Tucson residents have been up in arms about a proposed data center dubbed Project Blue. The project, which is tied to tech giant Amazon, would have been built on 290 acres of unincorporated land the developer wanted annexed into Tucson so it could access water supplies.
But, as residents relentlessly pointed out, that’s water that Tucson desperately needs.
On Wednesday, the Tucson City Council heard those constituents loud and clear. Council members voted unanimously against bringing the massive project to Tucson.
The move was cheered by a big crowd gathered at council chambers. Arizona Luminaria reporter Yana Kunichoff was there, and she joined The Show to talk about what she saw and what happens next.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: So this has been a roller coaster to cover, I'm sure. Tell us first what exactly Project Blue would have looked like.
YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah. So there's so many questions still about Project Blue, but what we did know was that it was a data center that was proposed, that would eventually have an access into the city of Tucson. It would have initially been over 290 acres, would have used millions of gallons of water for the first few years, actually would have relied on potable water, which means drinking water, before eventually working with the city of Tucson to build a renewable water pipeline.
But what's crucial is that this was just the first of three proposed phases that there was sort of murky details about the last two. And we also there was no public confirmation of who the end user was. But the news organization I work for, Arizona Luminaria, was able to get a document through a public records request that told us it would be Amazon Web Services.
So we had some information and there were still a lot of big questions.
GILGER: Right. So this really outraged a lot of people in Tucson. We saw a massive community meeting earlier this week. And Lots of concerns about how this all went down right.
KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think that there was so much, there was concern about the project, but there was also so much anger and I think just mistrust around the process. Both from the company and public officials.
GILGER: What did the company have to say after this vote yesterday, in which the City Council sort of said, we're not going to move forward with this annexation?
KUNICHOFF: The company sent a statement that said that they were disappointed in Tucson, that they felt like they had worked hard to kind of win the trust of community members by participating in these public meetings that the city of Tucson had put together ahead of the City Council's first discussion on the project.
But I think it's important to say that a really big vote on the project, which was the Pima County Board of Supervisors selling a big part of its unincorporated land to the developers, happened before there was really any public meetings. And again, any information about who the final user of the project was.
GILGER: But this doesn't mean that Project Blue is over, right? Like, this could still very well happen, just in different ways.
KUNICHOFF: Yeah. I mean the really big bombshell of information, or one of them was when City Councilmember Nikki Lee said that she had talked to folks that were part of the development process, and they had said that, even if Tucson didn't agree, that they were still planning in some way to build a data center in the region, that those big questions about how or where they would access the amount of water that a data center need, because being annexed to Tucson would give access to Tucson water.
So, yeah, a lot of big questions still, and we've reached out and haven't gotten firm answers.
GILGER: OK. So there are debates about these data centers and how much power and water they use going on kind of all over. But lots of cities in the Phoenix area are doing this right now, talking about how to regulate this. This also spurred that conversation, that debate in Tucson, right, about creating some kind of ordinance that would somehow limit data centers there.
KUNICHOFF: Yeah. And that's the next step. Council members, when they unequivocally said no to continuing to negotiate with Project Blue, said that their next step, even at the next meeting on Aug. 19, will be to start working on this ordinance.
And I think that the experience of Valley cities, Tempe, Mesa, Phoenix is going to be really big in what things look like in Tucson.
GILGER: Right, and they're still being built data centers all over right now, right? I mean, tell us more about the concerns about water usage, power usage. Are they kind of, are they not regulated at this point in most places?
KUNICHOFF: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of what we have seen. So first of all, to someone saying no desert data center, but obviously there are data centers in the Sonoran Desert and in the desert already. So data centers use a large amount of water for cooling, the large computers and machines that are inside them.
But I think a lot of what we've seen in other communities is there's not a data center or a company promises in a written agreement. And then, for example, like you see in Mississippi, there's turbines that have a data center that's run by one of Elon Musk's companies that has been running without environmental safeguards because on paper, those turbines are seen as temporary.
So there's a lot of promises made. And at the same time, there's ways that these, like, large multinational corporations are able to kind of find loopholes that residents say hurts their community's resources and their health.
GILGER: Last question for you here, Yana, in the last minute or so, this has brought up, again, kind of a longtime debate in Tucson about creating a public power option there. What would that look like?
KUNICHOFF: Yeah, that was I really, I was surprised that that was brought into the, I mean, it makes sense. It was brought into this conversation. But Paul Cunningham, the City Council member, has sort of been, kind of not entirely on board with that. But basically there's been a campaign here for just about a year for Tucson to take over the electric utility.
And so I think in some ways that would allow the city to move more clearly towards its green energy goals. It's also, as I understand it, if Tucson tries to take over the electric power utility, it would have to buy a certain amount of its debt.
There's kind of a it's a really big financial, logistical decision, but I think it would put the power for rate hikes and like the experience of how much Tucson residents pay for power, in the hands of an elected level of a, of the government body rather than a private corporation, which it is right now.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The headline for this story has been edited to remove a reference to Amazon. And due to an editing error, this story has been updated to correct the spelling of Kunichoff’s name.
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