Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Land Use Data Center topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Residents press Sioux Falls council over proposed data center, demand more transparency and a ballot option
Summary
Multiple residents urged the council to halt or impose conditions on a proposed 500 MW data center, raising concerns about energy use, water, health effects, local housing and transparency; organizers said they have a petition to take rezoning to a public vote.
Dozens of Sioux Falls residents used the public-comment portion of the Jan. 20 council meeting to press elected officials on a proposed large data center and to demand more transparency and a public referendum on rezoning.
Sarah Coop, who opened the public-comment portion on the topic, said she objects to the project on several grounds, including public-health and environmental risks tied to electromagnetic fields (EMF), unknown ownership, and water and electricity consumption. “We don’t know who’s owning it. We don’t know who’s utilizing it,” Coop said, asserting concerns about EMF and other health risks; the transcript records the concerns as public comment, not technical findings.
Susan Downs, a Sioux Falls resident and Sioux Valley Energy customer, presented electricity-bill excerpts to explain rate drivers and offered a lay estimate about large data-center loads; she said a 500-megawatt data center operating at maximum capacity could equal roughly 226,000 household-equivalents of electricity per day, as a way to illustrate scale. Alex Zapprei asked whether the project would fund local generation or efficiency investments and urged a clause requiring the data center to invest in offsetting capacity such as solar, batteries or wind.
Several speakers, including John Coonery and Samantha Scarlata (chair of Let Sioux Falls Vote), described organizing petitions and community outreach to place rezoning tied to a data center on the ballot. Scarlata said petition organizers want the public to decide after a prior council vote she said was 7–0. “This is unacceptable,” she said, and added the group is pursuing a ballot option.
Other commenters expressed broader quality-of-life concerns, potential housing-market impacts and distrust of how information about the project was shared with residents. Councilors acknowledged the public comments; staff and council also answered some procedural questions during prior agenda items, but no additional council action was taken on the data-center petitions at this meeting.
Context and caveats: speakers raised technical and health claims during public comment; the transcript records those claims as opinions or concerns by residents. The article does not validate technical or health assertions about EMF, ‘pulse weapons’ or other contested claims; those claims require scientific or regulatory verification beyond the meeting record.
Next step: Petition organizers indicated they are pursuing signatures to place rezoning tied to a proposed data center on a public ballot; residents asked the council for more public engagement and possible conditions on any development.
