Aurora, Colorado Council Rejects Data Center Moratorium Again in 6 to 5 Vote

The Aurora City Council has again refused to pause new data center approvals, voting 6 to 5 late Monday night against suspending its own rules to reconsider a moratorium that first failed in August. The procedural motion needed seven votes, so the council could not take up the moratorium itself, and new applications in Colorado's third largest city remain open while Aurora has no rules on how far a data center must sit from homes.

Council member Amy Wiles first proposed the moratorium this summer after residents objected to several high capacity projects, among them the 500 megawatt Trident project from Vantage Data Centers and a 177 megawatt QTS center. Aurora's zoning code sets no distance limits between data centers and homes. The Trident site sits less than a mile from two neighborhoods and about a quarter mile from a senior living community, and the project itself would not be stopped by the moratorium because it already has city approval.

A meeting that ran past midnight

The meeting began at 6 p.m. Monday and ran into early Tuesday morning. Forty five people signed up to speak, and 30 were still in the room when public comment on the moratorium began at about 10:45 p.m. Colorado Public Radio reported that the comment that followed the vote ran almost two hours and that every speaker who addressed the council supported the pause. The vote drew boos and shouts of "Shame!" and "You are selling us all out!" from the crowd.

Five council members voted against reconsideration: Rob Andrews, Françoise Bergan, Curtis Gardner, Angela Lawson and Stephanie Hancock. CPR reported that all five attended the meeting remotely. Gardner said during the study session before the meeting that data centers were the topic of the moment and that other uses allowed in the same areas could be more harmful to the environment.

The mayor has changed sides

Mayor Mike Coffman cast the tie breaking vote against the moratorium in August. He now supports a pause and told the council he would bring the motion and resolution back at the next regular meeting. Focal News reported that Coffman said a visit to the area where Vantage plans to build Trident changed his view, and he has become a public critic of the project in recent weeks.

Vantage, for its part, wrote to the council that it had heard residents' concerns and would study whether the data center could move to sites farther from homes. The company asked the council to pause new rules for 90 days while it considered relocation. A Trident spokesperson later told CPR that the company is still advancing the current site and has not decided to move.

What happens next

Wiles said after the meeting that she plans to work on tighter rules for data center noise and on reducing tax incentives. The council passed a ban on water intensive evaporative cooling that she sponsored on September 28. Before Monday's meeting she also proposed a buffer that would bar data centers within 750 feet of residences and add requirements for sites within half a mile. The council cleared that proposal for review by city planners, and it could reach a final vote in December.

Aurora is not alone in Colorado. With no statewide rules in place, Denver, Brighton, Thornton, Commerce City and Lochbuie are each weighing local pauses, and existing moratoriums in the state run from six months in Boulder County to an indefinite ban in Longmont.