Tag Archives: Law

Update: Clay silt runoff down St. Augustine Road to Withlacoochee River 2026-08-07

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Update 2026-08-14: Ashburn sewage spill 2026-08-02, Clean Alapaha River 2026-08-08 but dirty Town of Alapaha, Clean Withlacoochee River 2026-08-12.

Following up on the August 3 clay silt runoff down St. Augustine Road into the Withlacoochee River, we already posted that there was no effect on the Withlacoochee River detectable in E. coli measurements by Valdosta Utilities or WWALS.

[Update: Clay Silt Runoff, St. Augustine Road into Withlacoochee River, Valdosta, GA 2026-08-07]
Update: Clay Silt Runoff, St. Augustine Road into Withlacoochee River, Valdosta, GA 2026-08-07

Valdosta City Engineer Ben O’Dowd sent this update on August 7:

The property owner is required to install and maintain a series of BMPs (silt fencing, check dams, sediment storage basins, etc.) to prevent the escape of sediment from the permittee’s property throughout construction.

Sometimes those components of the construction plan are not maintained appropriately or the fail during severe inclement weather and need to be repaired, replaced, or supplemented in order to prevent the escape of sediment from the permittee’s property.

Following receipt of the report of sediment escape from the property, we had our ESPC inspector visit the subject property, document the deficiencies which resulted in the escape of sediment from the property, and notify the owner and their contractor of the deficiencies.

We also reached out to the owner’s design professional and recommended a modified construction phasing approach which would reduce the risk of repeat occurrences.

If the incident occurs again, or if the identified deficiencies are not rectified within the required timeframe, we will progress through the City’s enforcement procedures for locally issued permits.

Please let us know if you identify any other deficiencies or if you have any more questions.

Have a good weekend!

You may wonder why it took WWALS so long to post this update. Continue reading →

Clay silt runoff down St. Augustine Road to Withlacoochee River 2026-08-03

4 Replies

Update 2026-08-14: Update: Clay Silt Runoff, St. Augustine Road, into Withlacoochee River 2026-08-07.

Update 2026-08-07: Clean Withlacoochee, Little, and Santa Fe Rivers 2026-08-05.

A WWALS member on Monday reported clay silt running out of a construction site, down St. Augustine Road, to the Withlacoochee River.

[Clay silt runoff down St. Augustine Road to Withlacoochee River, 2026-08-03 stopped 2026-08-04]
Clay silt runoff down St. Augustine Road to Withlacoochee River, 2026-08-03 stopped 2026-08-04

I reported it to GA-EPD and the City of Valdosta.

City Engineer Ben O’Dowd responded within minutes, saying the City was “addressing the compliance issue directly with the permittee”.

As of 3 PM Tuesday, the runoff had stopped.

We don’t know what measures have been put in place to make sure it does not happen again in the next rain.

The location is:
1660 N Saint Augustine Rd, Valdosta, GA 31601. Continue reading →

Moratorium on solar farms, AI facilities, and Bitcoin operations –Cook County BOCC 2024-12-02

Cook County, Georgia, was ahead of everybody else in passing a datacenter moratorium, way back on December 2, 2024.

Commissioner Rowe moved to approve a moratorium on solar farms, AI facilities, and Bitcoin operations in Cook County. Commissioner Daughtrey seconded the motion; the motion carried unanimously.

[Moratorium on solar farms, AI facilities, and Bitcoin operations --Cook County BOCC 2024-12-02]
Moratorium on solar farms, AI facilities, and Bitcoin operations –Cook County BOCC 2024-12-02

According to Cook County Manager Randall Lane, the motion itself is the entire text of the moratorium.

He wrote, “It was added to the Agenda by a Commissioner, and it was voted on unanimously to approve until lifted by the Board.”

Cook County is bounded on the west by the Little River, and on the east by the Withlacoochee River and its tributary the New River. Like everywhere else in the Suwannee River Basin, Cook County drinks from the Floridan Aquifer, for home, industry, and agriculture.

The county seat, Adel, on July 6, 2026, passed its own datacenter moratorium.

Adel’s moratorium is two pages compared to Cook County’s one sentence.

Downstream on the Withlacoochee River, the datacenter moratorium that Madison County, Florida, passed on July 23, 2026, is intermediate in length and complexity.

In between, Lowndes County, Georgia, has passed nothing: no moratorium, and no datacenter ordinance.

For much more about detacenters, see:

https://wwals.net/issues/datacenters Continue reading →

Adel, GA, Datacenter Moratorium 2026-07-06

Here is the 180-day datacenter moratorium that the City of Adel, Georgia, passed on July 6, 2026.

