Effingham County officials are considering stricter regulations for heavy industrial development as they review zoning ordinances amid ongoing opposition to a planned data center.
During a work session Tuesday night, county staff said they plan to strengthen ordinances related to heavy industrial use, among other uses.
"We do have lighting provisions currently, but we understand that we do need to strengthen some of our standards," said one county staff member. "A lot of these standards will be strengthened and addressed in our heavy industrial and our I-1 ordinances.”
County Manager Tim Callanan added that the county is going to strengthen the noise portion in their ordinance
regulations but that the county has already added a section for low frequency and some tolerances, but did not go into detail on what those are.
Staff went on to say the county will also include standards for emergency backup generators for their heavy industrial ordinance and data center ordinance, including buffers, locations, setbacks and screening among other standards.
"Those do have some sort of noise with those," staff said. "We currently have buffer and screening ordinances. However, we will take a deeper look at that, and that may also be something that will be included as a condition in that use as well."
She went on to say the data center will be placed in the county's table of permitted uses as a conditional use.
"We will have attached conditions, so they will have additional things that they'll have to abide by,” staff stated. “We'll have water and sewer standards that require documentation of anticipated demand and capacity. We would require traffic studies, and that would be established as objectively triggered based on project characteristics.”
Commissioners are expected to address the new ordinances at one of their regularly scheduled meetings in November.
Latrice Williams is a general assignment reporter covering Bryan and Effingham County. She can be reached at lwilliams6@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Effingham discusses stricter industrial standards
