Boulder City data center fight sparks push for tougher federal review

A bill from a Nevada congresswoman is seeking to ensure new data centers are thoroughly and transparently evaluated before agencies award developers permits to build on public land.

Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., introduced the Public Lands Accountability Act on Wednesday. She says it’s a direct response to the Trump administration’s approval of a data center in Boulder City, where the Bureau of Land Management awarded permits for a data center after determining a previous environmental review for a solar project was sufficient.

That data center is now on hold after an administrative judge granted Boulder City officials and environmentalists a stay, saying they were likely to succeed on their appeal challenging the approval.

“Data centers are proliferating in Nevada and other states having large expanses of federal land,” Titus said in a statement. “We need to make sure the public’s voice is heard and that the effects on the environment, water resources and the electric grid are thoroughly assessed and made public.”

Titus’ bill would prevent a federal agency from changing an existing right-of-way permit on BLM land to allow the construction of a data center without a separate environmental permitting process, where the public would be involved. Under the bill, data centers would no longer qualify for what are known as “categorical exclusions” that would allow them to avoid more extensive environmental reviews.

It would require the BLM to consider the impact of a data center on regional water supply and ask data center developers to submit a workforce plan that includes how many local jobs it will create and at what wage level.

Reaction from environmental group, firm

Both a Nevada environmentalist and a libertarian-leaning, nonprofit public interest law firm have qualms with the bill, albeit for very different reasons.

Patrick Donnelly, the Great Basin director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, was one of the parties who successfully petitioned for the stay halting the Boulder City data center construction.

He is not satisfied with Titus’ bill and says it doesn’t go far enough.

“There is no acceptable data center on public lands, no matter how much review it gets,” Donnelly said in statement. “We are opposed to Rep. Titus’s bill, because it does not address the root problem. Public lands should be off limits to data centers, period.”

Meanwhile, Joe Luppino-Esposito, federal policy director at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said the bill could create significant new barriers to data center development on public land.

Luppino-Esposito said the bill, if passed, could be a huge barrier to any data center project on public land. It could extend to something like a transmission line used by a data center, even if that line had other uses.

“Existing law already worked as intended: the Boulder City development was halted based on the individualized review,” Luppino-Esposito said. “This bill takes a lawful industry and adds more burdens on its advancement in ways that would mire any data center development in years of litigation.”