UPDATE: After a contentious, four-hour meeting of the Modesto City Council Tuesday evening with about 200 people in attendance, five of the seven city council members – Chris Ricci, Eric Alvarez, Rosa Escutia-Braaton, Nick Bavaro and Jeremiah Williams – said they were in favor of moratorium on data centers. Staff is now gathering information for a potential moratorium on a future council agenda.
Lots of people get mad at the news these days – particularly when the topic is about the rise of data centers nationwide.
But when lifelong Modesto resident Elizabeth Miranda Morales read the news about a developer interested in building a data center smack dab in her own city, she did more than get mad.
“When I saw the story, I was action-minded,” said the 34-year-old local project coordinator. “It’s easy to get on the teeter-totter of ‘Why isn’t anybody doing anything?’ or ‘What can we do to stop it?’ and I finally thought, ‘I don’t know if there’s a petition out there, but I’m just going to start one and spread the word.’”
The mother of two young children started a Change.org petition to stand up against the proposed Modesto development and any data centers in Stanislaus County. And she isn’t alone in taking a stand. Since launching the petition less than a week ago, more than 1,700 people and counting have signed.
Even more have expressed their opposition – by the thousands – online and across social media. Many cite the AI infrastructure as a threat to the community’s already-stressed water and energy supplies, farmers, artists and others.
So much opposition has formed, and so quickly, that a march and protest is planned before this week’s Tuesday evening, Aug. 11, Modesto City Council meeting.
Grassroots public opposition has been so strong at the mere idea of a big data center coming to Modesto that city officials released a statement last week aimed at calming down concerns.
But the statement, which says the controversial tech infrastructure isn’t an allowed land use in the municipal code, ignores the fact that the city has two existing data centers already – albeit much smaller.
Modesto joins national trend against data centers
Modesto residents’ vocal opposition to data centers mirrors national trends against the AI tech industry’s rapid and seemingly endless expansion recently.
As soon as this news was confirmed by city officials of NorthPoint Development’s interest in building a data center at 1200 Graphics Drive near the Modesto Junior College East Campus, a mix of college students, community leaders and concerned residents took to social media looking for ways to protest the project.
Thousands of comments, likes and shares across various social media platforms illustrate many Modestans’ insistence that data centers are not welcome in the region.
Last week, Hannah Methvin, a third-year communications and theater major and president of MJC Pirates for Peace, and her team began circulating information on how neighbors can voice their displeasure with the potential project to local lawmakers.
Since January, Methvin and six other students built an online platform as Pirates for Peace with aspirations to become an official club if they can find an advisor. Earlier posts have garnered a couple hundred likes. The group’s post stating “We Don’t Want Data Centers in Modesto” has more than 11,500 likes.
Methvin is not surprised.
“Nobody I know uses (AI),” she said. “All of my friends dunk on people who use AI because it’s anti-intellectual. We need to put humanity first, and anything that AI has to offer, Modesto has tenfold of it.”
From her perspective, it’s no longer an opinion, but has become a fact, as data centers are being built at an almost immeasurable pace across the country.
Her group’s main concerns boil down to three categories: utility bills, environmental costs and local employment.
“When something like this is coming or is being proposed to our area, we’re really hesitant to welcome that in because this AI center is going to drive up energy and water costs for our residents,” Methvin said, “and if we let that happen, then that’s not putting our community first.”
Pirates for Peace will join Modesto 50501 and the Central Valley Black, Indigenous and People of Color Coalition (CVBIPOCC) on Tuesday evening for a protest at Five Points and then march to City Hall before the council meeting.
Protest planned during council public comment
Activist group CVBIPOCC is calling to pack Tuesday’s council meeting in response to the potential data center, in addition to the group’s ongoing concerns about increased surveillance and overpolicing.
Efren Diaz, a CVBIPOCC spokesperson, says while the other issues have been on the organization’s agenda for a while, data centers have become a unifying topic. Opposition to them, he said, is an all-sides issue that will likely bring neighbors together, no matter their political affiliations.
“This is sort of like a universal issue that both people on the more conservative side and the more liberal side are essentially not wanting data centers here,” he said, “We’ll just have to kind of wait and see to see who is kind of being proactive about this and who is having those initiatives for no data centers.”
Methvin said the response she’s seeing online so far reflects how she and her peers feel.
That includes fellow native Modesteans like Julia Washington, who works part-time at Roseburg Square’s independent book store Bookish and runs a very small greeting-card business, selling her art at the local farmers market.
As a champion of Modesto’s creative community, Washington is also an outspoken critic of data centers and is helping to mobilize opposition especially around its impacts on artists, farmers, and long-term community health.
“The solutions that we should be looking for long term aren’t found in a data center,” Washington said. “They’re found in: How do we attract more people with medical degrees here? How are we going to help support the artist community here? How do we make it a little bit easier for people to start businesses here?”
Much of the local concern about possible data centers centers around their water usage, which is required in massive amounts to cool the technology. The Central Valley has seen on-and-off droughts, in addition to groundwater depletion due to pumping, for more than a decade.
“Here in Modesto, water is a key issue for us,” said Morales, one of the many reasons she started the petition. “We have water regulations (where) you can only water certain days of the week. I have a garden. I make sure I don’t water on the days we’re not allowed to. To think of a data center just running water 24/7 whenever they want, with probably no repercussions, is not fair to the residents.”
Council members respond to data center petition
With new people signing onto the petition daily, two city council members, District 4 Councilman Nick Bavaro and District 6 Councilman David Wright, responded to the public outcry on the Change.org site with reassurance. Both confirmed no official application for construction of a data center exists at the moment.
Despite the lack of impending construction, even the consideration of a data center is worth pushing back on because opening a door for one, opens the door for many, Morales told The Modesto Focus.
Colby Zavala, a spokesperson for Modesto 50501, said their organization is spearheading a protest and advocacy action event on Tuesday before the city council meeting. The grassroots group is part of a non-violent progressive movement that organizes mutual aid events, protests and demonstrations.
The group will lead a protest walk from Five Points, at the intersection of McHenry Avenue and J Street, to Tenth Street Place for the council meetings.
“When a city council person posted twice on Facebook, it felt like they were testing the waters,” Zavala wrote in an email statement.
The group submitted public records requests to the city after learning that several city council members were being lobbied on the topic, he wrote.
“We don’t need data centers making those issues worse. Noise pollution is another concern. Many data centers currently operating have noise issues, and there needs to be specific regulations in place before we can approve something that is very likely to have negative impacts on people’s health,” he wrote.
MJC’s Pirates for Peace and CVBIPOCC said they’re following Modesto 50501’s lead on addressing the data centers to council.
“I don’t think that this specific conversation is going to die because it is so local to us,” Methvin said. “The fact that this might be built right next to MJC, I think that people really see this as a threat to us.”
Vivienne Aguilar and Ximena Loeza are reporters for The Modesto Focus, a project of the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. Contact them at vivienne@themodestofocus.org and ximena@themodestofocus.org.