Springfield, MO weather is not the story Broken Arrow residents walked into on June 15, but the council vote will shape what can be built next. The Broken Arrow City Council approved a six-month moratorium on data center consideration, putting any new review on hold through Dec. 31 unless the council extends it.
City manager Michael Spurgeon told the council he wanted the city to slow down and do its due diligence before moving ahead with data center review. He said, "I don’t know enough about it to be able to say what a good one would look like, and what a bad one would look like."
Michael Spurgeon on the pause
Spurgeon also said there was no application before the city’s community development for actually going through the approval process or pre-development. In the same discussion, he said, "I felt like, since they backed out of it, that this is a great time. There is no application before the city’s community development for actually going through the approval process or pre-develeopment" and, "We could actually slow down this process, and just go through a methodical process in trying to make sure we do our due diligence."
That gives the city a fixed window to sort out what rules should apply before any proposal reaches a formal review. The source says Broken Arrow’s zoning and code regulations currently do not implicate data centers, so the moratorium is being used as a pause before the city decides what, if anything, needs to change.
Jackson at the meeting
Jackson, a neighbor, urged the council to pay attention to how much staffing a data center requires. He told the council, "They don’t need people! They run off of … what I’ve read … about five people can run the thing cuz they’re mostly maintaining the servers."
An engineer at the meeting added that smaller ones take power off the grid and said, "The smaller ones take power off the grid. That is what, in my humble opinion, I would advise you take an extra measure of care at looking at. But the big ones, no they’re not a big deal at all."
Broken Arrow deadline
One developer had been in the very early stages of bringing a data center to Broken Arrow, but the effort fizzled out. That is the immediate backdrop to the council’s vote: the city is pausing before a new application lands, while leadership decides which zoning or code changes, if any, should be considered before Dec. 31.
For now, the moratorium does one thing clearly: it stops data center consideration while the city tries to write the rules first. If the council wants more time, it can extend the pause.
