To Centre Wellington Mayor and Councillors,

I am writing as a resident of this community because I am deeply concerned about the rapid growth of data centres and the new pressures these facilities will place on our local water sources, electrical grids, households, ecosystems, and our community.

The data centre proposed for the Fergus location at 865 Gartshore Street plans to scale up to a 150 MW to 300 MW site within 5 years, which is considered a large-scale AI data centre campus. This size of data centre are among the most resource-intensive forms of industrial development being proposed in communities across Canada. They require enormous amounts of electricity, significant volumes of water for cooling, extensive utility infrastructure, and constitute around-the-clock industrial operations. 

Despite the high risk of negative impacts on communities and the environment, residents are provided with little to no information about proposed data centre projects before decisions are made. Cities aren’t considering these data centre projects as unprecedented development proposals, but these projects represent a wholly different scale of land-use than our local policies are prepared for. Data centres effectively constitute an entirely new type of unregulated land-use and our local policies were never designed to consider this kind of intensive industrial development, nor do we even fully understand the impacts of them.

What I do know is our community should not be expected to bear the environmental, financial, or infrastructure costs of data centre development without meaningful resident involvement and full transparency on impacts, with clear guardrails put in place. This includes considering the risks if a given project should change its ownership, scale, intended use, go bankrupt, or otherwise not end up as advertised. 

As a resident, ratepayer, and voter, I expect you as a Council representative to put the interests of our community first. Specifically, I ask that you:

1.Adopt a moratorium on data centre development until you have time to research and conduct impact studies. Pause all data centre development until our municipality has information, clear policies, and the assessment tools & capacity in place to assess the cumulative impacts of these facilities and the implications for residents and businesses (including grid capacity, electricity demand, water usage, infrastructure requirements, environmental and human health impacts, and affordability impacts).  

When the property was purchased 20 years ago by the current owner, residential homes were not built right up to the adjacent streets where it is located. These residents will be most impacted by this development.

Centre Wellington Township has the opportunity now to establish clear rules before this large-scale infrastructure is built. Existing planning and zoning frameworks must be updated to reflect the scale, resource demands, and the known long-term impacts of these facilities.

2. Guarantee meaningful public consultation: Residents should be engaged early and transparently throughout the planning and development process. Our community should be notified as soon as data centre proposals are brought forward and provided with accessible opportunities to ask questions, raise concerns, and provide input before decisions are made. Irreversible major infrastructure decisions affecting public services and noise / air pollution should not proceed without meaningful community participation. 

Further, updates throughout the planning process should be communicated in plain language and proactively shared in transparent and accessible formats.

3. Require public disclosure of project impacts: All data centre proposals should publicly disclose projected electricity demand, energy sources and related methane and carbon emissions, water consumption, water sources, cooling methods, wastewater or cooling discharge plans, backup power systems and related emissions, expected noise impacts, projected air pollution, and any anticipated upgrades that would be needed to municipal infrastructure at taxpayer expense. Residents and municipalities need access to this information in order to understand how these developments may affect local resources, public infrastructure, affordability, and community well-being. 

If this data centre project has already advanced without adequate community transparency or a clear understanding of their impacts, it should be subject to further review. Communities should not be expected to accept decisions that were made without appropriate transparency or public participation. Council, moreover, must not sign non-disclosure agreements that prevent this information from becoming public.

4. Protect residents from subsidizing private infrastructure: The costs of servicing data centres, including expanding electrical infrastructure, water systems, or other municipal services, should not be shifted onto households, small businesses, or existing ratepayers through higher utility rates or public subsidies. Developers and business operators should be responsible for the full costs associated with their facilities and the infrastructure required to support them. Legally-binding commitments, rather than vague promises to follow best-practices, are needed to this end.

5. Advocate for coordinated action across all orders of government: I also request that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and our provincial municipal association work with provincial and federal governments to develop a coordinated framework for data centre development. This framework should include municipalities and establish clear standards for environmental protection, honouring Indigenous sovereignty, human and community health safeguards, public disclosure requirements, meaningful public consultation, and infrastructure planning, while rejecting approaches like ‘bring your own power’ that obscure the energy footprints and climate impacts of data centre development. 

Communities deserve to know what is being proposed in our backyard, to understand how these projects could affect us, and to have a meaningful voice in the political process before decisions are made. Local governments should have the tools they need to make informed decisions in the public interest. 

I respectfully ask that Council support a moratorium on new data centre developments that include any current data centre proposals until impacts, policies, and protections are in place to guide responsible decision-making.

Thank you for your time and your service to our community. I look forward to your response and protective action for our community.