City Council/Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

provide information that staff researched, and provide a city attorney opinion on whether data centers can be banned or not, and then to receive by that direction back to staff. So tonight I mentioned briefly the Planning Commission. Since this is a joint work session, the role of the Planning Commission tonight is no different than any other night for an item where the city council would be the ultimate or the final decision-making body. And that is that we would request that the Planning Commission be a part of the discussion, act in an advisory role, provide their input and opinions to the city council. And then ultimately, the city council is requested to provide that policy direction back to staff. We understand that with four council members

So if we were to go with proceed with the ban of the use of data centers, right? At the front of this, you defined it as was laid out by federal guidelines, it looked like. I don't want there to be a way for it to come under any other name. So I just have some concerns if there's any... tight language that we could do that would make it so that who knows in two years what they're going to decide these things are called, especially with all the negative things that are happening. So I have some concerns along those lines. And I think this joint question that I was going to ask maybe comes to how we can come up with better ways to do that. But you also talked about the ethics. For me, that is a big concern. Look at what we do for housing. You want to figure out how to maximize the allowed people in a house. So if we're going to give up the mass amounts of land that these things would require, There a way to specify some sort of jobs per acre threshold similar to how we have like a You know like what what the allowed housing is that way there's a little bit of built-in protection as well if it comes under a different name Okay, is this going to provide this many jobs per acre? Oh, it's not can't pass so Those are sort of my questions about that and then the other question that is now coming up a lot so now there's a bunch of people who are having home versions of these, right? So we may say there's no land in Oakley that can use that, but I, as a rate payer, right? PG&E's ripping me off, Tesla's, we have Tesla's batteries and PG&E's not giving us any money. So I could say, oh, you know what? I've got room on the side of my house. I'm going to put one on the home version of data centers that they're now coming out with. So what is the impact of 1,000 of those? And we don't have anything in our ordinance that sort of addresses that residential concern. So those are some of the questions. Oh, and then also on the Oakley Logistics Center, you said currently it has uses established. But if any of those uses moved out, If there wasn't a banner if we didn't take any of these other actions Technically a data center could take one of those uses right because it's not like our bridge had specific where it's spelled out that it can't be in there Does that make sense what I'm asking all those questions? Perfect. Okay. Great. Those are my questions

Yeah, so great questions. For the first one, absolutely. If that were the option, if that were the direction of the council to come back with an ordinance banning data centers, it would be much more than just data center. We would provide definitions if there was any. catch-all definition so that they couldn't slip through with a different name. So it would really describe the use and how the use operates. That would be the key. And if you were to look at that Monterey Park a ballot measure. They kind of do that there. I think they limit it to a certain acreage, but it's more than just data centers. So they define it in there. We would do the same. As far as the jobs required, that would be a new thing for us. I don't think we have any other uses that do that. So that would be something I'd want to discuss more with the team here if that's something that we'd have the potential to do. It would be unique to that use. Home version data center is not something we've even thought about, to be completely honest. OLC, that would be the same as any other property here. if the moratorium were to expire. So no different. So yeah, for instance, if the moratorium were to expire and there was no additional ban, someone could potentially come and file for an unclassified use to have data center defined. And then us decide, well, you know, CUP and light industrial, whatever it may be. However, OLC, I believe, has its own zoning, similar to Bridgehead Industrial Project. So that would probably require an extra step, amending that or something along those lines, as opposed to just an unclassified use. But yeah, great questions. Sorry I don't have answers for the home one. That's completely new.

No, yeah. And it is new. It's a new technology. But I just worry like, OK, we're doing the step to say we do the step to ban this. But then there's 2,000 homeowners who do it. I can't imagine living next to that would necessarily also have any. I imagine it would have impacts on people. So potentially, maybe we need to look at that eventually, too. Cool. Thank you.

Thank you. Vice Chair Harvey?

Thank you. I wanted to ask a question and also make a small observation. The question I want to ask is how much do we think that a ballot measure might cost for us if we do decide that? That would be the first question. The second is please consider designating all data centers as H2, heavy industrial. Don't let them have our water. Please consider that. Thank you.

