“Who does not want a data center here?” Laura Oxendine asked the 100 or so people gathered in the Sandy Grove Baptist Church fellowship hall in Lumberton on Thursday night.
Nearly three-quarters of people raised their hands in response to Oxendine, a Lumberton resident and member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
Concerned Citizens for Better Government, Unified Robeson County NAACP, and Robeson County Cooperative for Sustainable Development organized the meeting to discuss a proposed city ordinance regulating data centers. If the ordinance gets approval from the City Council, it will set rules for locations, building requirements, noise, and water-efficient technologies.
Increased interest from developers hoping to bring a data center to the Southeast Crossroads Industrial Park at the interchange of Interstates 95 and 74 prompted the proposed ordinance, City Manager Wayne Horne told the Border Belt Independent ahead of Thursday’s meeting. He said three developers have approached the city with possible data center projects in recent months.
The city is currently in discussions with one of the developers for a project codenamed Project Alps, Horne said. If Lumberton is ultimately selected, Horne said, Project Alps would create a data center that would use about 50,000 gallons of water and up to about 50 megawatts of power per day.
Many residents at the community meeting questioned Lumberton’s ability to ensure such a facility wouldn’t siphon and pollute their water, increase their electricity rates, and harm their health.
“These are a nationwide cancer,” Oxendine said. “They’re going anywhere they can as fast as they can for any amount of money that they will do it for. They do not care about you. They do not care about anything.”
Horne and Deputy City Manager Brandon Love said city officials used draft ordinances from Bladen County and the city of Fayetteville as a starting point for Lumberton’s proposed rules.
“All the things [residents are] concerned about are things that we are getting questions for and evaluating on our end,” Horne said. “We don’t bring projects to council unless we are comfortable with them and they are going to be good for the community.”
The city can only support one data center, Horne said. The ordinance’s working draft, approved by the city’s Planning Board on October 20, would restrict a data center to the industrial park. The nearest homes are about a mile west along U.S. 74. The new Robeson County Career and Technical Education Center is a little over 2 miles south.
The draft also limits the noise coming from a data center to 65 decibels, the same level as a business office. If a facility exceeds the limit, it must “implement mitigation measures,” according to the ordinance’s working draft.
Additional Revenue
Horne, Love, and council members visited an Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina, on November 3 to investigate its impacts on the community. Apple built the data center in the Catawba County town, which is an hour outside of Charlotte and home to 3,700 people, in 2009.
Horne and Love said they couldn’t hear anything except road noise when standing 100 yards away.
The data center has been a massive revenue booster for Maiden, Horne and Love said, contributing millions of dollars in property tax revenue every year. It allowed Maiden to lower residents’ property taxes and build a new town hall, fire and police stations, and a community center, PBS North Carolina reported earlier this year.
Horne and Love said a data center could be a financial game changer for Robeson County, which has the state’s highest poverty rate.
Project Alps, as currently proposed, would bring between 20 and 30 “high-paying” permanent jobs, Horne said. He said he is also optimistic the data center would support local trades, based on Maiden’s experience with Apple. He said the data center there has hired a lot of plumbers, electricians, and landscapers.
The Lumberton project would bring between $800 million and $1 billion in capital investment, according to Horne. He said it would also generate an estimated $4 million in annual property tax revenues. The city would also see “substantial” electricity revenues estimated between $4 million and $5 million per year, Horne said.
A substantial revenue boost could shield against future tax hikes, Horne said. The city increased property taxes and water and sewer rates to help fund its nearly $105 million budget this year, which mostly sustained services.
“If we don’t have this investment, then you’ve got to go to the taxpayer for more money to deal with inflation and other issues that we face here every year with increasing our budgets,” Horne said. He added that the city would likely decrease tax rates if Project Alps works out.
No tax incentives are being offered to entice Project Alps to Lumberton, Horne said. Love added that the city is working with the developer on how the project could benefit the community.
Residents’ Concerns
A community-benefits agreement is a needed addition to the draft ordinance, the Rev. Mac Legerton, co-director of the Robeson County Cooperative for Sustainable Development, told city officials at the Thursday meeting. The agreement, Legerton said, would define what tangible contributions a data center would provide to residents, and how it would “protect the city, the land, the air, and the people.”
Legerton called for a moratorium on data centers while city officials improve the draft ordinance. Moratoriums on data centers are broadly popular in North Carolina; 40 of the 43 proposed in counties and municipalities across the state passed as of October 25, according to research by Frank Muraca, a senior analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based policy research company Power Brief. Muraca has tracked local decisions on data centers over the last year.
In the Border Belt, the city of Whiteville and Columbus County passed moratoriums in September and October.
Among residents’ top concerns was the impact on water availability. In 2023, data centers in the U.S. consumed 66 billion liters of water to cool computers, according to research by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By 2028, they are expected to use at least 148 billion liters. The average American uses about 113,300 liters of water per year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Horne and Love said any data center would use a closed-loop cooling system, which circulates water through sealed pipes or coils to minimize evaporation as it runs over the hot electrical equipment. They noted that the nearby Campbell Soup plant in Maxton and the Mountaire Farms processing plant in Lumber Bridge use more water than the proposed data center project.
Water pollution was also a concern. The cooling systems and fire suppressants used in data centers could emit PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a bipartisan nonprofit founded by Congress. Lumberton residents continue to deal with decades of PFAS pollution from the Chemours plant on the Bladen-Cumberland County border. The city was among 10 local governments that settled lawsuits with the company over its alleged PFAS contamination in eastern North Carolina.
John Cantey Jr. was the only City Council member at Thursday’s meeting. Cantey, who represents Lumberton’s fifth precinct covering much of downtown and areas along N.C. 41, said he was sympathetic to citizens’ concerns—but also excited about what a data center could do for Lumberton.
“I’m torn 50/50 because I have a duty to the city of Lumberton, but I also have a duty to the residents as well,” Cantey told the crowd. “I see all the benefits that it can do here for our community.”
Other council members appear torn on how to vote on Monday. Owen Thomas, who represents Precinct 8 in northwest Lumberton, said in a Facebook post that he wants “to see Lumberton grow, attract investment, and create opportunities.”
“But I also want us to approach development thoughtfully and protect the quality of life our residents deserve,” he wrote.
Legerton and other organizers of Thursday’s community meeting hope residents will pack City Hall to make their votes heard on Monday.
“This is not a game,” Oxendine said to cheers from residents on Thursday. “We might be able to handle one year, but think about 10, 20, 50 years down the road. We have children. We have grandchildren.”