Mayor: craft mill site nearing final cleanup; city preparing zoning rules for data centers

Mayor Matt Zacher said the craft mill site is in the final stages of demolition and cleanup and that owners and tenants are increasing onsite employment.

"The buildings are down. They just got to clean up the rubble getting the rebar out of the cement," Zacher said, noting owners are bringing in subtenants and increasing employees. He said the city does not own the mill property and will exercise control primarily through zoning and building permits when tenants seek to occupy or change uses.

Zacher said city staff and councilors are working to draft clearer ordinance language to define what constitutes a data center so the municipality can evaluate prospective uses in advance rather than reacting after tenants have arrived. "We don't want to wait until after they come in and then start putting in ordinances because then we can get ourselves in trouble," he said.

The mayor praised local utility operations at the site (named in the interview as Queco Consolidated Water and Power) and said the city prefers to have strong private operators on the site to support manufacturing and other employers. He also said the council is reviewing and selectively amending sections of the zoning code that were seen as overly restrictive rather than replacing the whole code at once.

Zacher gave a high-level sense of increased employment at the site but the transcript contains an unclear employee count (garbled as "100 315"), and he did not provide a definitive headcount or tenant list during the interview.