Council Member Shah or Eileen? I have both names on here, so I'm not sure which one.

It's me. So I just have one question for now. If we do move forward with a permanent ban and we need to have specific findings, is that going to be something that the city attorney works on with you, or are we going to need to determine what those findings would be?

Maybe I can answer that. I think consistent with practice, we would propose language. I would want to obviously work on that and present that to you. So certainly I could do that, and then you could add or subtract anything. Another option consistent with practice, this is a workshop. But if you give direction tonight, we can come back and formally introduce an ordinance, bring it to the commission, bring it to the council. Or we can do kind of a focused workshop on whatever direction you give us. So if you want, let's say, a ban ordinance, We can give a draft of that in a workshop format, which would allow you more leeway to give us direction. Then we can take that draft, take your direction, and actually go through the formal introduction process. So that's at your pleasure as a council.

I have always said I wanted this as done as quickly as possible. So I think having you provide something would be fine in my eyes. I just want to make sure that it's very strongly like no loopholes, nobody following. Like Council Member Williams said, I had those in my notes as well, like making sure that we aren't banning data centers. We're banning what a data center is. And so that way, if they come back with something by another name, And also, you know, it's the size is a concern for me. In the staff report, it said large. I want to just have it across the board, and I can give that after public comment. But my question was, you know, we will have some, obviously we always have some direction to give, but I think I would rather you bring us something.

Yes, and responding to that comment as well as Council Member Williams' comment, We can define the term data center, but define it very specifically and very broadly so that if people try to come back with different names, those would fall within our definition. So if we use our definition, but we have a very inclusive, exhaustive enumeration of what a data center is, then legally that will encompass the prohibition, and it shouldn't allow people to come up with a different name, because we're going to be describing what they are. So we have some leeway in using the term data center, but I'm sensitive to the issues you both have raised.

Commissioner Ireland.

So on that same topic, I know we're talking about definition, data center by another name. Is it possible to not just look at defining what it is? I know in the federal definition it was a primary use. But also look at objective criteria, the external effects of what what a data center is. Because it's really primarily what sounds like public comment is it's the water use, the noise, the power, and also environmental risk for battery and fuel storage backup systems. So not just looking at defining what a data center is, but also what the external effects of what it is operating from an objective criteria standpoint in any kind of ordinance. Is that possible? as a way to make sure it's not an R&D center that's really this. It's not a research center or something like that.

Yes. And that falls in line with my previous comments. And we would very carefully enumerate those objective factors, Commissioner Nyland, that you mentioned. So we would absolutely do that. And again, what I know from my experience drafting ordinances with this council and your predecessor councils is sometimes it's good to have that workshop. Right, tonight we're doing a workshop where we're discussing the topic generally. But it may be worth bringing a workshop to actually talk about something specific. I think we've done that with a number of other ordinances and policies where we did that informal step before we did the introduction. And what I'm hearing, it's obviously your pleasure as a commission and as a council to give staff and I direction. that might be something you want to do because it would allow, I think, an iterative process. Because once the concepts are out, once you give us direction, this is a new phenomenon. So we're working with a blank slate as well. So I'm not telling you what to do, but I think the workshop, a focused workshop, let's call it that, might be a good idea when you get to giving us direction.

Light still on so I'm just checking I touched it.

Would that be something we can do jointly with the Planning Commission?

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you That actually might be nice because then I mean it would kill two meetings I mean we can do it all in one so I'm not advocating for that but Councilmember Williams, okay, so if if that's the process that we took a focused workshop we would still then have a

say we develop the language, we get an ordinance we like, we would still have a first and a second reading.

Well, what we would do, because this would go in the zoning ordinance, our zoning title is we would bring it to the planning commission under the zoning ordinance procedure where we'd ask the planning commission for a recommendation. Planning commission would give its recommendation. We'd bring that to council. And we'd introduce and then do the second reading. So it would actually be three meetings. Now, our second meeting practice in this council is usually done on consent. In theory, someone could pull it off of that.

