Pinal County Planning Commissioners Say They Can't Yet Recommend Approving Data Centers

Pinal County Planning Commissioners Say They Can't Yet Recommend Approving Data Centers

What Happened

On Aug. 12, five members of the Pinal County Planning and Zoning Commission appeared before the Board of Supervisors at the board's invitation for a two-hour, education-only session on data centers — one installment in an ongoing county series. Nothing on the agenda asked the board to decide anything, and no vote was taken. Commissioners told the board they cannot responsibly recommend approving new data center projects until the county confirms it has the water and power to support them, and until rules governing the buildings are actually written.

Why It Matters for San Tan Valley

Pinal County writes and enforces the land-use rules for unincorporated San Tan Valley, so any data center ordinance the county eventually adopts would apply there. On the utility side, SRP serves the Town of San Tan Valley and APS serves parts of the wider San Tan Valley area, meaning decisions either utility makes about large new customers can reach local ratepayers. None of the specific projects discussed at the Aug. 12 meeting were identified as being located in San Tan Valley.

What Commissioners Said They Can't Answer

Commissioner Gary Pranzo told the board that APS has said the county needs to grow its power supply by roughly 13%, and that ED3 has said about 20% more could be lost when hydroelectric generation fails — by his math, a shortfall of roughly a third. He noted farmers and ranchers are drilling wells 100 feet deeper than they were two or three years ago, and that the state has exempted data centers from certain taxes through 2029. “We really cannot make a recommendation to the county supervisors because we don't know if we have the facilities to support it,” Pranzo said, asking who gets priority in a shortage — a data center or a neighborhood.

Commissioner Thomas Scott II said the people presenting data center applications to the commission have not been the engineers or site planners who can explain the projects' design, contrasting that with a county tour of a facility in Goodyear where those answers were available. He also questioned employment estimates on one proposal — told 100 to 500 employees per 400,000-square-foot building versus 28 reported to the board — and cited a CNN report he said found temperature increases of 16 degrees at a data center building and 3.6 degrees five miles out, saying he remains unconvinced by closed-loop cooling claims.

Commissioner Karen Mooney asked for a full year of seasonal ambient-temperature testing before and after construction, the same before-and-after approach for noise, and water discharge testing before it enters any public system, arguing a closed loop isn't a sealed loop. She cited a $10,000 fine in Wyoming tied to a soil bacterium in discharged water and a $20.5 million settlement in Oregon over wastewater and nitrate groundwater contamination linked to data centers.

Commissioner Terrilyn Klucar said her concern is location: recent applications have asked the county to amend its comprehensive plan or rezone land for data centers, when the sites toured in Goodyear didn't require rezoning because they were already zoned industrial. Board Chairman Jeffrey McClure responded that counties have less zoning flexibility than cities because of state trust land and private-property constraints, but said he'd look at moving in that direction.

A fifth commissioner argued rules need to exist before approvals, not after, pointing to Casa Grande as a jurisdiction left with little regulation to fall back on, and raised concerns that data center construction can absorb electricians, plumbers and concrete crews also needed for home construction.

One Supervisor Pushed Back

Supervisor Stephen Q. Miller disagreed that new rules are the answer, saying any development — including 1,500 homes and their streets — raises local temperature versus the farmland it replaces, and called the heat concern around data centers a myth in his opinion. He noted car radiators, a closed coolant system, are drained daily and already heavily regulated, and said he saw no reason to treat data centers differently.

What Experts Told the Board

David Ebert, chief AI and data science officer at the University of Arizona, told the board it has authority to set conditions on approvals. On water, he said direct-chip and liquid cooling can recirculate the same fluid rather than consuming it, making facilities close to water-neutral. On heat, he cited an Intel demonstration where machine rooms ran at 95 degrees instead of a traditional 65-68, cutting the facility's active cooling need to 29 hours for the entire year — a strategy he said suits Arizona's dry climate. Asked why the buildings need to be sited in Pinal County at all, Ebert said latency-sensitive uses — traffic signal control, emergency response systems, flood prediction, computer-guided surgery — can be disrupted by delays that grow with distance to a data center, while other uses, like looking up an actor's filmography, don't require local proximity. Ebert said he was not an expert on low-frequency noise, coolant toxicity at disposal or fire risk when those questions came up, and recommended the county consult specialists on each.

Scott Scharli, director of strategic energy management at SRP, said the claim that data centers raise other customers' bills does not hold in SRP territory because a large customer pays the full cost of the transmission lines and substation it requires before service begins. He said roughly 20 data centers in SRP territory accounted for about 7% of a recent system peak of about 9,000 megawatts. He also described SRP studying 7.2 gigawatts of requests from 24 applicants after requiring a 30% non-refundable deposit to continue — only three applicants moved forward.

What Happens Next

Pinal County currently has no data center ordinance. Supervisor Mike Goodman asked whether requirements — including annual water-use estimates and megawatt needs — could be written into a future ordinance; Ebert said applicants should be able to supply that information up front. In the meantime, applications continue arriving at the Planning and Zoning Commission, which under county practice meets the third Thursday of each month at the Pinal County Administrative Complex Emergency Operations Center in Florence.

Sources: SanTanValley.com, “Pinal County Leaders Want Data Center Rules in Place Before More Projects Are Approved” (Aug. 20, 2026)