SOCIAL CIRCLE, Ga. – In front of a meeting room crowded with nearly 40 people, including Mayor David Keener, the Social Circle Planning Commission voted unanimously at its Sept. 23 meeting to recommend that the city council reject annexation and rezoning requests, as well as a special-use permit request and a future-land-use map amendment application, all being sought as a prelude to establishing a data center on 151 acres at Hawkins Academy Road and Roy Malcom Road. 

The planning commission, which serves the city council in an advisory capacity – the council is not bound by any planning commission recommendation – rendered its unanimous decisions just one week after the city council established a 90-day moratorium on consideration of any zoning actions pertaining to proposed data centers. 

The proposal under review at the Sept. 23 meeting, from which Planning Commissioners Adolphus Gaither and John Gardner were absent, was submitted prior to enactment of the moratorium, and thus is eligible to go through the process of being considered by the planning commission and the city council. 

The council could make a decision on the four requests pertaining to the proposed data center at its Oct. 21 meeting, set for 6:30 p.m. in the Community Room at 138 E. Hightower Trail. 

In recent months, the city has fielded numerous requests for zoning actions aimed at establishing data centers – massive facilities filled with computer servers and other hardware designed for the storage, processing and distribution of large amounts of digital data. Data centers require significant quantities of electricity, and water for cooling, which can severely impact local infrastructure. 

Currently, there is only one data center operating in the Social Circle area. Meta (formerly Facebook) has a facility in the Stanton Springs industrial and mixed-use development off Interstate 20. 

More recently, plans for two data centers in Social Circle, one proposed for Amber Stapp Studdard Road and another set to be located along Interstate 20 – both of which made it successfully through the city’s review process – have apparently been abandoned, according to information from the city council’s Sept. 16 meeting. 

As proposed, the data center planned for the Hawkins Academy Road and Roy Malcom Road site would comprise three two-story buildings, containing nearly 1.5 million square feet of space, along with an electrical power substation. 

Speaking briefly at the planning commission meeting was T.J. Peters, a Greensboro resident and part of the family that owns the two tracts proposed as a data center site. 

According to Peters, family members have been fielding calls from across the United States from people who have identified the property as a potential location for a data center. As a result, he said, the family decided it was time to consider selling the acreage. 

“We think it’s going to be a good thing for the community,” Peters told the planning commission with regard to a data center coming to the tracts. 

One concern for the planning commission was the fact that neither of the two tracts proposed for the data center currently have utility services other than the electrical substation, a circumstance which would require the developer to get those services to the data center. There was also some concern expressed that there is no written commitment from any electric utility for providing electricity to the site. 

While the planning commission meeting was crowded with concerned citizens, only a few spoke to commissioners during public hearings on each of the zoning-related requests up for consideration. 

Christi Studdard, who lives just outside the Social Circle city limits, and who spoke out against the city’s handling of data center requests at the city council’s Sept. 16 meeting, was once again critical of the process of allowing data centers to be considered for special-use permitting under a lightindustrial zoning classification, when the city’s zoning ordinance lists data centers as a permitted use in heavy- industrial-zoned areas. Studdard called that practice “unethical.” Social Circle resident.  

Doug Hawkins questioned the wisdom of any continued annexation of property into the city. 

“People in this community are tired of annexation,” he said, adding that the city is “at or beyond capacity to handle it.”