Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Zoning Data Centers topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Bridgewater panels recommend ordinance to restrict high-intensity data centers
Summary
Planning and council committees recommended a zoning amendment that would ban large "high-intensity" data centers across town and add criteria (electrical and water demand, facility size) to trigger the restriction; the board approved a recommendation to the Town Council while members urged follow-up edits on size thresholds and monitoring.
Merilee Hunt, chair of the Community and Economic Development Committee, opened a joint public hearing and read the ordinance's stated purpose: "The purpose of this ordinance is to protect the public health, safety and welfare of the residents of the Town of Bridgewater by ensuring that land uses placing significant and continuous demands on municipal infrastructure are appropriately regulated." The proposal, DFY26-016, would define and limit "high intensity data centers," including thresholds tied to water and electrical demand and facility size.
Several board members and members of the public urged changes to the numeric thresholds. Janet Hansen (Pleasant Street) asked why the draft uses 25,000 square feet as the facility-size trigger and suggested lower numbers such as 5,000 or 10,000 square feet, saying, "I personally think it could be smaller." Public commenters also recommended adding measures tied to megawatt usage rather than floor area alone and opposed permitting the centers by special permit in some cases.
Planning-board members noted the draft contains multiple ways a facility could be captured (for example, electrical demand above 5 megawatts or water use above 10,000 gallons per day) and said that, while they would forward the ordinance as written, the Town Council could refine the footprint thresholds. The planning board voted to recommend DFY26-016 to the Town Council (planning-board side recorded vote: 5 in favor, 0 against). The Community and Economic Development committee also voted to recommend the ordinance to the council with the expectation that council-level edits (including possible reductions to the 25,000-square-foot threshold) may follow.
Next steps: the Town Council will receive the planning board and CED recommendations; board members urged a legal review of state-level preemption issues and suggested staff prepare potential edits on facility-size and operational-monitoring language before the council takes final action.
