By Roland Murphy for AZBEX
Pre-submittal materials have been submitted in Mesa for a major new data center project on 178 vacant acres at the NEC of Pecos Road and the Crismon Road alignment.
The site occupies land that is partially under Maricopa County and partially under City of Mesa jurisdiction. The request from landowner Pacific Proving would annex the property into Mesa and consolidate the disparate zoning designations to allow for the development of a data center campus featuring six individual data centers of 400KSF and 60 MW of installed capacity each, according to the conceptual site plan.
The overall campus would deliver 2.4MSF of gross built area with an installed capacity of 360MW.
As of Nov. 7, the Mesa planning staff has reviewed the materials and submitted initial feedback. The review found the current Mesa General Plan character type for the area to be Mixed Use Community, which is not compatible with the requested Light Industrial zoning. A minor General Plan amendment would be required to change the designation to Employment if the request is to proceed.
The pre-submittal materials do not name the eventual operator of the project. The site plan identifies kW Mission Critical Engineering and Corgan as the attached engineering and design firms. The requests were submitted by the law firm of Gammage & Burnham.
Proposal Comes During Focus Shift
In recent years, Mesa has become the East Valley hub for data center development. The DATABEX project database shows 15 data center projects planned in the city since 2016. Of those, two have been completed, one has been canceled, six are in either design or design/plan review, one is pending procurements/negotiations, and four are under construction.
Not including the canceled project, the total estimated construction valuations for which data is available are more than $5.8B and nearly 10.5MSF.
Data centers have become an increasingly controversial development choice, however. Even though nearly all current proposals feature designs that include hyper-efficiencies in terms of water use and recycling for cooling and operations purposes, older designs required massive amounts of water. This led to an increase in public opposition, as well as resistance by some planners. Data center project representatives have often had to undertake significant reeducation efforts to explain the new efficiencies, sometimes with limited success.
As was discussed in the recent BEX Leading Market Series panel on the state of industrial development, data centers face another challenge. Mesa in particular embraced data center and warehouse/logistics development early on in the current development boom. As a result, the city has seen explosive growth in large footprint developments that provide comparatively few jobs after construction is complete. (AZBEX, Nov. 10)
The panelists said Mesa and other cities are changing their focus away from large footprint/small employment development and giving preference to advanced manufacturing and other industrial uses that provide greater employment and tax revenue opportunities. This change in preference has begun to create an administrative slowdown in advancing non-manufacturing project proposals.
No hearing or other action dates have been set for the Pacific Proving requests.