[Adel, Georgia, Datacenter Moratorium, 180 days, July 6, 2026]
Adel, Georgia, Datacenter Moratorium, 180 days, July 6, 2026

RESOLUTION No. 26-02

RESOLUTION FOR A MORATORIUM ON THE CONSIDERATION, PROCESSING, AND ACCEPTANCE OF APPLICATIONS OF NEW BUSINESS LICENSES, BUILDING PERMITS, OR OTHER APPROVALS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OR DEVELOPMENT OF DATA CENTERS WITHIN THE CITY OF ADEL

WHEREAS, the Constitution of the State of Georgia provides that the City of Adel enjoys and possesses home rule powers, police powers, zoning/land development powers and the ability to license and regulate certain businesses and occupations within the boundaries of the City; and

WHEREAS, the City of Adel shall have, inter alia, the full power and authority to license, regulate, control, or prohibit all businesses (Adel City Charter, Sec. 26);

WHEREAS, the City of Adel may, in the interest of public health, safety, order, convenience, comfort, prosperity, or general welfare, adopt by ordinance a plan or plans for the districting or zoning of the City for the purpose of regulating the location of trades, industries, apartment houses, dwellings, or other uses of property (Adel City Charter, Sec. 24);

WHEREAS, the City of Adel may define and prohibit nuisances within the corporate limits of said City (Adel City Charter, Sec. 27);

WHEREAS, the Mayor and Council of the City of Adel may enact and revise ordinances to regulate the issuance of licenses and permits for the construction, development, establishment, and operation of data centers within the City;

WHEREAS, the Mayor and Council of the City of Adel find there is a present need to review and revise the ordinances, zoning regulations, land development standards, licensing requirements, and nuisance regulations relating to the construction, location, placement, and operation of data centers within the City;

WHEREAS, data centers are a relatively new and evolving land use consisting of Continue reading →

Datacenter Discussion @ Columbia County Commission 2026-07-23

“Data Center Discussion” is the first item on the agenda for the Columbia County Commission meeting,

5:30 PM, Thursday, July 23, 2026, at the School Board Administrative Complex, 372 West Duval Street, Lake City, FL 32055

The board packet includes 215 pages of related materials, all from Datacenter supporters, except for one by 1000 Friends of Florida. Some of them try to conflate hyper-scale AI datacenters with search and cloud datacenters, while others argue that the growth in AI is inevitable so just go along to get along.

Hint: it’s not inevitable. It’s a bubble that will pop, more likely sooner than later.

[Datacenter Discussion @ Columbia County Commission, 5:30 PM, Thur4sday, 2026-07-23, 372 W Duval Street, Lake City, FL]
Datacenter Discussion @ Columbia County Commission, 5:30 PM, Thur4sday, 2026-07-23, 372 W Duval Street, Lake City, FL

There are several growth projection graphs, all of them wrong.

This one is clearly wrong at first glance, because its forward projection is linear: a straight line.

[Graph: Electricity Consumption at U.S. Data Centers is Expected to More Than Double by 2030 Total electricity consumption by U.S. data centers (terawatt-hours), 2026-01-01 --1000 Friends of Florida]
Graph: Electricity Consumption at U.S. Data Centers is Expected to More Than Double by 2030 Total electricity consumption by U.S. data centers (terawatt-hours), 2026-01-01 –1000 Friends of Florida
PDF

This graph is wrong because it projects a smooth curve. Sure, an exponential curve could be closer to right. See growth curves of the Internet, or of adoption of solar power, smartphones, or PCs.

But in all those historical examples, the exponential growth eventually looked more like an S-curve.

Also note that even if the amount of data produced does grow exponentially, that doesn’t mean that power use or datacenter numbers or sizes must grow like that.

The bubble will pop, sooner, or later, for one or both of two reasons:

  1. Investors will wise up that AI companies have grossly oversold the benefits of their products, and they are failing to produce profits
  2. Someone, probably in China, will leapfrog the current crude stack-computers-in-a-warehouse approach with faster, cheaper, and smaller methods.
Continue reading →

Datacenter Moratorium Proposed –Madison County BOCC 2026-07-08

Update 2026-07-23: Madison County BOCC passed the datacenter moratorium 4:0.

Update 2026-07-18: fixed name of county in title.

On July 22, 2026, a datacenter moratorium comes up for second reading at the Madison County, Florida, Board of County Commissioners, when they can also vote to pass it.

They already read it once on July 8, after working on it for some time before that.

[Datacenter Moratorium Proposed, Hamilton County BOCC, First Reading 2026-07-08, Second Reading & Vote 2026-07-22]
Datacenter Moratorium Proposed, Hamilton County BOCC, First Reading 2026-07-08, Second Reading & Vote 2026-07-22

The agenda and board packet for their Regular Meeting, July 8, 2026, contains a public notice, a recently-passed state datacenter law with highlights on parts applicable to local ordinances, a Business Impact Estimate for the proposed ordinance, a redline version of the ordinance showing changes since its previous draft, and the nine-page datacenter moratorium ordinance itself.

Every county should be as diligent and transparent, no matter in which state.

The east border of Madison County is the Withlacoochee River downstream from Georgia and upstream from the Suwannee River, with first-magnitue Madison Blue Spring in between. Madison County, like all counties in the Suwannee River Basin, is on top of the Floridan Aquifer from which we all drink for every purpose.

