Inver Grove Heights council grants data center exemption amid lawsuit
Data center moratorium passed by Inver Grove Heights City Council
Inver Grove Heights residents spoke out against a proposed data center in the city before the council voted 3-2 to pass a moratorium on data center construction. An attorney for Inver Grove Heights warned the developer threatened to sue the city if the project is delayed.
INVER GROVE HEIGHTS, Minn. (FOX 9) - The Inver Grove Heights City Council voted Monday to approve an exemption to its data center moratorium to allow an existing project to move forward amid a legal challenge by the project's developers.
Moratorium vote
What we know:
The council approved an exemption for the QLevr LLC project to its moratorium on Monday night on a split 3-1 vote.
The exemption will allow for the proposed data center at the former Travel Tags property on Carmen Avenue East to move forward.
The backstory:
QLevr filed a lawsuit in July after the city passed its year-long moratorium blocking the development of data centers in the city.
QLevr, which owns the Travel Tags site, had been working for months to develop the site for use as a data center. When the council took up consideration of the moratorium, QLevr had its attorney send a warning to the council, saying that the project should be exempt from any moratorium since it had submitted its application prior to the moratorium's passage.
If approved, the developers would build a 54,000-square-foot facility for the data center. According to city information on the project, the data center would draw about 5 megawatts of power and use closed-loop water cooling – meaning it would only draw about the water of one to two households. In comparison, a planned Google Hyperscale data center project in Hermantown would have enough capacity for 700 megawatts of power.
The project has faced plenty of public pushback, including criticism at Monday's meeting.
Council wanted to avoid costly legal fight
What they're saying:
At Monday's meeting, council members made it clear that the QLevr data center will still need to get final approval from the council. However, approving the exemption allows the city to settle the lawsuit.
City officials explained if they didn't act on the exemption, residents would have to bear the legal costs that came with the lawsuit.
"Continuing the fight doesn't mean [the data center] won't happen," explained Council Member Tony Scales. "It actually means the city and the residents are going to pay a lot of money, and it's still going to happen."
Scales said the city has searched for alternatives but came up empty.
"We take it out of the moratorium, we get the data center; we leave it in the moratorium," he added later, "we get sued, we pay a lot more... and we get a data center."
Scales said a long lawsuit battle could end up costing the city a minimum of $20 million and potentially a lot more.