The data-center conversation reached the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday, and it arrived with a disclaimer attached: the county was not being asked to do anything.

That was the framing County Manager Mike Bryant put on the third and final item of his manager's report at the board's May 19 regular meeting — a "level-set" briefing on data centers, delivered for information only, no vote requested. By the time it was over, several commissioners had made clear they wanted the county to do something anyway, and the presentation had spelled out, in careful detail, how little the county can do.

The briefing came at the request of Board Chair Mark Jerrell, who represents District 4. "I reached out to the attorney and the manager to talk about data centers as it was becoming a really heavy conversation in the community," Jerrell said. He described a proposed facility near his own neighborhood and another in the District 3 area represented by Commissioner George Dunlap — "maybe a mile and a half, two miles from me."

What the briefing said

Zach Lewis, senior assistant to the county manager, delivered the presentation, and both he and Bryant stressed that it took no position. "We just want to keep it objective," Bryant said. "We don't want to send out a panic or anything." The research, he added, was done in conjunction with the county's city partners and overlaps with what Charlotte's City Council has already received.

Lewis walked the board through what a data center is — a secure warehouse of servers, storage, cabling, power, and cooling — and through the spectrum of sizes, from a single server closet up through the hyperscale and AI facilities he described as the newest and most demanding type. A 100-megawatt data center, he told the board, draws roughly the power of 80,000 average U.S. households. Citing Gartner research, he said an estimated 95 percent of new internet applications are expected to be cloud-based this year, up from 30 percent in 2021, and that roughly 60 percent of global corporate data now lives in a data center.

He laid out the case on both sides. Proponents point to property-tax revenue, public-service funding that doesn't add traffic or students, grid and broadband upgrades that can benefit residents, and construction jobs. Critics point to water consumption and noise, the strain on local utilities and the rate hikes that can follow, the non-disclosure agreements that keep planning out of public view, and a questionable return on tax incentives for facilities that employ few permanent workers once they open.

Locally, Lewis said, county tax-parcel records identify 18 data centers, primarily commercial co-location facilities and telecommunications hubs — most of them long-standing. Many smaller enterprise and edge centers sit inside office towers and hospitals and never appear as standalone parcels at all.

The part the county controls

The county's role, it turned out, is the narrow part. Under North Carolina law, Lewis said, zoning and land-use authority belongs to cities and towns and their extraterritorial jurisdictions. Mecklenburg's municipalities have exercised that authority so thoroughly over the decades that the only truly unincorporated land left in the county is roughly one square mile in South Mecklenburg near Pineville — and that tract is already governed by a comprehensive plan the board approved in January.

The practical conclusion, Lewis said, after researching the question and consulting the county attorney: the county's strongest play is "engagement" with the cities and towns — joining the conversation, fostering municipal partnerships, and weighing data-center expertise when it appoints members to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission.

Jerrell said he had already asked the attorney about an ordinance covering what the county does control. "We need to look at lifting up an ordinance as it relates to data centers with what we can control," he said, "even though that's 6 percent." He asked Bryant to bring back all the options available to the county.

"The cloud is on Earth taking up space"

The discussion that followed was the part the briefing couldn't script.

Commissioner Elaine Powell, who represents District 1 in north Mecklenburg, made the environmental case at length. She pointed to the region's water supply, drought on the Catawba, and the interbasin transfer that lets Mecklenburg draw more water than its own basin provides. She said Duke Energy needs to build hundreds of substations for already-approved neighborhoods and doesn't know where to put them, and that North Carolina ranks second in the nation for farmland loss — the same agricultural land developers are eyeing for these facilities. "A delay just means more are coming," she said. "So I feel like we need to be smart about that."

Dunlap said the community wants to be educated by someone who hasn't taken a side. Residents have called him worried that a data center proposed near them might be "emitting all kinds of stuff," he said. "That's a legitimate concern. Somebody needs to be able to answer that question. The community is begging for information." He called the facilities "the lesser of two evils" — necessary, but freighted with unanswered questions — and said he supports the city's moratorium "until you can study the impact and the effect."

That moratorium is real, and recent. Charlotte's City Council deadlocked 5-5 on the question in April, with Mayor Vi Lyles breaking the tie against it — then reversed course on May 11, voting unanimously to schedule a public hearing on a 150-day pause on new data-center approvals. That hearing is set for May 26, and the council could adopt the moratorium as early as June 8.

Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell, who represents District 6, called data centers "a necessary evil" and "unsustainable" in their current trajectory. "The cloud is on Earth taking up space," she said. "It is incumbent upon the county to have knowledge and for us to have some kind of position on it."

Commissioner Laura Meier, District 5, said the land use is what bothers her most: "It's tearing down neighborhoods and farmland and open space." Commissioner Vilma Leake, District 2, was the dissenting note. She said she has not heard data centers raised as a concern by her constituents, particularly her senior residents. "A town hall meeting on data centers, my people would laugh me out of the community," she said, adding that what she hears about instead is "this war with Trump."

What happens next

Nothing was decided, because nothing was on the table to decide. Bryant committed to keep the information in front of the board and to brief members as the county learns more. Jerrell asked for the full menu of county options. Dunlap asked for a public town hall built around the same neutral presentation.

"Twenty years from now," Jerrell said, "we're not on the oops trail."

No date was set for any of it.