Richmond pauses data centres as Oakland weighs its own moratorium

Richmond's City Council voted Tuesday to stop accepting new data centre proposals for 45 days. Oakland's council takes up the same question next Tuesday, and two more East Bay cities are somewhere behind them.

The Oakland hearing is the one with a date on it. Councilmember Carroll Fife is proposing an urgency ordinance that would temporarily bar the city from approving land-use entitlements or agreements allowing data centres to be built or operated. It gets its first formal hearing at the council's Life Enrichment Committee, which Fife chairs, next Tuesday, Sept. 22. If the committee moves it and the full council adopts it as an urgency measure, it takes effect the moment it passes.

Fife's proposal argues that Oakland's planning code has not kept pace with how quickly data centres have grown, or with how much the facilities themselves have changed, and that the city needs a pause while it works out how to regulate them.

The pressure came from the floor. More than 70 speakers addressed the council on Tuesday afternoon to oppose data centres, even though no data centre item was on that day's agenda.

What they were reacting to is a downtown building at 415 20th St., at Franklin Street. Behring Companies has proposed converting about 20,000 square feet of the 83,000-square-foot building into a data centre, as part of a larger artificial intelligence and innovation campus. The building once housed a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory supercomputing facility and still carries substantial power infrastructure. Behring has pushed back on the description of the project as a conventional data centre.

Richmond did not wait. Its council voted the same night for a 45-day moratorium, to buy time to examine what new facilities would draw from the city's electricity and water systems, what they would add to local pollution, and what the infrastructure and utility costs would mean for residents. Richmond was the third Bay Area city in recent weeks to pause approvals, after Oakley and Gilroy; Gilroy passed its own 45-day moratorium on Monday.

Hayward is one step behind. Its council, meeting the same Tuesday night, directed staff to come back with options for a data centre moratorium of its own.

Pittsburg went a different way. After residents filled the council's June 15 meeting to talk about data centres, the council directed staff to put a workshop on development of data centres on an upcoming regular agenda, with time for public participation and council direction. The city did not announce a date for it.

Residents who want notice of that Pittsburg workshop can get it: the city said the agenda will be posted 10 days ahead on the bulletin boards at City Hall, 65 Civic Ave., and the Pittsburg Library, 80 Power Ave., and on pittsburgca.gov, and emailed to everyone signed up for council agenda notices through the city's enews list.