But Not Without Second Thoughts

A one-year pause on large-scale data centers and “large load” facilities cleared council 7-0 Thursday night, but not before residents warned the 50-megawatt threshold is too high. The city attorney explained why council’s hands are tied by the state, and Council President Allison Patton cast a reluctant “yes.”

The Pensacola City Council voted unanimously, 7-0, to approve Proposed Ordinance No. 13-26 on first reading Thursday night, imposing a temporary one-year moratorium on the acceptance, review, or approval of development permits, rezonings, site plans, and other city approvals for large-scale data centers and “large load customer facilities” within Pensacola’s city limits. Read Proposed Ordinance No. 13-26.

What the Ordinance Does

The ordinance defines a covered facility as any data center or large load customer with an anticipated monthly peak electric load of 50 megawatts or more, calculated over a 15-minute interval at a single location. That threshold — and the moratorium mechanism itself — tracks language in Senate Bill 484, passed by the Florida Legislature this session, which explicitly preserves local governments’ land-use authority over “large load customers” at that power level.

• Bars city staff from accepting, processing, reviewing, or approving applications tied to covered facilities for one year from the ordinance’s effective date
• Directs staff to study groundwater withdrawal impacts, water and wastewater capacity, electrical grid infrastructure, land-use compatibility, and environmental effects during the moratorium period
• Exempts routine maintenance, emergency work, government public-safety infrastructure, and projects already holding a final, unexpired building permit
• Can be extended by the council after a public hearing if more time is needed

Public Comment: “Fifty Megawatts Is Not a Small Number”

Several residents spoke during the public hearing portion of the item, and many raised the same core concern: that the 50-megawatt threshold, borrowed directly from state law, may be set too high to actually protect Pensacola.

“Forty-nine megawatts could easily power the city limits of Pensacola and still have enough leftover to cover a massive portion outside the city limits,” said resident Casey Harris, who warned that facilities built just under the state’s regulatory threshold could “sneak by without regulation” with no cap on how many could be built side by side.

Pepper Wimer, who said she’d spent weeks trying to gather comparative power-usage data from Sacred Heart Hospital, Baptist Hospital, and Pensacola State College, as well as baseline numbers from Florida Power & Light, told council she supported the moratorium in concept but worried the city was moving forward without the numbers to know whether 50 megawatts was the right line.

• She suggested council consider tabling the item until better data was in hand, a suggestion that didn’t gain traction with the sponsor.

Christy Rosen, co-founder of the Escambia County Indivisible chapter and Gulf Coast Against Data Centers, thanked council for “listening to us week after week, month after month,” but pushed back on the idea that SB-484 limits the city to 50 megawatts. “It’s a guideline,” she said, “but there’s nothing in it that says we can’t go below the fifty megawatts.”

• Rosen also renewed her group’s call for Mayor D.C. Reeves to cancel the city’s Flock Safety camera contract, tying it to broader surveillance concerns around AI infrastructure.

Can the City Go Below 50 Megawatts? City Attorney Says No — For Now

The most substantive exchange of the night came when Councilman Jared Moore pressed staff on what the city’s land development code currently requires of a hypothetical data center project.

• Assistant City Attorney Sherry Morris explained that data centers aren’t a permitted use in the city’s M-1 light industrial district, meaning any such project would need to fit in one of the city’s four scattered M-2 heavy industrial zones and would require both planning board and city council approval, along with proof of power reservation from FPL and consumptive-use permits from the water management district.

Bare then asked directly whether the city had legal room to set its own threshold lower than 50 megawatts. City Attorney Adam Cobb said no — not because of anything in SB-484, but because of a separate bill passed this session, Senate Bill 180, which restricts local governments from imposing new moratoriums or heightened development criteria generally. SB-484’s large-load-customer provision, Cobb explained, is a narrow carve-out from that broader restriction — and the carve-out only covers the 50-megawatt definition the Legislature wrote.

“So, uh, the short answer to your question is no, I don’t think we can currently go below fifty,” Cobb told council.

Council Debate: Jobs, Aquifers and “Cyber Coast” Ambitions

Bare, introducing the item, said his primary concern was large-load facilities rather than data centers generally, and that while he’d “ultimately like a full ban,” the moratorium buys the city time to update its land development code the right way — citing concerns raised by Santa Rosa County, which passed a similar 50-megawatt moratorium, about potential Bert Harris Act property-rights claims if the city moves too aggressively.

• Council Vice President Jennifer Brahier raised Pensacola’s geology as a central concern, contrasting the region’s shallow sand-and-gravel aquifer with the deep Floridan Aquifer that underlies most of the rest of the state.

Councilman Jared Moore voiced support for the moratorium but cautioned against treating it as a step toward an outright ban, arguing the region’s self-branding as the “Cyber Coast” and the broader shift toward data-driven infrastructure make data centers a more complicated issue than a simple yes-or-no.

• He also pressed staff and Council Executive Don Kraher on whether the ordinance’s Section 5 study directives were specific enough to produce actionable regulations within the year, a process question that surfaced a charter wrinkle: council cannot directly order administrative staff to perform a study without doing so collaboratively with the mayor’s administration.

Patton’s Reluctant Yes

Council President Allison Patton delivered the most pointed critique of the night, arguing the ordinance’s “large load customer” definition sweeps in any business that trips the 50-megawatt threshold with no carve-out for, say, a manufacturer or employer that happens to need that much power for unrelated reasons.

• Patton said she worried the city could inadvertently wave off a large employer. She cited Tesla’s EV battery operations as a hypothetical example without fully understanding what “unintended consequences” the broad definition might carry. Still, she voted yes, telling colleagues the vote wasn’t “without reservations.”

“I do think the fact that all of us up here are saying we don’t know this, we don’t know that, indicates that we’re voting on something that we really don’t understand,” Patton said before the final vote.

The ordinance passed 7-0 on first reading. It will require a second reading and vote before taking effect five business days after adoption, per the city charter. Escambia County commissioners, meanwhile, have signaled they intend to address data centers through a resolution rather than a binding ordinance—a distinction Bare said Thursday “doesn’t go far enough” for the county, though it’s not his governing body to direct.