Farmington residents sue city over proposed data center campus

Farmington residents alarmed by the prospect of a sprawling data center campus in their rural neighborhood dug into the details and the background of the developer.

They traded articles showing the vast reserves of water and electricity needed to sustain data centers. They implored the Farmington City Council to stop the project.

And now, unsuccessful on those fronts, they’re taking their battle to court.

“We just feel like we’re being steamrolled,” resident Cathy Johnson said.

City officials have touted the jobs and tax revenue that could follow the proposed Farmington Technology Park, a campus of 12 data center buildings across some 340 acres, plans show.

The City Council greenlit a contract with Tract, a Colorado-based developer, in a 4-1 vote on Dec. 2.

Three days earlier, Johnson and seven other Farmington and Castle Rock residents filed suit against the city of Farmington.

The group, organized under the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, is asking a Dakota County judge to issue an order temporarily suspending city officials from negotiating further with Tract. The city has not yet responded to the lawsuit in court.

The residents’ central argument against the project outlined in the Nov. 29 complaint hinges on where it began: annexation.

In April, Farmington officials approved the annexation of a swath of land in nearby Castle Rock Township that the local school district has owned for two decades. That property, along with the nearby Fountain Valley Golf Club, is the site Tract is eyeing for the vast campus.

The City Council voted in November to rezone the proposed site from an assortment of uses — among them residential, business and agricultural — to mixed-used commercial industrial, paving the way for a data center.

The residents suing the city contend Farmington violated a deal with Castle Rock Township when it changed the comprehensive plan designation of the property it annexed to mixed-used commercial industrial without the township’s consent.

That deal, called the Orderly Annexation Agreement, has been in place for years and is supposed to ensure municipalities “have some degree of mutual control” over annexation arrangements, said Andrew Tiede, Castle Rock Township’s attorney.

Tiede isn’t representing the residents suing the city; they’re currently representing themselves. But he said the township opposes Farmington’s decision to change the land’s designation — a position he elaborated on in an Oct. 17 letter to the Metropolitan Council.

The proposed data center, he wrote, would have “an adverse effect” on a shared aquifer, Castle Rock’s water supply and the quiet neighborhood dotted with wildlife. An average medium-sized data center consumes around 300,000 gallons of water a day, or about as much as 1,000 U.S. households, according to one estimate from the California-based Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The letter, sent before the City Council acted, asked the Met Council to deny the proposed land-use change.

Tiede said the regional agency told him it preferred to stay out of the issue and have the municipalities resolve it. He declined to share the city’s response.

After the Minnesota Star Tribune contacted Mayor Joshua Hoyt and City Attorney Leah Koch about the residents’ lawsuit, City Administrator Lynn Gorski said the city can’t comment on pending litigation.

In previous interviews, Farmington economic and planning officials and a Tract executive addressed many of the livability concerns residents enumerated in the complaint — from their fear the data center’s characteristic hum will disrupt sleep to worry the project will slash property values.

The officials said a set of guidelines will govern the project, including standards intended to muffle noise and setbacks that will place the buildings a few hundred feet from homes.

And they contended it’s difficult to predict a data center’s impact on property values. (The city and Tract haven’t announced the client that will use the proposed center.)

But their reassurances haven’t satisfied many residents.

Drea Doffing, one person suing the city, contends the project is an example of illegal “spot zoning” that creates an island of one sort of land classification — in this case, one that permits a high-powered data center — that’s inconsistent with the surrounding area.

“I mean, my God, this is enormous,” Doffing said. “The ones you see are usually … on the outer skirts of the cities with nothing around [them].”

Doffing pointed out that data centers can be windfalls for municipalities and property owners. A purchase agreement shows that the local school board — the longtime owner of the land Farmington annexed from Castle Rock — agreed in January to sell nearly 200 acres to Tract for $18 million.

City Council Member Steve Wilson has repeatedly voted against the data center project, citing concerns about its size, proximity to homes, length of construction and possible strain on water resources.

“The natural resource part of it cannot be overlooked, but it’s not just unique to Farmington,” Wilson said.

The Met Council, he added, should take a hard look at the region-wide pressure multiple data centers could place on water resources.

Residents opposed to the data center are now calling their group the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development in an effort to widen their reach, as plans for such facilities get underway in Faribault, Cannon Falls, Chaska and Rosemount.

And those suing the city point to environmental concerns the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources previously raised about the project.

In a September letter, the DNR complimented Farmington officials for some aspects of the proposed data center, like a plan to install water reuse systems.

But the letter notes the city had failed to provide “specific information” about the data center’s impact on groundwater levels and the nearby Vermillion River. The DNR states that one scenario of the proposed development could more than double the volume of water the city currently uses.

In response, the city said it plans to review the need for additional water and sewer infrastructure following an ongoing analysis, documents state, adding that officials will complete further studies if more capacity is required.

The residents suing the city contend those answers are inadequate, and they’re asking a judge to prohibit the city and Tract from entering into a contract before “comprehensive water sustainability analyses” are complete and the DNR approves them.

The city declined to comment on questions about the allegations, including whether those studies are underway and at what point in the process they’re required.

Whatever happens with the suit, many residents say they plan to keep fighting. Johnson penned letters to the Metropolitan Council and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in an effort to halt the project. The state, she wrote Ellison, needs to better regulate these projects.

“We need ... big-picture protection from the unruly proliferation of hyper-scale data centers,” she wrote, “especially when local municipalities are ill-equipped to regulate them.”