Winchester weighs the future of data centers

The Winchester City Commission meet­ing of September 1, 2026 was a good begin­ning on dis­cov­er­ing some of the local atti­tudes regard­ing data centers. 

A num­ber of speak­ers expressed their views, some pos­i­tive, some neg­a­tive, about the future of such facil­i­ties in Winchester. There is a lot of infor­ma­tion need­ed to for­mu­late any rea­son­able, effec­tive and fair method of deal­ing with them.

Planning direc­tor Rob Jeffries revealed the lack of con­trols cur­rent­ly avail­able through any local ordi­nances to address the issue. Since our plan­ning com­mis­sion is a board that reg­u­lates both in the city and coun­ty, it quick­ly becomes obvi­ous that the Clark County Fiscal Court needs to take some appro­pri­ate action match­ing that tak­en by the City Commission, imposed a one-year mora­to­ri­um on any data cen­ter devel­op­ment with­in the city lim­its of Winchester.

Jeffries point­ed­ly not­ed that the cur­rent lack of spe­cif­ic zon­ing for data cen­ters places “any future appli­ca­tions [for data cen­ters] in trou­bling legal waters.”

Several of the speak­ers at the meet­ing stat­ed their desire that the mora­to­ri­um be longer, either two-year or even three-year.

A year is enough — for now. That should be suf­fi­cient to gath­er enough infor­ma­tion about the impact of data cen­ters. If it is not, the mora­to­ri­um can eas­i­ly be extend­ed as nec­es­sary. Jeffries has already gath­ered infor­ma­tion about how oth­er com­mu­ni­ties in the state have addressed the issue, some with short­er mora­to­ri­ums, some with longer ones.

One of the speak­ers had pre­pared a lengthy dis­ser­ta­tion regard­ing the poten­tial use of resources by data cen­ters, specif­i­cal­ly water and power.

Someone sug­gest­ed that the issue of data cen­ters be put to the vot­ers. I demur. 

Our form of gov­ern­ment assumes that we elect our lead­ers to make those deci­sions. They can do so with the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion and cit­i­zen input. Too often such plebiscites are ruled by emo­tion rather than objec­tive reasoning.

The only pos­i­tive com­ments about data cen­ters were pre­sent­ed to sug­gest that they would be no dif­fer­ent from the for­mer Amazon dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter in the indus­tri­al park. Just large build­ings with few employ­ees and vir­tu­al­ly no exter­nal traf­fic — although some cen­ters have cre­at­ed extra­or­di­nary noise lev­els that are a detri­ment to near­by homes or businesses.

Data cen­ters appear to be becom­ing what is called “hyper­scale,” huge facil­i­ties cov­er­ing many acres, so such cen­ters would be unlike­ly to find a place with­in the city lim­its of Winchester. 

Not so in the county.

One appar­ent­ly accept­ed fact relat­ing to data cen­ters seems to be that they are not great job cre­ators. Most jobs affil­i­at­ed with them occur dur­ing con­struc­tion of the facil­i­ty after which they require very lit­tle human oversight.

It has been not­ed that some school admin­is­tra­tions view data cen­ters as great sources of tax rev­enue. This may be true; col­lect­ed infor­ma­tion will or will not bear out this supposition. 

An addi­tion­al con­sid­er­a­tion relat­ed to tax­es might be how many tax incen­tives would be asked to locate one in the com­mu­ni­ty. The Kentucky leg­is­la­ture has pro­posed some leg­is­la­tion that would give such cen­ters extreme­ly long peri­ods of tax for­give­ness and the leg­is­la­ture is alleged­ly going to re-vis­it this issue in its 2027 session. 

The state has been stung on more than one occa­sion through these tax writeoffs.

Data cen­ters may well be an inevitable part of the future of America. Many believe that they will be nec­es­sary for the United States to be con­tin­u­al­ly com­pet­i­tive with oth­er coun­tries, most espe­cial­ly China. But it is not unrea­son­able for com­mu­ni­ties to work to mit­i­gate their impact on the local econ­o­my and environment.

In the com­ing year there are like­ly to be numer­ous addi­tion­al pub­lic hear­ings regard­ing these data cen­ters and, assum­ing the fis­cal court will be dis­cussing the issue in the near future, res­i­dents are encour­aged to attend and make their views known at all these meetings.

It is only with input from the pub­lic, cou­pled with ade­quate and fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion, that our polit­i­cal lead­ers will be able to make the nec­es­sary deci­sions to pro­tect and sup­port the community.