Riverside council takes up 45-day moratorium on new and expanded data centers

The Riverside City Council's Nov. 10 agenda included a Land Use Committee recommendation to adopt an urgency ordinance placing a 45-day hold on new data centers, and on expansions of existing ones, anywhere in the city.

The records reviewed do not show what the council did. Minutes of the Nov. 10 meeting had not been posted.

Adopting the ordinance required a four-fifths vote, according to the staff report. It would take effect immediately.

Before it expired, the council could extend it after a public hearing by up to "22 months and 15 days" under state law, the report says, again by a four-fifths vote.

While in effect, the ordinance would bar the city from granting building permits, business licenses, use permits, variances, subdivisions or any other approval to open or enlarge a data center.

Staff also offered an alternative: a resolution recording the community and economic development director's view that data centers are already not allowed. The municipal code does not list them as a permitted use, and the director has made no finding that they resemble any listed use, the report says.

How it reached the council

Data centers came before the Land Use Committee on Sept. 14, and members directed staff to prepare a moratorium. The next day the council formed an artificial intelligence working group, one of whose tasks is studying the land use and infrastructure needs of data centers.

The committee met again in a special session Oct. 13. It discussed timing its work with the AI group, heard the City Attorney's Office explain state rules on moratoriums and asked staff to bring both options to the council, according to the Nov. 10 report.

A data center discussion set for the council's Oct. 20 meeting was removed from that agenda, according to draft minutes that are awaiting council approval.

Committee chair Clarissa Cervantes' memo for the Oct. 13 session says the city's code neither defines nor regulates data centers. Staff reported no pending or active applications for big data centers or server farms, the memo says.

The memo lists actions elsewhere, including a permanent ban in Coachella, a September prohibition in Calexico, 45-day moratoriums in Palm Springs, Oakland and San Francisco, and a ban Monterey Park voters approved in June.

Staff's concerns

The Nov. 10 report cites water use, noise, air quality, energy demand and land consumption. It says Riverside has a single connection to the statewide grid and that outages hit parts of Ward 1 and Ward 5 in summer 2026.

It cites projections from the U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that data centers could use 6.7% to 12% of the nation's electricity by 2028, up from about 4.4% in 2023. It also says the EPA considers Riverside to be in chronic non-attainment for fine particulate pollution such as PM2.5.

During a moratorium, staff would study setbacks, noise limits and community benefits. Options could range from an outright ban to allowing data centers under specific standards, the report says.