The Pima County Board of Supervisors will not move forward with a public health analysis that would have considered the health and water impacts from Project Blue, a developing data center in Pima County.
County officials say that there isn’t enough time to implement the due diligence ordinance for heavy water and power users ahead of the looming Christmas Day closing date, during Tuesday’s meeting.
The due diligence ordinance was passed after the Supervisors approved Project Blue in a 3-2 vote in June.
Sam Brown, Chief Civil Deputy Attorney for Pima County said if the Board approved implementation of the ordinance, it would’ve been applied retroactively, but that would’ve been unlikely.
“I think there’s also some practical concerns that there was information not known at the time that the Board of Health made this recommendation around when closing would occur,” Brown said.
County Administrator Jan Lesher echoed the concern for timing.
Jennifer Allen, Supervisor of District 3, added the item to this week’s agenda, after a unanimous recommendation that was made by the Pima County Board of Health.
“We were discussing the health department framework they’re developing in order to comply with and participate in future due diligence processes and the motion was made that we should do this for now for Project Blue,” Allen said of an October meeting.
Allen says the policy was aimed at making sure the county wasn’t in a position to make decisions without sufficient information.
“To help us understand the impacts of economic development projects that are going to utilize large amounts of water and energy, what those impacts will be on many levels,” she said.
“I am disappointed but not surprised that we face another roadblock from our lawyers and from county administration on trying to mitigate what we know will be unprecedented impact to our region because of the data center that we are considering,” said Andres Cano, Supervisor of District 5 at Tuesday’s meeting.
Allen said that although the county is focused on Project Blue, she believes that there needs to be broader attention on data centers throughout the region.
“The amount of energy that this would draw and the consequences on rate payers, on air quality, on water consumption, I would be shocked if all of the data centers that are in negotiations would all be air-cooled,” she said. “We just simply cannot sustain data centers at the level at which they’re gaining momentum.”
Allen noted that she will continue to explore other options to stop Project Blue.
The end user of the data center is still unknown, as is the water source for the project.
This week, The Arizona Daily Star reported that Amazon Web Services had pulled out of serving as the operator of the Project Blue data center due to the developer’s change of plans to use air cooling instead of water cooling for the center’s services.
Allen said that the project has changed from what was presented to the board in June.
