Hello there! It has been a busy few months for us for a multitude of reasons. Mostly job and personal life stuff but the entire planet is also really messed up so you can probably relate. You can always stay more up-to-date with us if you check out the podcast! We do it most Sundays at noon. It’s like church with more guilt and none of the tax write offs. You can also find me vague-skeeting on Bluesky.

One of the major projects we are working on is opposition to a data center that an Israeli company plans to build in Mandan, ND. My hometown. Today there was a public meeting held at the high school in Mandan with members of the city commission and their planning and zoning committee. While I will wait to go over more specific details when the minutes of the meeting are available, I wanted to get down some initial thoughts and ideas. I will also be discussing it, at length, in two weeks on the podcast. I am off next week to watch wrasslin’

The purpose of this meeting was for the committee to put forward their recommendations for a code to be written into law regulating various details about data centers built within the city limits of Mandan, North Dakota. The recommendation, which they did make and vote for, will be put forward to the Mandan City Commission to be reviewed. The long and short of it was that there was zero language protecting Mandan against data centers before today, and now we have at least something. The code itself was amended, during the meeting, to a more rigorous standard.

There was much concern by the committee about the law being too restrictive that it would be struct down in court. There was also much concern about the upcoming state legislative session and how they could possibly decide to pass legislation to prevent moratoriums on data centers at the city level. Chairman Robinson even commented that he didn’t think the state session would, “Do us any favors.”

I will try to find a full length video of the meeting and carve out some of the moments I liked when the public comment opened. You can see the original writing of the code here. My favorite part is when an impassioned speaker, that I may be friends and co-workers with, spoke plainly to the committee and condemned them for needing a dozen police officers to protect them from nobody at this meeting.

Some of the things that were changed from the draft in the link above were changing the sound standards. They originally had them at 55/50 DBa for day and night sounds respectively, but it was amended down to 45/40 DBa, respectively. There will be a section added that no city official or contractor will be allowed to sign and NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with the developer. A setback zone was brought up several times and also forgotten about several times during the meeting. While I thought they had agreed on a half-mile set back zone, then language appeared to say five hundred feet. That is the zone where, from the property line, nothing but landscaping can be built. A measure will be added to use PFA-free cooling. There were various language corrections about ensuring the developer would shoulder the cost of testing, as well as ensuring that the city would find the testing agencies and not the developer. There were other small items but I will wait for the meetings.

I have several concerns about legal battles that could come out of this, including from our own state of North Dakota. Data Centers have billions of dollars behind them and that can go a long way in politics in a small state. If our city and county legislatures are concerned about what our state legislatures will sell us out for, that concerns me. We need to be very mindful of what our state representatives say and who pays their bills. Mandan still does not have a city planner, we have a third party agency. There is no job listing on the City of Mandan website for a City Planner at this time. Aside from our own hostile state government who would love to sell this land to the highest bidder, we have the developer themselves, Stark Power. That impassioned speaker poignantly stated that corporations have one goal, and it’s to make money. The commission was assuming that Stark Power, or any other applicant would work with the city in good faith. They simply will not, they will see this just as another obstacle for them to destroy. The “punitive” part of the code is almost non-existent. Who will stop them if they decide, “We’ll just bring in our crews and start work while we spend the next five years in court?”

I don’t see any of the cops standing around at high school chewing bubblegum standing up to an Israeli company any time soon.

More to come when I have the minutes and other files and such! Kisses~ Justin