ST. PETE BEACH — Commissioner Jon Maldonado wants the city to get ahead of the data center boom, urging his colleagues to ban large-scale facilities before advances in technology shrink them enough to fit on the island.
The proposal met skepticism from fellow commissioners, several of whom said St. Pete Beach’s limited space and vulnerability to flooding make it an improbable home for such development. In the end, the City Commission declined to pursue a ban, agreeing instead to draft a proclamation supporting a new state law regulating the industry.
“It’s something that I have been following, and it’s starting to get a lot of attention,” Maldonado said. “I just think that strategically it’s something we should look at. ... There’s certainly a desire to bring these into municipalities and to basically invade our boundaries.”
He defined a hyperscale data center as “a massive, highly scalable computing facility designed to support robust cloud services and AI workloads,” adding that the type he was concerned about “typically … houses over 5,000 servers and occupies more than 10,000 square feet.”
Because Pinellas County has already shielded its unincorporated areas from such development, Maldonado said, companies may “start to look elsewhere” — potentially to St. Pete Beach, which he said has parcels large enough to accommodate them.
“It’s a very long-term, very strategic thing that I think we do need to at least consider,” he said.
Any ordinance should be written carefully to avoid unintended harm, Maldonado told City Attorney Ralf Brookes. “What we don’t want to do is somehow unintentionally impact the small businesses that rely on small-scale data centers to operate,” he said.
Maldonado asked the commission to adopt an ordinance rejecting hyperscale development within the city’s municipal boundaries, “which also include water.” The facilities, he warned, “require extraordinary amounts of electricity and millions of gallons of water per day for cooling,” threatening aquifers during drought and destabilizing local power grids. Some developers, he added, want to submerge the centers underwater to aid cooling.
He also proposed a resolution supporting Senate Bill 484, the data center law Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in May, which Maldonado said protects ratepayers, local authority, the environment and communities “from harm caused by hyperscale data centers.”
Some commissioners were skeptical that any action was needed now.
“I’m certainly not opposed to that sort of ordinance,” Commissioner Karen Marriott said. “It’s possible I don’t know enough about it to make this statement. It seems like this would be a very unlikely place for anyone to want to put one, starting with the lack anywhere (of space) that’s that size, continuing on to the danger of flooding and the susceptibility to storms.”
Marriott said she was reluctant to devote significant staff time to the issue. “I don’t feel like it’s likely necessary to have that kind of an ordinance … when I feel like it’s pretty unlikely to happen regardless of any ordinance we might have,” she said. “But I’m not out there trying to get people to come and build one either.”
Vice Mayor Lisa Robinson agreed the scenario was unlikely and said she did not consider it a priority.
Commissioner Al Causey also doubted the town had room for such a facility. “A hyperscale data center, I don’t think, fits this town very well, for reasons mentioned,” he said. “I won’t want to rule out or discourage high-tech investment in the area, or corporate headquarters moving here, or even the idea of a small-scale data center, if there were such a thing as that.”
Mayor Scott Tate said his priority was preserving local control. “I certainly don’t want to lose our local control to make these decisions,” he said, noting the commission had recently enacted an emergency sign ordinance to address “a clear and present issue.”
Speaking more broadly, Tate said he weighs several questions before backing any ordinance: whether a problem is happening now, whether it is frequent enough to warrant action and whether it is already covered by existing rules. “Let’s make sure it’s an issue that is prevalent, or persistent, or imminent, that is not covered by another ordinance,” he said.
“I don’t know that it’s worth the investment right now, personally,” he added.
Maldonado reiterated that he was thinking years ahead, to a time when smaller data centers could fit on the island.
“The investment you alluded to may be prudent, but I won’t go too far with it,” Tate replied.
The commission did, however, reach consensus to draft a proclamation supporting the state’s data center law.