PRINCE FREDERICK, Md. — Calvert County will continue its work on a text amendment regarding data centers, as per the March 10 Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) meeting.
The Department of Planning and Zoning presented a second version of draft text amendments at the meeting, hoping to put guidance in place for any future data centers that may want to come to Calvert County.
The text amendments will be added to the zoning ordinance in the county to give these centers specific laws and guidelines they have to follow in order to be considered in Calvert County. Planning and Zoning first presented the text amendments at the Feb. 10 meeting, at the request of the BOCC.
Currently, Calvert County’s zoning rules don’t have any language specific around data centers. This can create uncertainty and ambiguity around new types of businesses coming in, especially industrial companies or newer technologies like data centers.
Data centers in Calvert County have been hotly debated in the last few weeks after a job was posted by AWS for a data center senior construction manager. The favored amendment, option C, reads:
Commissioner Mike Hart, who represents the Lusby district currently in talks for a data center location, expressed reservations about adopting a text amendment before more is known about data centers’ impacts on the community and the environment.
“We’ve has businesses come here before that don’t have a designation. That doesn’t mean they’re illegal, they just don’t have a designation, and we don’t know what to do with them,” Commissioner Hart said, explaining his concerns that signing off on a text amendment would legitimize data centers before the county is ready. “There’s still so much we can’t begin to know about this.”
Planning and Zoning Director Jason Brinkley said Calvert has already put more parameters around data centers than most places in Maryland, and his team wanted to make sure there was specific code for them — otherwise, data centers could, for example, meet the definition of a warehouse.
“If we put some version of these conditions on, I’m not sure there’s a more strict county in Maryland,” Brinkley said. “We’ve taken good steps, the question is what do we do next to make sure the public is protected.”
The BOCC opted to have Planning and Zoning bring its text amendment to the Planning Commission for review, and then return to the board at a future meeting. You can view the full text amendment presentation online.
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This data center is a foregone conclusion and this is just to give the public the perception that these commissioners understand, or care, about the impacts of data centers. No groundwater wells and “non-potable water” coupled with the fact that the County uses spray irrigation for their effluent likely means whomever builds this data center is going to use the effluent from the County wastewater plant in Lusby and the County will have them pay for that.