(The Center Square) – Caddo Parish commissioners sent two data center proposals to committee Monday, rejecting an effort to advance them to Thursday’s agenda.
Residents demanded greater transparency and parish attorneys warned that a proposed two-year moratorium cannot legally be imposed by resolution.
The debate followed lengthy public opposition to the projects and a warning from parish attorney Donna Frazier that Commissioner John-Paul Young’s proposed two-year development moratorium cannot be enacted through a resolution.
Young sought to move Resolutions 52 and 53 forward to Thursday’s regular meeting while also holding a Special Projects Committee meeting beforehand. That effort failed 8-3 before commissioners voted 11-0 to send both measures to the committee instead.
Resolution 53, a proposal by Young, seeks a two-year moratorium on new data center developments, expansions and tax benefits in unincorporated Caddo Parish. Resolution 52, proposed by Commissioner Ken Epperson, calls for environmental impact studies related to data center development.
Young, who voted last year for the parish’s data center payment-in-lieu-of-taxes framework, acknowledged Monday that residents and commissioners were left without information as the projects moved forward.
“We’ve all heard from a lot of citizens just now,” he said. “They were unanimous in their support for these resolutions.”
“The thing that unites them is that they are regular people who have been excluded from this process, the way many of us were excluded to a degree from this process by not having information,” the commissioner and mayoral candidate said before addressing his role in courting data center development.
“I regret not doing more to do that in the past,” he said. “I think that it is the appropriate thing for us to do now. We have a chance to correct course.”
Frazier, however, told commissioners that Resolution 53 cannot impose the proposed development moratorium.
“A moratorium cannot be enacted via resolution,” Frazier said, citing the parish charter. “A resolution does not have the force of law.”
Frazier said imposing a moratorium on a particular land use through an ordinance in an area without a master plan and zoning ordinances would violate the Louisiana Constitution and state law. She said establishing a master plan could provide a path toward regulating land uses and potentially allow some form of moratorium while that process is underway.
The legal distinction became significant as commissioners also questioned what their earlier approval of data center tax incentives actually accomplished.
Parish officials said the State Line Road project could have proceeded without the PILOT agreement. Without it, however, the project would not have received the tax incentives approved by the commission, although developers potentially could have pursued incentives through another avenue.
Commission President Greg Young defended his vote for the incentive agreement, saying he wanted businesses to know Northwest Louisiana welcomes investment.
“I want the whole wide world to know that our area is open for business,” he said, adding that he supports lawful incentives that encourage economic activity and create jobs.
Greg Young compared the trade-offs surrounding economic development to residents living near railroads and to the region’s support for Barksdale Air Force Base.
People in his neighborhood, he said, deal with railroad noise but accept the disruption because the railroad provides good-paying jobs. He said the region similarly embraced Barksdale despite the risks associated with hosting a military installation during the Cold War.
The commission president went even further, saying “There are people who had to make sacrifices, had to live with all the toxins. All those people live in Mooretown, all those people live in Queensborough. They have to deal with this every day, and we do so for the good of the whole.”
“All of us have to make sacrifices when it comes to progress. … There are always going to be sacrifices when it comes to progress. Let’s not ignore that fact,” he continued.
Earlier in the meeting, when members of the audience attempted to speak from their seats outside the time for public comments, Greg Young had them removed from the chamber.
Commissioner Chris Krackman pushed back against the way residents affected by the State Line Road project have sometimes been characterized during the debate.
Krackman said his primary concern is for people who already live around the development and cautioned against treating them as opponents of economic development because they object to the project’s effects.
“What we have is we have a set of folks … that had to listen to the beeping of a backhoe at 3:55 in the morning,” Krackman said.
He pointed specifically to the Bison family, which he said has lived on its property for 119 years and now faces a facility of 2 million to 3 million square feet nearby.
“They are pissed and they should be,” Krackman said. “You would be if you had this monstrosity being built in front of your home and it was waking you up and your children up at 3:55 in the morning.”
Krackman said his position was not about being for or against data centers.
“It’s the transparency issue that almost everybody has a problem with,” he said, noting that opposition has come from people across the political spectrum. “They feel disrespected that they’re not in on this conversation, and I can appreciate that.”
Epperson also said transparency was at the center of the dispute.
He told commissioners he recently visited a data center project in Boyce in Rapides Parish and contrasted the information he received there with Caddo’s experience.
“Transparency drives trust,” Epperson said, reading from information provided during the visit. “That’s why we are here today, because initially we weren’t transparent.”
Epperson said the parish “didn’t go about this in the right way” by failing to begin with residents and explain what was happening.
“The citizens have spoken,” Epperson said in support of moving the resolutions forward.
What Caddo can legally do remains unsettled. Frazier said the parish cannot impose the proposed land-use moratorium through Resolution 53 and would need to pursue planning and zoning to regulate development. The commission also cannot bind future commissions from considering incentives or other measures.
That leaves commissioners confronting two separate questions as the resolutions head to committee: how much authority Caddo has to restrict future data center development, and how much public assistance it should provide to encourage it.
