Gibbons requests time to review data-center rules

Kennedy Gibbons. Hello commissioners. My name is Gabriel and I live up in North Spokane County. Um, so first I just wanted to take an opportunity to thank all of you in person for finding a compromise and voting on the four-month pause um for data center construction. So, Commissioner Jordan, Commissioner Waldruff, Commissioner Karns, Commissioner Brooks, and online, Commissioner French, thank you.

Um, with that said, my ask is that if the planning commission requests an extended deadline to do their best work that you grant that pause or that extension of the pause.

Um, and here's the reasons why. So, I read through the entire ordinance, the draft ordinance, and I read line by line. I made very thorough comments in the margins of everything that I've learned with my environmental science degree, things that I liked in the ordinance, things that I found concerning. I've also been keeping a track record of every single comment made at all of these meetings at the planning commission workshop as well as things posted online on Facebook and case studies that I've read of all of the gaps that we still have in this ordinance.

My plan is to compile all of these things, cate categorize them, and then take them to an event I suggest the public attend, which will be um in Airway Heights this Thursday, which is September 10th, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. And it's a public forum by the people for the people, so we can hear all the concerns and see if there are any that are still um not on this list.

With all of those compiled concerns, the planning commission said the easiest way for them to incorporate all of those is to see tracked changes. So, I'm going to take the entire ordinance. I'm going to write in all of the comments, the suggestions, the things I don't know that like we could use planning research and help. Um, and then we're going to get that document over to the planning commission. Um, so hopefully that's really helpful for them, but that's still going to take us some time as a community.

The hope is that as a community we can find and finalize and agree on a single document with all of the concerns and then get that over to them so it's not just comment after comment. I know many of you tuned in to that planning commission workshop and it was very all over the place with concerns and things that were directly um talking about changes in the ordinance and just um overall changes in general. So I just want to try to streamline that process, but it's still going to take some time on our side before we can even get it to the planning commission.

Um, so that brings us to this guy. This is our Earth. This is my Lego Earth. And similar to our our real world Earth. If I drop this, it's fragile. It's going to break. Right. So, we've got one Earth. We've got one shot to really get this ordinance right. And if it's going to take a few extra days to get all of the language, get the loopholes out. Right now there's a loophole where a developer could make several light load data centers next to each other and um they wouldn't have to follow the same rules that the larger load has.

There's another um loophole that I'm concerned about which is developers will just pay the fees for violating things in the ordinance which has been done in case studies and I'll put those together and send those out to you guys so you're aware of that.

I just really want to see this be as robust of a document as possible and the only way that that's going to happen is to have enough ample time to do so. So, if the planning commission requests more time, I really would appreciate if you could send. Thank you. And then we do have one