The Janesville City Council held a special session on March 23, 2026, at 5:15 PM to receive a presentation on data center water usage and utility capacity. The presentation was delivered by David Botts, Utilities Director, and Dale Lewis, Director of Data Center Development for Bolt Company, followed by a council Q&A session.
All right, we're gonna call the um order the city council special session meeting for Monday, March twenty third, twenty twenty-six. Roll call, please. President Burdick? Here. Vice President Squire. Here. Council Member Cass. Here Councilmember Earthman. Council Member Miller. Here. Council Member Nino? Here. Council Member Williams. Here. I think I got them all. There's one absent, we do have a quorum. All right, thank you. Okay, this uh uh presentation will be for thirty minutes and then we'll have uh fifteen minutes for questions. And uh here we have for uh presentation on um data center water usage and it's David Botts, the utility director for the city of Jamesville. Thank you, Council President, Council members. I'm Dave Boss, utilities director for the city. I'm responsible for the both sewer and water utilities that uh we have here in the community. So what we're gonna do tonight is uh kind of give you some background information on our utilities we have here in town. The north pressure zone is the one in yellow, and the south pressure zone is the one in pink. And basically what divides them up is elevation. The higher elevation is the north pressure zone and the lower elevation is the uh the pink pressure zone. That's what we can produce. What they refer to as reliable is when one pump station is down, that's how much water we can provide. So they always want to make sure that we have a backup in our in our numbers so we don't, you know, overuse what water we have available to us, so we call it reliable flow is two point one million gallons a day. Yes. Yeah, they're they don't cross over each other unless we want to move water from one pressure zone to the other. And the south one can get 11.4 million gallons a day. So we have a combined total of reliable of 22.6 million gallons a day. In the north zone, during 2025, we averaged 5.7 million gallons a day for our water usage. So we're only using less than 45% of our our water we can produce. The South Zone, we got 5.82 million gallons per day. So, you know, going back to it, you know, we only use about 10.89 million gallons a day of our reliable resources for water in 25. In our system, we have 68 industrial customers who totally their total number is about two more 2.0 million gallons per day is what our industrial customers use. And then our commercial customers, we got over 1600 of those. And you know, their total volume is like 1.8 million gallons a day. The remainder of the 10 gallon 10 million gallons we use per day is uh commercial is for uh residential customers as well as public authority, which would be government buildings, schools, and other that types of buildings. So they make up the majority of the water usage for the community. And as you can see, as our four top industrial customers, the highest one is only 0.6 million gallons a day, is what their water usage is. This is on average for the year. Obviously, you know, they go up and down, depends on the time of season and everything, but so you know, even our top four customers don't use a lot of water that we can provide, and then our top four commercial customers, as you can see, the the fourth highest one is a car wash that uses that much water just per car wash on average per the year. So around the the GM site portion of it on the the north end, we have a lot of utility structures uh along Delvin Drive. We have a 16-inch water main, we have a 54-inch sanitary sewer main, and then on Jackson Street, we have 24 inch and 21-inch sanitary sewer lines, we have eight-inch water mains that go up and down there. So there's a lot of water availability for that south side, water and sewer capacity for the south side, or for the north side there. Then for the datco site, we have there's a 15-inch water or sewer line that crosses the property on the very south end. Then we have you know, mains out in Kellogg as well as Jackson that can provide you know the water and sewer resources for that portion of the development.