Meeting starts at 7 a.m.; ordinance follows through on the Mayor’s July pledge that “no data center is worth our water.
RAPID CITY, S.D. — An ordinance that would rewrite how the city treats data centers — capping their water use, banning the largest of them outright, and imposing new noise and cooling requirements — goes before the Rapid City Planning Commission Thursday, September 10, at 7 a.m. in the City Council Meeting Room, 300 Sixth Street. Doors open 15 minutes early.
The Zoning Board of Adjustment meets first on a separate, unrelated agenda; Planning Commission follows immediately after.
This is a recommendation vote, not final adoption. If Planning Commission recommends approval, the ordinance still has to clear a first and second reading before the full City Council before it becomes law.
Anyone who wants a say before staff’s recommendation goes to Council has their best shot at influencing the shape of the ordinance now, at the Planning Commission level.
What’s on the table
File #26OA006 would amend Chapters 17.04, 17.22, and 17.24 of the Rapid City Municipal Code, creating three legal categories of data center where currently there is one undifferentiated use:
- Micro data center — peak demand up to 10 megawatts, no more than 4,000 gallons of water a day (not counting initial fill or irrigation).
- Permitted outright in Light Industrial and Heavy Industrial districts, provided it sits at least 500 feet from any residentially-zoned property line. Closer than that, it needs a conditional use permit instead.
- Large-scale data center — 10 to 50 megawatts, up to 10,000 gallons a day.
- Allowed only as a conditional use, with a 1,000-foot residential buffer.
- Hyperscale data center — 50 megawatts or more, or more than 10,000 gallons a day. Prohibited outright, citywide, under new sections 17.22.035 and 17.24.035.
Every data center, regardless of tier, would be barred from using evaporative cooling — the ordinance requires air-cooled or closed-loop systems instead, on the reasoning laid out in staff’s memo that evaporative systems consume significantly more water.
Backup generators are restricted to emergency use only and must meet EPA Tier 4 emissions standards.
Operators would have to commission both pre-construction and post-construction sound studies and stay under 65 decibels in the daytime and 60 at night, measured at the property line.
The ordinance also gives the city and its utility providers ongoing authority they don’t clearly have today: the right to demand usage data from an operator at any time, and — if a facility’s water draw exceeds its allowed threshold — the right to restrict or shut off its domestic water supply.
Where this comes from
Mayor Jason Salamun told the Council in his July 20 budget address that his administration would bring data center regulations forward specifically to protect the city’s water supply, a pledge he punctuated with the line that became this outlet’s headline that week: “No data center is worth our water.”
A resident raised the same concern more pointedly at the July 29 Legal and Finance Committee meeting, pushing for a conditional use process and a formal legal opinion on whether data center development was even allowed under the city’s existing industrial zoning — comments tied at the time to Sequitor Edge’s planned facility at the Black Hills Industrial Center.
The ordinance up for a vote Thursday doesn’t name that project or any other by address, but it lands squarely on the questions raised about it.
City planning staff’s memo, dated September 4, frames the current rules as a gap rather than an oversight: the city defined data centers and allowed them in industrial districts back in December 2024, before water, sewer, noise, and vibration impacts specific to the industry were “well-researched,” in staff’s words.
The Development Review Team is recommending approval of the ordinance as written.
What’s still unresolved
The ordinance sets hard numbers — megawatts, gallons, decibels — but leaves the harder judgment calls to the people enforcing them later.
It doesn’t say how the city will independently verify an operator’s self-reported water and power usage, only that it has “authority to request data.”
It doesn’t specify what happens if a large-scale facility is approved and later wants to expand past the hyperscale line — beyond requiring a “major amendment” to its conditional use permit, which itself is silent on whether that amendment could be denied outright once the infrastructure is already built.
And it says nothing about how, or whether, the rules would apply differently to a facility already under review, like Sequitor Edge’s, versus one that files after the ordinance takes effect.
Those are the questions worth watching for as this moves — assuming it clears Planning Commission Thursday — toward its first reading at Council.
Sourcing
File #26OA006, Ordinance 6746, and the accompanying September 4, 2026 staff memo from Jessica Olson, Current Planning Division Manager, City of Rapid City Department of Community Development. Meeting details from the September 10, 2026 Zoning Board of Adjustment/Planning Commission agenda, rcgov.org. Mayor Salamun’s July 20 budget address quote per this outlet’s prior reporting.
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