St. Cloud’s rulebook does not say the words “data center,” and the city will take at least another month to fix that.
The St. Cloud Planning Commission voted 5 to 1 Tuesday night to postpone action on the city’s first data center rules, sending staff back for more research before a possible vote in October.
The delay matters because the current code is not silent by design. It never contemplated these buildings, so the city treats them as communications facilities, a use already allowed in its planned industrial parks. The door is technically open right now, with no standards attached to it.
I wrote about the meeting earlier (before the meeting). This was their goal…
The St. Cloud Planning Commission holds a public hearing Tuesday evening at 6:00 at city hall on draft amendments to the Comprehensive Plan and Land Development Code that would, for the first time, define what a data center is in St. Cloud and specify where the largest ones could go.
The city itself is the applicant. In a September 1st memo, Community Development Director Matt Glaesman writes that the city’s current position leans on general industrial language and “a dated zoning definition with no specific site design standards.” Acting now, before a site-specific proposal lands, is “the best practice to establish appropriate standards based on community goals,” he writes.
The drafts split data centers into two categories. Enterprise or on-site facilities, the kind that have quietly operated inside businesses for years, are capped at 2,000 servers, 10,000 square feet and 50 megawatts of peak electrical use. Anything bigger is considered hyper-scale.