A grassroots petition circulating in Cheyenne calls for a moratorium on new data centers in Laramie County, amid a growing clash between local residents and the policymakers and economic development officials promoting the projects.
The Cheyenne petition comes as other Mountain West counties and more than a dozen states weigh enacting temporary moratoriums on new data centers, reflecting a much wider national debate.
Heather Madrid is one of the individuals circulating the petition in Cheyenne.
She said organizers of the petition are aiming for 7,000 signatures in all and already have hundreds in less than two weeks.
Madrid said she’s not personally opposed to data centers, but she feels they are flying into Laramie County at an unprecedented speed, and that it’s not something the city’s existing planning framework is ready for.
At a recent “Council and Coffee” forum with Ward I Councilman Larry Wolfe, he told Madrid that Laramie County has 70 data centers in various stages of discussion right now.
Wolfe also circulated a map with about a dozen of the data centers with more definitive plans surrounding Cheyenne. That, in particular, really got her attention.
“The rate of these projects being filed and approved is alarming,” she said. “And know that the scale of these projects is just unprecedented.
"We do not have appropriate regulations in place to account for the impacts of these hyper-scale data centers in these business parks in our communities.”
Data centers are needed for things like national security, she acknowledged, and she doesn’t want to see existing projects that have already broken ground reversed.
But she does want to see better regulations that “reflect the magnitude of these projects” on future projects.
