The ordinance had been proposed by Eddie Kirkley, Chesterfield County Council member for District 5 covering McBee and Plainview, and Derrick Outen, the County building codes director, County Attorney Coleman Bryant said at last month’s meeting.

At the April meeting, Kirkley said the moratorium piggybacks off of SC House Bill 5286, which had been introduced in February, adding, “They’re trying to pass it to this same date that we are, for the same reasons.”

Kirkley said in a phone interview, “There’s just been a lot of conversation around the state as a whole about data centers coming in.”

He said he saw the need to move forward with the emergency ordinance because, had the County undergone all three readings of the ordinance, “we could have seen some interest in that three-month period. We just wouldn’t have had our ordinance in place or our criteria on what we wanted it to look like.”

“This moratorium is just so we can get a barrier if we have to cross that bridge,” Kirkley added, “So we're ready — the County is ready.”

Ethan Foard — Council member District 3, Pageland — said over the phone, “Up until we put that moratorium in place, there was nothing we could do to stop someone from coming in and saying, ‘We’re going to put up a data center here.’ It was such a new concept, there was no regulation in place that would protect our citizens in any way.”

Kirkley said, “Chesterfield County has no barriers or mandate. The whole purpose of the moratorium is not to entertain data centers in the future, but to get some information: Pros and cons, to learn more about them, to learn more about their needs. That was the easiest way and the quickest way for us to start that process.”

The Chesterfield County Building Codes department will be heading up the information gathering, according to Kirkley, who explained, “It goes back to not having any kind of codes, any regulations or anything as far as this type of a project goes. We’re also in the middle of working on all of our business codes and ordinances, so it kind of falls hand in hand.”

Kirkley has done some digging of his own. “There are a couple different types of data centers I’ve read about,” he said. “In what research I have done, these data centers use a lot of power and a lot of water. There are a lot of variables going into that. There are employees, but they don’t hire many.”

He said if the County were to bring in a company that uses a lot of resources, his opinion is they would rather it be one “that hires 200 people from the community than one that comes in and hires very few people.”

Last June, Richmond County in North Carolina had announced in a statement that Amazon Web Services would invest about $10 billion to build a new data center campus in Rockingham’s Energy Way Industrial Park. The campus would take up 800 acres and add “at least 500 new high-skilled jobs over the next five years,” according to the statement.

Earlier this year, Marion County passed tax incentives for Stream Data Centers LP, which is proposing a 400-acre campus at Marion County Industrial Park, a more than $6 billion investment that is expected to add “more than 125 permanent, high-paying operational roles,” according to the company’s website. The company said its “intent is to hire locally for these roles.”

Kirkley said, “I hope they’ve done their research on what their needs or benefits are to it. That’s something I’ve found in my research: There are so many unknowns about these data centers that a lot of the communities that are dealing with it right now are pushing back. This moratorium is not so much to be opposed to data centers as it is so we can do all our research and make informed decisions on it.”

“We want to make sure we’re putting the right thing in Chesterfield County,” he said.