Members of Sanford Clean Air & Water Coalition listen to discussion at the Sanford City Council meeting Tuesday. Photo: Lee Burnett
By Lee Burnett
Applause broke out at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting after councilors voted unanimously to enact a 180-day moratorium on data center development.
The applause came from members of the Sanford Clean Air and Water Coalition, the organizers who collected petition signatures twice, once for a citizen-enacted 90-day pause and again for the longer pause enacted by the council on Tuesday. Mayor Becky Brink complimented the group for their efforts and admitted the council “stole” their idea.
Attention now turns to the Industrial Development Standards Task Force, the city council-appointed group tasked with reviewing city land use controls and recommending changes. It was clear from discussion that Mayor Brink and the coalition have very different ideas of the purpose of the task force.
Brink said she sees the purpose of the task force as developing guardrails “to protect our community” and “to protect the environment,” while allowing businesses to develop.
“You don’t put a moratorium in place to stop stuff, you do it for a reason. We want to be business friendly,” she said. ” … We want businesses to know we still want them to come, but we want to give guidelines.”
Coalition members see the task force’s role as one to develop standards that, if enacted, would make it impossible to develop a large-scale data center.
“We need business in Sanford, but we need responsible and sustainable business, and a generative AI data center is neither of those things,” said Rebecca Andrews of Springvale, a Democratic candidate for the Maine House of Representatives in District 141.
Eve Dumont-Wilson, a mother and wildlife conservation student, said her work collecting petition signatures showed her “there is no silent majority in favor of it” and urged the council to consider passing an ordinance prohibiting large-scale data centers.
Alex Clary, a member of both the coalition and the task force, said, “this is not the right project for Sanford … this data center does not offer us a path forward.” Clary said he does not want to see Sanford green light AI development only to see the bottom fall out of the market, which he fears will happen because the speculative investments in AI far exceed demand.
“We do not need another abandoned project within this municipality,” he said. “We need to ask these questions now, and say no, and find something better that will meet our needs and that is out there.”
The Gibbs family, which has owned more than 1,000-acres of land in south Sanford for 50 years, has proposed a massive industrial-technical complex that includes a data center, on-site power generation, an industrial greenhouse, a cold storage facility and potentially a range of other advance manufacturing, warehouse distribution and research and development businesses. The family allowed disclosure of planning efforts in February in an effort to derail a proposed statewide moratorium.
The task force, comprised of city staff, councilors, industry representatives and citizens, has been meeting since last month and will wrap up its work January 31. The moratorium could be extended if the task force needs more time, Brink said.
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