The ordinance does not explicitly name any of the rivers or springs or the aquifer, but it does include these sections, which are relevant. Continue reading →

Data Center in Land Use table in Zoning Ordinance –Irwin County 2026-04-06

The Irwin County Data Center Ordinance table rows about which zoning districts can have a Data Center Special Exception have made their way into the composite Irwin County Zoning Ordinance.

For those who are not used to this standard practice in county zoning regulations. The Irwin County composite Zoning Ordinance has a table to show what is permissible in each zoning district. The two rows specified by the data center ordinance got into that table. One of them says you can have a special exception for a data center on agricultural land. Which is s. the county commission later approved. Curiously, the composite zoning ordinance does not include the rest of the data center ordinance. Nor apparently about a dozen other ordinances.

For much more about datacenters, see:

https://wwals.net/issues/datacenters

It’s possible that for the Special Exception for Project Arrowhead that the Irwin County Commission passed on May 20, 2026 to be legal, it first needed the Data Center Ordinance they passed on April 6, 2026.

[Data Center in Land Use table in Zoning Ordinance --Irwin County 2026-04-06]
Data Center in Land Use table in Zoning Ordinance –Irwin County 2026-04-06

Curiously, the actual Data Center Ordinance is not included in the composite Zoning Ordinance that Irwin County sent me on June 29 in response to an open records request of the same day.

The Zoning Ordinance ends with Chapter 16, and the Data Center Ordinance says it is adding Chapter 27. I wonder what are the ordinances in Chapters 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26?

Anyway, here’s what those table rows look like in the Data Center Ordinance: Continue reading →

Verizon tower in Langdale Park? @ GLPC 2026-06-29

Verizon Wireless wants to put a 159-foot-tall communications tower in Langdale Park, a stone’s throw from the main trail kiosk, too close to White Trail A, and with no demonstration that no existing tower would do, not even an inventory of existing towers.

The Greater Lowndes Planning Commission (GLPC) will hear this case at 5:30 PM, Monday, June 29, 2026, and the Lowndes County Commission will decide at 5:30 PM, Tuesday, July 14, 2026.

County staff wrote that the application satisfies the requirements of the county’s Unified Land Development Code (ULDC). Actually, it fails to do so in at least four ways.

[Verizon tower in Langdale Park? Next to White Trail? @ GLPC 2026-06-29]
Verizon tower in Langdale Park? Next to White Trail? @ GLPC 2026-06-29

The GLPC agenda sheet for “8. TWR-2026-02 Bermuda Run, 3781 North Valdosta Road, Map and Parcel 0076C-025” says in part: Continue reading →

Help stop big box sprawl, Alachua City Hall 2026-06-22

You can help stop sprawl west of Alachua along US 441, uphill from the Santa Fe River.

[Help stop US 441 big box sprawl, Alachua City Hall, June 22, 2026]
Help stop US 441 big box sprawl, Alachua City Hall, June 22, 2026

Call, write, or go to the 6 PM, June 22, 2026, Alachua City Commission meeting.

Here’s a petition by the Suwannee-St. Johns Group of Sierra Club Florida Chapter:

https://act.sierraclub.org/actions/Florida?actionId=AR0619414&fbclid=IwY2xjawSZ_cZleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFHckF4eGVwYmRlYUJ2U3lOc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHkQjqONwPFpZmnp8B2Grx_yYBxP1yHJrP5HoydoDB9Y8xeqBd1Yu_wuID_cn_aem_QfdwczhEdjHfmrHbOKaPzw Continue reading →

Rezoning application for potential datacenter, Coleman Road, Lowndes County 2025-06-30

Update 2026-08-05: Rezoning materials, REZ-2025-11, potential datacenter site, Coleman Road North, Withlacoochee River @ LCC 2026-08-03.

I keep getting asked for the rezoning application for the potential datacenter site on Coleman Road in Lowndes County.

Please note that there is no application yet for a datacenter in Lowndes County.

The rezoning application for the potential site is in the board packets for the June 30, 2025, Planning Commission meeting and the July 7-8, 2025, Lowndes County Commission meetings.

[Rezoning application for potential datacenter site, Coleman Road North to Withlacoochee River, Lowndes County 2025-06-30, 2025-07-08]
Rezoning application for potential datacenter site, Coleman Road North to Withlacoochee River, Lowndes County 2025-06-30, 2025-07-08

The Planning Commission board packet materials, 2025-06-30

These were obtained from Lowndes County in response to an open records request from Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE):

http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2025/06/packet-two-lowndes-county-rezoning-materials-glpc-2025-06-30.html

In case it’s not obvious, see this file:

https://wwals.net/pictures/2025-06-30-coleman-road-lowndes-county-rezoning-datacenter-site/REZ-2025-11-GLPC-Packet.pdf

Images of each page are below.

They include the relevant pages about the target zoning, M-1 (Light Manufacturing), from the Lowndes County Unified Land Development Code (ULDC). Continue reading →