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NEW BEDFORD – City councilors unanimously advanced a measure Monday night to prohibit new data centers from being built anywhere in the city.
The proposed ordinance would be an indefinite ban, but city planners have described it as a “pause” to give them more time to research the issue. It’s not clear whether any site in New Bedford has the space and resources to host a new data center.
Data centers are allowed under current city zoning for “General Business and Office Uses,” with no extra approval process designed to address the impacts that a large data center can have. Planning Director Jen Carloni said that provision was drafted when planners understood a “data center” to be a regular building with computer servers inside.
“But now with the rise of AI, they’re much different,” she told the council at its ordinance committee meeting on Monday.
Planners want to pump the brakes because the large-scale data centers that support artificial intelligence can be noisy, and they demand large amounts of water and electricity, Carloni said. She pointed to a controversial data center expansion in Lowell as the type of situation the city wants to avoid.
New Bedford would join a growing number of cities across the country that have passed bans or moratoriums on data centers. A MassLive analysis found 18 municipalities in Massachusetts with a ban on the books.
Councilors Ian Abreu and Ryan Pereira said they were potentially open to a data center in the city for the revenue.
“I’m not against growing our tax base,” Abreu said. “But it’s got to be done with the right regulations in the appropriate manner.”
Carloni told councilors her department will take about a year to research whether New Bedford could accommodate a modern data center, and if so, what the approval process should look like. After that, she said, she would come back to the council with a more permanent proposal.
That proposal might be to keep a ban in place without changes.
No one at Monday’s committee meeting pointed to any area in the city that they were confident could host an AI data center. The city has little developable land left. Even a large open site, like the 95 acres of the city golf course slated to be turned into an “advanced manufacturing campus,” could have trouble getting all the water that a data center needs, Carloni said.
“There might not be an area that we’d even bother wasting our time,” Pereira said.
The Planning Board gave the proposed ordinance a non-binding thumbs-up at its meeting on Oct. 7, unanimously voting for a favorable recommendation to the council.
The committee unanimously referred the proposal to the full City Council with a favorable recommendation.
Flock discussion delayed
The ordinance committee was also slated to question Police Chief Jason Thody about Flock, the controversial license-plate reading technology, on Monday. But councilors delayed the discussion because Thody was at a conference for police chiefs. He sent a letter to the council saying he would come back from that meeting with “more context” on the technology.
The city will allow its contract with Flock to expire on Nov. 12, The Light reported on Friday. New Bedford police had already suspended their use of the license-plate cameras in August after backlash from some residents and councilors. The mayor fired two police officers on Thursday for abusing Flock data to track romantic partners.
Councilors tabled their Flock discussion until the next ordinance committee meeting on Nov. 12.
In the meantime, The Light will host a Community Conversation on license-plate reading technology at 6 p.m. on Wednesday at Keith Middle School.
Council weighs modernizing legal notices
Under state law, many basic functions of city government have to be advertised ahead of time in a local “newspaper of general circulation” — namely, the New Bedford Standard-Times, the city’s legacy newspaper. The council is now weighing whether to change that.
Councilor Shane Burgo, who chairs the committee, told his colleagues he was interested in introducing a new process for notifying the public that relies on more modern communication methods like the internet. The council would need approval from the state Legislature to make such a change, and he said he was already talking to New Bedford’s state representatives.
Legal notices in the local paper are required for things like planning and zoning hearings, public contracts, and updates to city ordinances.
Burgo said advertising those city activities without going through a local paper would help the city keep up with the times as newspaper readership declines, and save money. The council alone spent $15,000 on legal notices last year, he said.
Councilor Pereira proposed putting legal notices on a dedicated page of the city’s website and on physical bulletin boards in all city libraries. As a fallback, his proposal would also require the city to continue its practice of posting notices outside the city clerk’s office.
Abreu floated the idea of starting an official New Bedford City Council Facebook page with basic, non-political updates about council business, similar to a page run by the Boston City Council.
The committee passed motions to ask all city departments to report how much they had spent on legal notices in the last two fiscal years and to ask the city’s lawyers to start drafting legal language for Pereira’s proposal.
Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org.
