Palm Coast government isn’t waiting a year or six months to add restrictive rules on approving data centers in the city.
In a review of updates to its Land Development Code, the City Council on Tuesday agreed to new proposed language that its planners had added to the code that very morning, and further language added at council members’ request.
“The city currently does not permit data centers. The code is silent on it,” Senior Planner Michael Hanson told the council. “This proposed change to add data centers as a prohibited use is not more restrictive, since that use is not allowed by right within any zoning district, so we float the proposal for data centers as a prohibited use.”
The language defines data centers, and requires a supermajority vote of the council (or at least four of its five members) for a data center to be approved for construction in the city’s boundaries. No data centers could be permitted by right. And none could be built outside of areas zoned for industrial uses.
That makes the future data center in Town Center, scheduled to be operational in 2027, an exception that would not be repeated. The council in 2024 approved a change to the Town Center development order to enable the data center, just before a public backlash against data centers began to build momentum across the country.
Council member Ty Miller earlier this month had asked the city to mirror the County Commission’s moratorium on new data center developments until regulatory language could be updated to include data centers. The city administration moved fast, in essence making a moratorium unnecessary once the language is formally adopted. There are no new data centers in the city’s application queue.
From now on, data centers could be approved in certain areas, but only as a special exception, and only with a supermajority vote.
“At a minimum, it requires it to always come before council and requires a supermajority vote, so there’s a high bar to meet right there,” Miller said. “I was trying to potentially still allow for low-impact projects that could be defined in the same way, but are not really what we’re fearful of, but this still allows for that, so I’m fine with it in this way.”
The council considers the data center currently under construction in Town center low-impact.
“If we had the cable landing station come again, that’s not a 1 million square foot facility,” Miller said, “it uses a closed-loop [water] system, so it’s not using massive amounts of water. That isn’t the same thing as a hyperscale. But it’s still under this would require a special exception.”
City Council member Theresa Pontieri won agreement from her colleagues that even with a supermajority vote, data center approvals must be accompanied by a set of conditions that would require closed-loop systems, that would rely on their own energy grid, and would include provisions against noise pollution.
“They should be as responsibly developed as the cable landing station is,” Pontieri said. The wording was added.
“As the data centers evolve, new technologies come on board. So I think that’s why it is best to defer to City Council to make that decision,” Planning Manager Phong Nguyen told the council.
He spelled out the new definition of data centers, included in the Land Development Code’s glossary: “A physical facility that houses a centralized network of servers, data storage drives, and networking equipment. It acts as the factory or backbone of the internet, providing the infrastructure required to process, store, or distribute digital information, cloud applications and artificial intelligence models. A similar use, such as a cable landing station, is also permissible under this definition.”
At the beginning of last Tuesday’s discussion during the data center segment, Hanson’s statement that data centers are a prohibited use in the city may have been a surprise to anyone familiar with the data center under construction off Town Center Boulevard, south of Royal Palms Parkway. The history of that data center requires its own explanation.
On Feb. 6, 2024, the City Council approved an amendment to the Town Center development order (called a “planned unit development”) explicitly to allow data centers in the business area of those 1,600 acres. The allowance was nestled among many others and was not discussed openly.
Not only did the city approve the construction of that data center–a cable-landing station for up to six undersea data cables that will emerge on South 6th Street in Flagler Beach. But aside from the amendment to the PUD, the city did so with near-complete secrecy, denying repeated requests for information about the center until last April.
The DC Blox facility avoided public regulatory oversight in two ways. First, with the blessing of the city and the county, it took advantage of a provision in state law that allows companies up to two years of secrecy if the company qualifies as an economic development project of a certain category. Second, the facility kept its footprint below 50,000 square feet. That removed the trigger of required public review by the city’s planning board. The facility was approved administratively through the planning department.
The city cleared the way for the Town Center facility under then-Mayor David Alfin, who also stayed mum, though he was fully aware of it. FlaglerLive revealed the plans when DC Blox worked with Flagler Beach government to secure right-of-way landing zones. Flagler Beach declined to conduct those negotiations in the dark. The discussions all took place before the Flagler Beach City Commission.
The claim that “the city currently does not permit data centers” required broader context. In response to written questions today, Hanson and Nguyen wrote back that “the Cable Landing Station was able to be approved as its use falls under an agreement approved by City Council which allows for departures from the City’s Land Development Code.”
Those departures may no longer be allowed for data centers. “The current draft of the LDC’s Chapter 3 no longer proposes to grant Data Centers as a permitted right or via a standard special exception in any zoning district,” the planners said.
As always, there may be caveats: What about data centers in the planned Radyent “westward expansion,” which would develop 22,000 housing units in 22,000 acres, along with large commercial and industrial set-asides? That master-planned development order, or MPD, is in the works.
It’s a matter of timing, the planners say–the sort of timing the council should be aware of. “If the current draft of the LDC is approved and not modified prior to the approval of the MPD of the westward expansion, then data centers would not be permitted,” they wrote. “If the MPD for the Westward Expansion is approved prior to the current draft of the LDC being approved, then data centers would only be permitted if in the MPD Development Agreement’s permitted uses. Alternatively, if the proposed footnote of LDC Sec. 3.03.02 Table 3-4 is amended to include MPD as a potential zoning district, then the Westward Expansion could list data centers within its permitted use list, then data centers would also be permitted. The potential timing relates to how the City handles nonconformities with its LDC.”
The following is a draft of the Land Development Code’s third chapter. It is still a work in progress:
LDC Draft Chapter 3 - 6.9.26 - Redline post workshop -draft watermark (2)
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