And welcome to the legislative committee meeting on Monday, April 6th, 2026, at 5 p.m.

in the council chambers and the Parish Courthouse.

Please sign up all electronic devices and remove all hats.

This meeting is called to order with a silent prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.

One nation on the God, individual with liberty and justice for all.

Alrighty, thank you.

Uh matters before the committee.

2026 0089, a discussion regarding code revisions as it pertains to data centers.

So Mr.

Albert, why don't you kick it off for us?

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

As a follow-up to the last legislative meeting at the parish president's direction, and after consulting with the council, you we recognize that the parish was at a point where data centers were essentially unregulated and would default into industrial zoning districts of the parish without further regulation or consideration.

So what my office did was sit down and draft a set of common sense regulations that seek to appropriately place data centers to define them to establish what zoning districts they go and the difference between whether it's M1 or M2.

We also establish a set of protections.

But in general, you can think of them as residential areas, nursing homes, um, parks, recreational places.

So we uh we establish a buffer in this and we establish some um noise protection regulations as well.

Um to go a little bit further into it, the uh the types of data centers are distinguished by whether or not they are self-generating in terms of power, whether they have on-site power generation, those would go into M2.

Absent that the uses would default to a light industrial use and go into M1.

Um you have the ordinance in front of you.

I won't go over all of the specifics of the setback restrictions, but in general, it's a 300-foot buffer from residences.

Uh the landscaping is very similar to what we did with the solar ordinances, but it does have the option of a landscaped berm, which is like a six-foot-tall wall of dirt that could separate and protect from noise.

We have a sound regulation of 55 decibels at the property boundary for the uh data center use.

Um and that's effectively ambient outdoor noise, which you would hear standing anywhere in your neighborhood.

And lastly, we have some requirements for equipment screening.

So the most noticeable part of one of these uses would be the generators where the substantial HVAC units causing sound, and those are required to be buffered and screened within the site.

So uh I'll leave it from there.

And if there's any questions about the ordinance, I'll do my best to help with that.

Thank you.

Hi, Mr.

Albert, thank you.

Uh Mr.

Jewell, I believe you have some slides and some information you want us to review.

Yes, Chairman.

I'll just add to what Michael said.

First, you know, I want to talk about the fact that we have different levels of data centers.

Do we have the slide presentation?

So we we put this together today um just to kind of talk about the the different levels because I think we're basing the actions that we're taking off of the ones that we're reading about every day in news articles and you know across the countries.

Your hyperscale, Meta Hyperion, Richland Parish, Amazon, X, all these other folks that are doing these really large campuses, when in fact the vast majority of these types of data centers are not that.

Um and they've been around for uh a while.

So they've been around for decades.

We'll go to the next slide, Sam.

Um first, your smallest level uh of a data center.

We'll go to the next slide.

Can you click it?

Okay, thank you.

That's okay.

Technology again.

So anyway, well, we'll just talk about this.

Uh so you have enterprise level data centers, which is something like there we go.

So it's something like this building.

We have a little data center in this building um where we do you know, computing, um cloud storage, servers, uh things of that nature.

Most businesses that have any type of computer system, hospitals, for example, um, would have something like this in there.

Next next is your co-location slash slash edge uh managed data centers.

These are um this is actually examples.

This is an example in Baton Rouge.

This picture on your left uh is an old mall that was converted to a data center, and then um one on the right is an also in Baton Rouge, an old movie theater uh that was converted to a data center.

These are again what they call co-locations.

You might um your company might need space at a data center, and you go to this data center and and buy space within um the racks that they have for your own personal computing or backup, and um and then you know, Anthony.

If I miss anything, please come up and chime in.