Okay. And just keeping in mind, I believe it was Council Member Shaw who was really aggressively pushing for an end of the year, right? Or maybe it was the mayor. I'm sorry. I don't remember at this point. But somebody really wanted something tied up by the end of the year, even given those timelines. Is that still realistic? Or would we probably...

Well, that'd be tough because it is basically late July. If we did a workshop, we would need some time. Obviously, I think we all have a lot of things going for this city. So I don't envision that staff and I would be able to have a workshop-able product to you until September. And then we have to go to Planning Commission. We have to notice that. And the law has changed recently such that we now have a 20-day published notice requirement. And getting into the weeds, the notice that goes to the council has to relay what the planning commission's recommendation was, so we can't even notice the city council meeting until we have had the planning commission and know its recommendation. So if I work it all out and then usually we don't do our November meeting and then your December meeting is, especially this year, you'll have, there's an election and so you'll be seeding a You'll be seating two council members, whether it's the current council members or not. I think that's ambitious if you're going to add the workshop piece. It's not that we won't work with you, but I just think that's, at this point, a little bit hard.

I don't see any further questions from there. Just checking with council member 4 on Zoom, no hand raised.

He is not on Zoom as far as I can tell.

OK. Then we'll move to public comment. We'll start off with public comment with members that are here in the room. The first public comment. The public comment will be limited to three minutes. The timer's in front of me. It will be John Bessinger. Hi.

Ooh, hello.

So I'm a little bit animated. You can tell from my outfit here. I'm AI Sheriff, trademarked. I've been doing this stuff for longer than most of you have probably been born, since the 70s. Well, some of you maybe not. But to go to kind of her point, actually, I'm going to pivot a little bit. You can do a lot of this AI work on really limited machines, gamer machines. I really want you guys to kind of put together something that would be a framework around, an education framework maybe, for the kids in Oakley. Middle school, high school, you guys need to address that really because you can do a lot of this. The kids are scared to death of this technology. The adults are scared to death of this technology. And you have to embrace it. You have to know what it's about. And you have to know the hardware, the network. Not to the level maybe that I do, I would really like the council to kind of figure out some sort of an educational path that the kids could learn in middle school and have a session on that. I mean, really, because you can set up these incredible machines with just a gamer. A lot of these kids, they have gamer machines at home. All the desktops you have, the laptops, you can do amazing things. And I'm saying that I'll help you. I'll be your expert if you'd like. I'm animated. The kids like me. I'm very memorable. And they listen to me. And I can certify the kids. I can get them to a level to where they can do you know, some amazing things, and they can embrace this technology without worrying about data centers, you know, and destroying the planet and killing everybody, you know, everything, the doomsayers here. And you can regulate, you know, she's talking about, you know, you don't need these massive batteries and things like that. You can have a 100-amp service from your house and do things with limited, you know, hardware. I'm doing things on 10-year-old hard, you know... Dated hardware. And you can do a lot of the stuff that some of these data centers were thinking that the data centers could do. And it was AISheriff.io. And that's the reason why I'm wearing my kind of crazy stuff. Trademarked. That's me. And like I said, I'm entertaining to the kids, and I can start off your process in terms of education. And that's really what we need to do, is get people educated. Because there are reasons to have these mass data centers, but they need to be next to the Lawrence Livermore Lab out in Livermore, somewhere that requires the computation for that. And we need to educate the kids, because they are scared to death of this stuff. They're following me around like the Pied Piper, looking for internships with no money. I mean, this is scary to the kids, and I, you know, I want to help them out. So anyways, that's it. Thank you.

Our next speaker is Randy Sullivan.

