Board of Adjustment Ignores Science, Voters
In a grueling twelve-hour hearing on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 29th, which ran into early Thursday morning, the St. Louis Board of Adjustment heard the appeal of the Armory/Goodwill Building data center project Conditional Use Permit (CUP).
Thirteen appellants had filed to challenge the decision by another board, the Board of Public Service. who granted a Conditional Use Permit to allow a 120-Megawatt hyperscale data center to go into the Goodwill Outlet Building at 3728 Market Street, adjacent to the historic Armory building and across from the Foundry entertainment complex. Commuters would recognize the Goodwill Outlet as the big gray building that peeks over Interstate 64 and the Foundry near the depressed lanes in Midtown. The Board of Public Service reached its earlier decision in April after cutting public comment short and failing to evaluate the proposal using their own criteria.
At 525,000 square feet, the data center would be the size of nine football fields and would use power equivalent to 88,0000 homes. Fifty-one semi-truck-sized diesel generators would provide emergency power – and would be tested at least monthly. As in communities across the country, data centers have attracted local scrutiny because they generate heat, noise, and air pollution at an industrial scale while using colossal quantities of electricity and water.
The Board of Adjustment members heard testimony from residents and expert witnesses, while also receiving thousands of pages of information on the project. Witnesses and experts opposed to the Conditional Use Permit outnumbered pro-data center lobbyists, beneficiaries, and developers by 2:1.
After nine hours of testimony, the Board of Adjustment members couldn’t find the conviction to reverse the Conditional Use Permit. A little after 10 pm, the Board of Adjustment decided they could amend the Conditional Use Permit rather than reject it. They then began tacking on amendments to the permit.
The Board shirked its responsibility to scrutinize the prior decision. Their late-night creation of amendments intended to mollify critics – like the kids in The Little Rascals who scavenged wooden boxes and wheels to construct their Soap Box Derby race cars- failed to transform the flawed Conditional Use Permit into a highway-ready vehicle. The Goodwill building is fundamentally in a location where no amount of reflectors, racing stripes, or turn signals on its rickety frame will make it safe. The problem isn’t how the facility will look on the road; the problem is physics, biology, and engineering. We can’t argue with The Little Rascals sincerity – they worked hard on their car, but sincerity won’t protect us. The next step is a legal challenge that will require all of St. Louis to make it clear that we do not want a hyperscale data center in the middle of Midtown, the city’s burgeoning residential, entertainment, and healthcare hub.
Kathleen Logan Smith is a transplanted St. Louis resident, parent, pet keeper, policy nerd, student of history, reader of documents, meal planner, cook, gardener, trained journalist and persistent advocate for human and environmental health; a former executive director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, former Executive Director of Food Works in southern Illinois, co-founder of Breathe Better STL, and asker of questions about harms and benefits in government decisions.
