“I have not heard an effective argument against this proposal, I’m sorry, I just have not,” council member Steve Johnson said before the 8-0 vote to rezone the land owned by the Stamey family for generations. The site is about 49 miles northwest of Charlotte.
The family intends to sell the property to Dallas-based Compass Datacenters. The company has built 18 data centers in the U.S. and Canada and one each in Tel Aviv, Israel , and Milan, Italy, Brett Collard, Compass senior vice-president for land development, told the council during a public hearing before the vote.
“The argument that it could do harm to the community does not meet the level to me to which I should vote to deny the right of somebody to sell their property,” said Johnson, former chairman of the Iredell County Board of Commissioners.
“And somebody else to use that property in a manner they deem fit that would not be detrimental to the community,” Johnson told a packed City Hall meeting room.
He said he talked with “dozens and dozens of people” and spent a Saturday evening in his basement researching data centers, “while a lot of people were out having fun.”
Council member David Jones made the motion to approve the rezoning. He said the site is near Interstate 40, the city’s comprehensive land use plan accommodates such operations, and a data center would generate far less traffic and noise than industrial plants and other allowed uses.
Lots of trees and other vegetation will mask the center’s five, 270,000-square-foot buildings from neighbors, Jones said. Each building would roughly be the size of nearly five 4.7 NFL football fields. Each will include 40 backup generators in case of power outages, the developer’s application shows.
The vote followed a two-hour public hearing where 17 residents urged denial of the rezoning, while five spoke in favor of the project.
Real estate broker Jade Benfield lives less than a mile from the site. From 1,000 feet away, she heard the 24/7 hum of a Bitcoin facility in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and worries that’s what neighbors of the proposed data center will face.
“Please reconsider this,” Benfield said to applause. “Please do not be swayed by a big carrot of corporate America. Please consider the people that are in this room.”
Said 37-year nurse Sheila Shuford: “I want my grandchildren and children to grow up in a manner I grew up in, where I can swing from an oak tree and breathe clean air.”
Those who spoke in favor of the project cited the potential economic benefits to the community and that a noisy, harmful industry could have located there.
Compass officials denied the plant will harm the environment, and Collard said operations “will not burden the (electrical) grid or taxpayers. Our systems strengthen the grid.”
Compass also is designing “a closed-loop, hybrid cooling system that recycles the same water,” Collard told the council, so the center “will have no impact” on the local water supply.
Modular buildings are planned, with no rooftop equipment, he said. Because the site will be 25 feet below the height of Stamey Farm Road, only about five feet of each building will be visible to drivers, Collard said.
Forty percent of the land will remain as open space, he said. Operations will comply will city noise limits, and no “intensity lighting” will be needed, he said.
The center will have about 200 well-paying engineering, electrical and other jobs, Collard said. Compass develops job training programs with tech colleges near its data centers, and will do so with the Stamey Farm Road one, Collard said.
On Aug. 26, the Statesville Planning Board unanimously recommended the rezoning for the same reasons city council members cited.
The Stamey family and their land- and farm-related companies own the eight parcels that form the proposed data center site, Iredell County public tax records show. The parcels have a total assessed value of $3.46 million, including land and buildings.
On Saturday, property owner David Stamey told The Charlotte Observer the project was right for his family’s acreage and the future of Iredell County. He did not attend the council meeting.
“For three generations, our family has cared deeply for this land and for Statesville,” Stamey told the Observer. “My grandfather, Howard Stamey, was an economic developer at heart. My father, Bob Stamey , always believed the land should be used wisely and envisioned a campus-style development.
“This decision was not made quickly or lightly,” Stamey said in an email. “We believe both of them would be proud to see the land’s next chapter contribute meaningfully to the future of our community.”
He called Compass Datacenters ”a world-class, sustainability-focused data center developer” whose project represents the largest potential private investment ever in Iredell County.
Stamey previously told the Observer he had “a lot of discussions with all types of developers,” because Statesville’s land development plan and Iredell County’s Horizon 2045 Plan call for industrial uses of the property.
Those included a global distribution company “promising 2,000 jobs, but also 1,000-plus trucks in and out every day,” he said; an industrial park covering the entire property; and “large-scale housing.”
“None of them were the right fit for the land or the community,” Stamey said.
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