By Bill Rauch
The 859-acre data center complex proposed by developers to be built east of I-95 at the headwaters of the Ashepoo River outside Walterboro, if it goes forward, will be the gravest threat to the ACE Basin in its relatively short history.
The proposed complex would be built off Cooks Hill Road on a Weyerhauser timber tract that is a neighbor to the Isiah United Methodist Church and several quail plantations. The developers, Eagle Rock Partners, whose website boasts they “find value in land,” recently withdrew — in the face of the citizens of Jones County, Ga.’s opposition — a similar application there.
Clearly, they learned a lesson in Georgia: to minimize opposition, keep the project as quiet as possible for as long as possible.
But the secret’s out now, and it was standing room only at the 470-seat Colleton County Civic Center auditorium last Thursday night where a worked-up crowd growled their comments to the Colleton County Zoning Board of Appeals, and cheered the angry comments of the other speakers.
The Appeals Board has been placed in the uncomfortable position of having to determine whether a special exception should be granted by them to Colleton County’s Rural Development 2 zoning that allows data centers by special exception. Their process is by statute public, which is why the secret is out at all.
Now that they know about it, the project’s opponents are in for a fight. It was suggested multiple times at the meeting that Eagle Rock Partners had only optioned the land from Weyerhauser for the purposes of getting it permitted for the nine data center complex, such that if they were successful, they would flip the option to Google or some other data center user.
A lot was clearly going on at the county council level for a long time before the public was brought in.
By some estimates, the proposed facility, when it is in full operation, will use as much electricity as 800,000 households. Anticipating that, Santee Cooper has already purchased land, Eagle Rock’s representative said, adjacent to the proposed facility for two substations.
Moreover, seeing the application coming, the Colleton County Council in October amended the county’s zoning ordinance to include imposing buffers on parcels granted special exceptions. Yes, the amendment was passed with public comments and three readings, as required by statute. But as the amendment was being considered, the public had not yet been let in on the secret that an 859-acre data center complex at the headwaters of the Ashepoo River would be the first entity to have to abide by the amended ordinance. How is it even possible in the 21st Century that buffers could have been the Colleton County Council’s sole misgiving about the project?
Colleton County Councilmember Steve Murdaugh, the personal injury attorney, said Friday that the appeals board’s word will be the last word on the matter, unless the developers choose to come to County Council for a development agreement. All other permitting – building, groundwater, electrical, wastewater, etc – will be at the administrative level.
All this has given the appearance that the data center is a done deal already. And it is that appearance that has put the appeals board — who are appointed by County Council but who do not answer directly to them — in the hot seat. And it was hot last Thursday.
State Senator George E. “Chip” Campson who represents Charleston, Colleton and Beaufort Counties in the State Senate, and who had clearly not been brought in on the secret plans until recently, warned, for example, of the “risks to the ecology of the Ashepoo River.”
“If y’all buy into this, y’all are a bunch of fools,” Ray Bennet, a Walterboro farmer, shouted as the cheers of the crowd drown him out. “It is wrong to allow these for profit groups to steal what isn’t theirs,” lawyer/politician Mullins McLeod added to more cheers. There were many many more. Some in the crowd wore “Hands off the ACE” stickers.
Because it appeared Eagle Rock Partners are just middle men, the crowd was skeptical of any representations they made that the final owner would use, for example, closed-loop water cooling systems to protect the area’s waters, or that their economic benefits estimates that 500 local jobs would be “created” were credible, or that the middle men had either the willingness or the ability to compel the facility’s final owner to steer the facility’s massive power generating systems in directions that protect Colleton County’s air.
The experience of other communities that have welcomed data centers is that power bills in the community all rise by a lot and fast. But that’s just the beginning of why this one’s a bad idea. The noise pollution, light pollution, air and water pollution and the copycats who will follow will change the face of Colleton County and the ACE Basin forever.
The Colleton County Zoning Board of Appeals members should demonstrate they are less easily conned than their appointers, and vote no.
At this writing, it had not yet been announced when and where the historic vote on the special exception will be held.
Bill Rauch was the Mayor of Beaufort from 1999 to 2008 and has won multiple awards from the S.C. Press Association for his Island News columns. He can be reached at TheRauchReport@gmail.com.
