The San Marcos City Council voted Tuesday night to prohibit data centers within city limits, Austin TV station KXAN reports.
The college town is in the epicenter of data center gold rush along I-35 between San Antonio and Austin. The heavily trafficked corridor is experiencing the what some experts have called the nation’s biggest boom in data center development.
Council’s ban passed with a 4-3 vote. Mayor Jane Hughson, who previously said she opposed a complete block data centers in the city, cast one of the “no” votes.
The amendment to ban the centers in San Marcos passed after council members reconsidered a proposed ban that failed in March. After that ban failed to pass, members of council filed an alternative proposal that called for stricter regulations designed to limit where data centers could be built so they would have less impact on nearby residents.
Under those proposed restrictions, data centers would have only been allowed in highly industrialized areas of the city, according to KXAN. The rules also would defined data centers within city code, helping officials distinguish the facilities from other industrial developments when reviewing future proposals.
Naturally, in a town known for the crystal-clear waters of the San Marcos River and San Marcos Springs — fed by the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies San Antonio — water conservation is on the minds of local residents. As such, the data centers would have been barred from using potable water. Additionally, the sites wouldn’t be allowed to exceed a 60-decibel noise limit.
“There’s just a large number of data centers coming in all at once, and none of our water planning factors in the projected demands,” Bobby Levenski, senior staff attorney for Save or Springs Alliance, told KXAN in a separate report.
At the time, San Marcos mayor Jane Hughson made it clear that she would never support an all-out ban data centers.
“I don’t want to cut them out forever, but I want it conditional use,” Hughson told KXAN in May. “And I want it to come to us.”
However, after increasing public pushback, council recently abandoned the proposed restrictions and this week reintroduced the amendment to ban data centers outright.
“We had heard for over a year just constant disapproval from our community and the disapproval just continued to grow,” San Marcos City Council Member Amanda Rodriguez told KXAN.
“It shows that we as a city can be selective about what we allow in our city and the root of that being, we just can’t handle it, whether it’s our infrastructure, whether it’s natural resources,” Rodriguez continued.
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