requiring a minimum setback of 1,000 feet was shot down during the session.
In her remarks, Jones described her visit to a data center this week, when she reflected on the homes surrounding it.
“Does anyone think that those homeowners’ property values increased when that data center showed up? It’s not likely,” Jones said. “It’s not likely that Redfin or Zillow will start advertising the distance to a data center as a selling point.”
With her proposed amendment, Jones suggested offering public hearings in order to address a common complaint community members have voiced at town halls and permit hearings — that they didn’t have a say before a data center was built in their backyard.
At a town hall hosted by Public Citizen and the Great Edwards Aquifer Alliance at Northwest Vista College earlier this month, one woman said she initially thought a warehouse was being constructed across the street from her home in Westover Hills.
In impassioned public comments, she spoke of the “perpetual daylight” that flooded through her windows from the center and lamented that she was no longer able to see the stars at night. Like many others who live next to data centers, she got her first chance to vocalize her opposition after the facility was already built, she added.
Instead of Jones’ proposed separate public hearings, the public will now have a chance to voice their opinion on each data center when facility representatives seek approval at city council sessions.
Representing a win for environmentalists, the approved UDC amendment forbids data center development over the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone.
Rachel Hanes, Policy Director of Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, had advocated for such protections relentlessly over the past year.
In her public comments Thursday, Hanes stated that requiring data centers to seek Specific Use Authorization was standard practice in a number of cities around the country, including Nashville, Phoenix and San Antonio’s Hill Country neighbor New Braunfels.
Randy Neuman, representing the Scenic Loop Helotes Alliance, cautioned City Council during public comment to consider the cumulative effect of the proliferation of data centers on the area’s environment, comparing it to trucks going over a bridge.
“Every truck might comply. Every truck might be perfectly legal. But as the number of trucks increases and the traffic patterns change, the question changes,” Neuman said. “It’s no longer simply, ‘Does this truck comply?’ It becomes, ‘Can the bridge carry the cumulative load?'”
Council considered two separate data center proposals originally offered up by San Antonio’s Development Services Department at Thursday’s meeting before Jones had offered up her own last week.
The plan council approved wasn’t the one favored by the data center industry. Business lobbyists at the meeting insisted that their preferred proposal was already a compromise, and any further restrictions would slow development or prompt tech companies to build their data centers in nearby Medina County instead.
Both original proposals would limit data centers to certain industrial and commercial-zoned neighborhoods in the city. However, the option with looser regulations would have allowed data center operators to build “by right” in such neighborhoods, meaning they wouldn’t be required to seek community or council approval before starting construction.
Until Thursday, data center operators have been able to build largely unfettered in San Antonio. The centers were zoned like any other commercial development, though environmental and neighborhood groups argue their potential environmental harms surpass those of many other commercial properties.
That relative lack of oversight has allowed data centers to proliferate throughout the city as the San Antonio-Austin corridor experiences the largest data center boom in the country.
San Antonio currently has roughly 40 data centers, 19 of which are in Councilman Ric Galvan’s District 6 on the West Side. Galvan has led the charge for stricter regulations since filing a formal request last October that council deliberate on the issue. A year later, this represents his first major regulatory victory as a council freshman.
Members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 60 union who spoke at the meeting cautioned against adopting stringent rules for data center development, warning the regulations could kill high-paying jobs. The members credited data centers for their personal changes of fortune and said data centers have been responsible for tripling union membership in the city over the past few years.
However, District 5 Councilwoman Teri Castillo cautioned that data centers power the artificial intelligence boom, which has contributed to mass layoffs across multiple industries.
“While we talk about the jobs it is producing, it is removing thousands of jobs in our community,” Castillo said, referring to reports of Microsoft offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 workers this week.
Castillo continued, directing her comments to the union members in hard hats who flooded the council chambers ahead of the vote.
“We have to keep the entire workforce in mind when we talk about these zoning items,” she said. “Again, I value the work of our laborers, but the solidarity spans the trades.”
Following the passage of the amendment, activists with Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance and Public Citizen celebrated winning the restrictions they had sought.
“We are pleased with the outcome because finally community members can weigh in on these data centers that will be built in their neighborhood when in the past, they never had that opportunity,” said DeeDee Belmares, Clean Energy Advocate in the Texas office of Public Citizen. “So, [a] big win for people who will be impacted by data center developments.”
Having achieved her mission of protecting the aquifer, Hanes told the Current “now, we can get some sleep.”
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