Overview:
- Council member Gabriela Santiago-Romero requests a draft ordinance to pause new data center permits until March 2028, while Detroit develops zoning rules.
- The proposal follows a March council resolution urging a two-year moratorium, on which Mayor Mary Sheffield has taken no action.
- The City Planning Commission is working on a permanent data center zoning policy, with a goal of completion by Dec. 31
A City Council member says she’s pursuing “an added layer of protection” against the prospect of data center developments in Detroit while the city works to craft and adopt a zoning policy.
District 6 Council member Gabriela Santiago-Romero, in a Sept. 29 memorandum, directed the council’s legal division to draft “an interim zoning moratorium to pause permitting for any new enterprise AI data centers” until formal city regulations to govern use are in place.
The request, Santiago-Romero said, would impose an 18-month ban to effectively achieve the two-year moratorium that council members urged Mayor Mary Sheffield to put in place in the spring. She’s asking for a “pause” that will run until March 17, 2028, according to the document.
“The community has been waiting for that (a moratorium). There are no protections in place and this feels like what I have to do,” she told BridgeDetroit. “Let’s pause on this. We made it clear where we stand.”
Santiago-Romero said that her request isn’t “totally out of the ordinary,” since she’s heard of other cities in the state and across the country taking similar steps to grant their municipalities dedicated time to develop regulatory frameworks for data centers.
Notable examples include New Orleans, LA; which approved an “interim zoning district” to pave the way for the approval, Tulsa, OK; Denver, CO; and Lansing, Flint, and Pontiac, Mich., the memo notes.
In March, Detroit’s City Council approved a resolution spearheaded by District 3 Council Member Scott Benson, urging Sheffield’s office and relevant city departments – the Buildings, Safety Engineering, and Environmental Department and Planning and Development Department – to refrain from issuing new data center permits until Detroit could gain a full understanding of the types, infrastructure requirements, and environmental concerns before they are developed. Advocacy groups and state and federal representatives sent a letter to the city in July, seeking adoption of the temporary moratorium, Santiago-Romero’s memo notes.
John Roach, a spokesman for Sheffield, told BridgeDetroit Friday that the mayor still hasn’t made a determination on the council’s spring request for a moratorium. In an Aug. 5 analysis, city planner Eric Fazzini noted that while the mayor’s office has not implemented the council’s requested moratorium, the administration “effectively paused the permitting of new principal use data centers while the issue is being considered by both the CPC, City Council and others.”
The administration did not immediately weigh in on whether the council has the authority to impose a temporary moratorium. The legal path forward for Santiago-Romero’s proposal is unclear.
Santiago-Romero’s request is separate from an ongoing effort by the City Planning Commission to draft a zoning policy for data center developments. The commission began drafting an ordinance in the summer following a series of meetings of a cross-sector working group convened by Benson, who said the goal is to have a data center zoning policy approved by the council by Dec. 31.
Marcell Todd, director of the City Planning Commission, said in a text message Friday that there were no new updates to share on the progress of the draft zoning policy.
Santiago-Romero reiterated to BridgeDetroit Monday that the council doesn’t have the power to impose a moratorium. That’s only done via the mayor’s office. But, a temporary pause is possible, she stressed, since the legislative body approves ordinances and her memo seeks to ensure something is in place until the formal zoning policy for data centers is adopted.
“Council approves ordinances and (Sheffield) could veto it if she wanted to,” she said Monday. “This would be via council’s power through zoning, which council has the power to regulate.”
But Santiago-Romero added that she isn’t hopeful about the initiative. She’s reached out to fellow council members in recent days and said the majority support a focus on the zoning amendment already in motion with the planning commission rather than her memo for an ordinance proposal.
The process of getting an ordinance to the table for a vote, she added, also would be more intensive than she expected. It would call for a rezoning process, with the planning commission, public hearings and council subcommittee review, which would likely take months, she said.
“I’m just trying to figure out how to actually do what we said (we wanted to do) since the mayor wasn’t going to move forward with a moratorium,” Santiago-Romero said.
Benson said Friday that the City Planning Commission is continuing its work to create a policy that is “well thought out and defensible, because we’re doing this to protect our residents.”
“Because of the sensitive nature and the litigious nature of that industry, you want to make sure you’re bulletproof,” he said.
A planning commission analysis this summer determined that Detroit has at least six existing data centers operating as a principal use. City officials have stressed that Detroit cannot accommodate “hyperscale” facilities, which start at 250 acres.
This summer, the council approved a separate data center-focused resolution opposing the unmitigated use of Detroit’s water resources to cool data centers without certain safeguards.
That resolution, led by Council Member Mary Waters, notes that data centers use water to cool down and “consume a tremendous amount of resources,” overburden local infrastructure, including water treatment facilities, and harm aquatic life.
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