How you doing? I just wanted to reiterate on how I didn't like the data centers coming in. I know we have the small town feel in our language. But I remember when it was a really small town. It's gotten bigger. And these big warehouses full of data centers and all that stuff, it doesn't need to be around here. I mean, unless you want to finish off the Delta. You've got pumps in there now, saltwater all the way up Sacramento. Fishing's gone. And it takes – well, just from what – before the data centers even got in here, or were trying to get in here, my water bill has already doubled. My PG&E bill has already doubled just within 25 years of living here. So I mean, that's just having to do with all the housing that's being built in here. That small town field is going away. I mean, we're getting crammed in. And now with the big warehouses wanting to get in here too, I'm all for none of that. That's all I got to say.

Our next speaker is Jasper Willober.

All right, hello. So main thing here that you guys need to take into consideration, I'm glad Williams brought it up earlier, is the Pittsburgh data center. So these AI data centers that have been having devastating effects all over the country and world are 100 megawatt data centers. Project Perseus in Pittsburgh has already been approved for 99 megawatts with expansion up to 500 megawatts. This is five times the size of the horribly destructive data centers we're already seeing around the country. So even with mitigating factors, it would be silly to think that we could have two AI data centers this close together. There's a time and place for AI. Despite what many of you may think, I'm not anti-AI. There's a time and a place right next to each other on the same waterway using the same power sources is not the place. In a town where light industrial was mistakenly intermingled among housing, it's not cool to let it be there either. Like the other man said, he's not the only one who worked in computers, was a network administrator, or he probably did higher echelons.

I don't even remember where I was going with that.

The point being, there's a time and a place for it. Like he said, out by Livermore, Lawrence Livermore Lab, spreading them out, using them only for necessary services. Generative AI is destroying the planet for nothing. Record keeping, hospitals, stuff like that's all, you know, great, excellent, viable, justifiable uses for AI. And we don't need to have as many AI data centers around the country if we start restricting and acknowledging what those centers can be used for. Now, that's broader scope than just this city. But that's why I said I want y'all to keep in mind we are already getting one, mandatorily 99 megawatts, up to 500 megawatts. Standard data centers that you saw in the 90s, they were like one to five. That's why they never had the devastating impacts. They didn't need the type of cooling, the type of power that AI does. They were wildly different. I worked in a data center in the Marine Corps. It was a tiny little one in the tent. It doesn't take that much power for the regular uses, for the things that we do need AI for. So it's just really a misuse by people who are abusing their power of having money or whatever it is to implement these in multiple places around the Bay Area when we have shared water sources. So I would hope that you guys will recommend a full outright ban in the city. Thank you.

Cheryl Cabral.

Good evening, Mayor Henderson, members of the Council, Planning Commission, and staff. My name is Cherie Cabral. I represent the California Construction Labor Management Trust, which is a coalition of the building and construction trades, the environmental side, as well as the Western Steel Council. I stand before you as a very proud 30-year resident of Contra Costa County. I raised my daughter here. My niece graduated from Oakley High School. This place is home to me. I have seen it grow. I have seen it change. from the days when it was agricultural fields and there was big distances in between places to kind of a boom town and a substantial change. This used to be kind of out in the sticks, right? This was the area where there wasn't much that was going on, and if you got to the Antioch Bridge, you'd really gone a long way from the core of Contra Costa County. Not so much anymore, and you guys have done a beautiful job in developing and building out this area. I do want to say this. I think you heard it from at least one other speaker. Data centers are not a new thing. They've been around since we started having digital dependency. They come in many different shapes and sizes. However, the majority of them, over 65% of them, roughly are between 500 and 200,000 square feet. So to put that into perspective, they're smaller than a Home Depot. They're basically your old CPU that used to be under your desk shoved into a big concrete building. And they have been the subject of study by numerous institutions from MIT and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory since 2008 on water use and power use and on heat. And some of those most recent studies from 2026, I think, are really starting to inform the changes in technology and the way that we build data centers and what's being used in them and how we cool them. That being said, data centers, because we are such a fundamentally digital community anymore, are part of the critical infrastructure just as much as electricity is, just as much as water is in a wastewater treatment plant or a road. They're not all of our favorite things to have nearby, but they are part of the necessity of our daily life. So I think that just like anything else that we build that's part of the critical infrastructure that not only helps to supply jobs, but does actually increase our daily quality of life, we depend on the things that data centers do, from using your debit card to going to the doctor, to enrolling your children, to having kids have equality and access to education by being able to read a digital book, that we can govern very carefully the standards that we place on building a data center by going through the planning process and putting those things in place as part of the overall structure of how we approve projects, right? Setbacks and all the rest of it. That's why that process is there and I would encourage you as opposed to banning everything and considering everything with a blanket umbrella Which not all data centers do AI the majority of them do not That you utilize the planning process for the governance as opposed to an outright ban. So thank you for your consideration Melinda Mora

