(PENSACOLA, FL.) - Two groups will show up as one on Tuesday, Jul. 7. The OLF-8 crowd and the data center crowd are wearing green and asking for the same thing: accountability and transparency in land use. The data center crowd held an organizing meeting last week to prepare to ask for zoning regulations.
Escambia Planning Board: 8:30 a.m.
Residents will attend the Escambia County Planning Board meeting Monday, Jul. 7 at 8:30 a.m. at the Central Office Complex, 3363 West Park Place. At the 8:30 a.m. meeting, data center organizers will ask the planning board to recommend changes to land ordinance and zoning to protect Escambia County from data centers. The group secured a public hearing for Jul. 23 where the Board of County Commissioners will consider placing an environmental ban on the August agenda.
What is OLF-8:
OLF-8 is a 540-acre former Navy airfield in Beulah. The county bought it for $17 million in 2019. DPZ CoDesign, the firm that wrote OLF-8’s original walkable mixed-use town center master plan, changed the original master plan with no input from the public. So now the community asks DPZ to stick to the original plan.
The OLF-8 issues:
Two OLF-8 items are on the Jul. 7 agenda. Theresa Blackwell, who has been organizing and advocating for the Beulah community for ten years, said Tri-W Enterprises, the county’s selected master developer for OLF-8, wrote a contract that required the developer to be “generally consistent” with the DPZ design code. “Instead, they threw out the DPZ code entirely and replaced it with their own, which produces suburban sprawl instead of a connected, walkable New Urbanist place,” Blackwell said.
The first item would rezone the entire 540 acres to Mixed Use Urban, a future land-use category in Escambia County’s code that allows residential as the primary use. Under MU-U, a developer could build 100% residential with no commercial jobs, or town center; even if the property is sold. The second creates a special future land use called MU-U (OLF) that allows distribution warehouses. “Their code degrades what could be a well connected, walkable place into suburban, car-dependent sprawl,” Blackwell said.
Tri-W’s Code Could Allow Data Centers on OLF-8
Documents attached to the second OLF-8 item on the Jul. 7 Planning Board agenda show Tri-W’s proposed design code does not ban data centers.The code creates a category called “Integrated Institutional/Commercial Data Centers” and permits them if they support a “primary business” such as healthcare, corporate, or educational use. A developer can propose a ‘primary business’, even a nominal one, and potentially attach a data center to it. The thresholds are high enough for a serious facility. 5 MW is not a small IT closet. The code also includes an “Ongoing Compliance” section. Any increase in data-center floor area, peak load, generator capacity, cooling equipment, or third-party use requires amended Development Review Committee review. OLF-8 appears to be zoned for data-center development. Just not hyperscale.
Photo credit: City of Pensacola Website
City Planning Board: 2:00 p.m.
Data center organizers plan to attend and comment at the City of Pensacola Planning Board meeting later that day at 2:00 p.m. at 222 W. Main St to demand the same things that they will at the earlier Escambia County Planning Board meeting. The City of Pensacola will introduce a 1-year moratorium on data centers at the City Council meeting on Jul. 16 at 5:30 p.m. at the same address. The moratorium does not cover the county.
Organizing together
“We had an organizing meeting for AI data center zoning and decided to wear green with our OLF-8 friends,” said one resident. “Different issues, same problem: decisions made without the public. We’re all wearing green. We’re all asking for accountability.”
Photo Credit: Theresa Blackwell Email
For comments or corrections, contact c.wimer@lead4earth.org.
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