CHAMPAIGN – A Champaign County group organizing against data centers held its second teach in Monday night.
The group – called Resist AI Data Centers in Champaign County – was launched last month to push against data center development in the county.
Antonia Herbstreit helped start the group. “My goal is disseminating information, educating people as to the ramifications of the industry,” she said.
Champaign County currently has a moratorium on data center development until April of next year while a task force meets to develop new guidelines for future development.
Herbstreit hopes the group’s efforts will encourage more people to attend the Data Center Activities Task Force and other county government meetings to give their input.
“People when they hear about the destruction that this industry brings to their way of life, they’re on board,” she said.
She was inspired to start the group after attending a task force meeting.
“When you do public input at the task force meeting, nobody answers your questions. You do public input. You speak, and they’re all silent,” Herbstreit added. “So there’s no response, so you could ask a lot of questions. And they are not answered, so we had to find the answers ourselves.”
The task force has been meeting since March and have had experts on water efficiency, engineering, sanitary sewers and the environment present. Officials representing the data center industry and officials from Aurora, which previously had a data center moratorium while developing their own guidelines, have also presented to the task force.
The task force will review the final draft at their meeting on August 31.
The issue of home rule
At the Resist AI Data Center group’s teach in, residents asked questions of Champaign County Executive’s Office Director of Administration Michelle Jett and members of the task force.
Last month, the group was considering placing an issue establishing Champaign County as home rule on the ballot. The deadline for that was August 3.
Although the group has dropped the idea, it would give the county the authority to permanently ban data centers, which many residents expressed support for at Monday’s meeting.
“Champaign County is not home rule,” Jett said. “You have to be home rule in order to have the legal authority to outright ban some kind of business or industry.”
The most the county can do with its current authority is the yearlong moratorium, she said.
“The reason the moratorium is acceptable now is because it has a specific timeframe,” Jett explained, “and it has a specific legal intent: to draw up the ordinance.”
She also said that the moratorium could potentially be extended if the county needs more time to create the ordinance, but even that would put the county in legal limbo.
Several communities across the country have found themselves in legal disputes with data center developers over similar issues.
A Kentucky town near Mammoth Cave National Park was recently sued by an artificial intelligence company over the town’s yearlong moratorium. The company wants to build a data center near the entrance of the national park. A city in southwest Ohio is also facing a lawsuit from a real estate developer over its own data center moratorium.