Hello, good evening.

I am actually a Pittsburgh resident, so I am here supporting my ban on the Pittsburgh data center. But I'm also increasingly excited to hear that with the definition of where you may all agree upon what a data center has now been potentially called, I really do believe that the ban on the data center, which this lady has now coerced, maybe, or decided to describe the way that technology actually is working. I do work in technology. I have for many years. I also have built a couple of data centers in my own career path. And there is not that much that is actually needed in the necessity of what people believe. And for that fact, I really think that at this point, if you guys do decide to ban what the data center is called and the definition of that, could become a very broad range. And I believe that that is the true way to go. And if people need to go back and revert into the potential meanings of your business, your industry, your city council, your hospitals, your police departments that need to run their own data centers, it's totally feasible. And I don't think that there's a necessary plan and need for these giant, expansive data centers, which I know people think they're all AI. And they're really not, because I do work in the health care industry for the largest health care industry that we all know of, probably, as a government-run industry. And we can run on a very small subset of our own data and our own data centers in a multitude of our own data centers. They have been around for many years. So for that fact, I don't think that there's a need for so many more to be created in our environmental impacts that we are seeing today as how they are being created. Because again, I've worked in them, and they are not like what they are today, which is unfortunate. But thank you and agree that please proceed with the ban of the use of the data center and that technology definition should be expanded to the extent that you all believe should be. Thank you.

That was my last speaker card for in person. We did receive one online that the person wished to speak. That'd be Louis Gentry.

Good evening, council and planning committee members. I am a software engineer myself. I have written software systems from graphics, the yellow line that you see on football games, to AI models from the ground up. And I agree with the other technologists in the room that the scale that we're talking about isn't necessary for the digital niceties that we've come accustomed to since the dot-com boom. We can have those niceties on smaller scale systems. The data centers that have run Google for 20 years, those are much smaller than these AI data centers. And they give us all the niceties without all the extreme environmental and economic impacts. So these hyperscale data centers are built at that scale for one reason, to put more money into the hands of the rich and put them in the more impoverished environment. And so I agree with the ban. On to the presentation, I had one concern that I wanted to add to the list of concerns is the amount of e-waste that these superscale centers would generate. Even the smallest one can generate several thousand tons of e-waste that could leach mercury and lead into the landfills. And also that could have impact on rates for customers and other environmental impacts. And also kind of related to that, Now, this AI boom is a bubble. It's speculation. It's the new gold rush. Not every participant is going to survive. Some of them are going to go belly up. Now, what happens if companies go belly up and this data center is abandoned and empty? Perhaps these questions have been answered already, but there were concerns that It came to me as I was reading, and I just wanted to kind of put that out there. But again, I am totally against these data centers and do not believe what the rich on high would like you to believe, that you need massive amounts of hardware. No, you don't. If you're trying to recreate what the human brain does, then of course you're going to need complete world of CPU, but those aren't the niceties that we need today. And at what expense? We don't want to blow up the planet just so somebody else can get richer. We can do all these computers that you have in your servers, these old computers that you meant to recycle but you're doing nothing with, you can repurpose all those and actually run AI models today on those things and actually get benefits without having to have all this massive expensive new hardware or anything like that. So again, the rich want you to keep spending. They want other businesses to keep spending to put money in their pockets. They're not thinking about how it's going to impact the everyday resident. Thank you.