A proposed data center in an old Lewiston mill building began to unravel before the public even got wind of it.
City councilors were caught off guard after receiving the detailed proposal for a $300 million center inside the downtown Bates Mill only about a month before a meeting when they needed to vote on the project. After two closed-door meetings, they released details to the public just six days before a pivotal vote in December. The idea drew instant backlash, and the council unanimously voted it down.
The events previewed the broader and hot debates occurring now around data centers in Maine and elsewhere. Developers often guard the details of their business plans, creating secrecy around projects that have caused alarm for their potential environmental impacts. A desire for greater vetting has stalled other proposals in Maine and forced lawmakers to consider a statewide ban through 2027.
“I wouldn’t say the door is completely closed to data centers, but we’re certainly going to be quite cautious about future proposals,” said Bryan Kaenrath, Lewiston’s city administrator.
The city has heard from a few other prospective data center developers since the mill project was voted down. But the moratorium bill being considered in the Legislature and the city’s now-longer review process has scared them away, John Blais, the city’s acting economic development director, said.
“Developers are still attracted by our power grid and fiber infrastructure,” he said. “But once I explained there would be a rigid public process, we’re not getting a lot of attention and they’re moving on to other communities.”
The Lewiston vote came a month after officials in Wiscasset effectively killed a $5 billion data center project there when residents rallied against the nondisclosure agreement the city had signed with the developer and the siting of the project on public land.
The stakes of whether to allow data centers in Maine are high, particularly in cities hungry for new businesses that could bring in much-needed tax dollars and jobs. Those benefits have also been subject to debate. The Bates Mill once housed TD Bank’s call center, which employed more than 1,000 people, but the data center would have employed only about 30 workers, the city estimated.
The developer first approached Lewiston officials last spring. On June 5, Kaenrath signed a non-binding letter of intent to explore the establishment of the AI data center in Bates Mill #3. The developer had asked for confidentiality for competitive reasons, he said.
Because the proposed data center required public financing, the city had to share the project’s concept with the City Council, which would cast the final vote on whether or not to approve it. That initial meeting took place in a closed-door session last spring, Kaenrath said.
After experts reviewed the feasibility of the project, the developer submitted a concrete proposal for the AI data center to the city five months later, in September. But city councilors said they did not see the details until November. That gave them limited time to digest the concept before voting on it, three councilors said in interviews.
All of this is typical for development projects, Kaenrath said. But in this case, city staff and councilors blamed the developer for failing to host public forums early on, which would have provided an opportunity to answer questions about the project and potentially build support.
“If a developer is looking to bring a major project to the community, the onus is on them to educate the necessary city boards and committees and the community about the impacts of the project,” Kaenrath said. “If they had had four, five, six town meetings, maybe things could have been different.”
Developer Bill Johnson did not respond to several requests for comment by the Bangor Daily News. Kaenrath said he has not heard from Johnson since the vote.
AI data centers have caused a wave of bipartisan public opposition across the country because of their massive power consumption and use of water to cool computers. Some $64 billion worth of proposed projects have been blocked or delayed over the past two years across the nation, according to Data Center Watch. The proposal in Lewiston was for a relatively small system, but news about environmental impacts of the large data centers elsewhere spooked Lewiston residents, Kaenrath said.
Before the vote, Lewiston City Councilor Scott Harriman received more than 100 emails and phone calls about the data center. One favored it.
He initially approached the project with an open mind, but the more city councilors dug into it, “the less appealing it seemed,” he said. Harriman also wanted more time to review the proposal, which included a 90% tax break for the first 10 years, higher than the usual 75%.
The council met twice in executive sessions, which are not open to the public, to review the plan before the scheduled vote on Dec. 16, City Council President David Chittim said. They scheduled it then in part because the developer needed to quickly get a tenant into Bates Mill #3, which has been empty for years and was burdening him with unaffordable taxes, maintenance and loan costs. Lenders now own the building.
However, the timing meant the public had less than a week’s notice about the project before the vote and the council had only a month, something Chittim said is a “killer to a lot of these types of programs, especially if it’s new and no one else has done it.”
Luke Jensen, a member of the Lewiston school committee and former city councilor, said he is appalled at the lack of transparency across the board. Nonetheless, citizens were able to quickly mobilize to protest the plan, with an overflow crowd packing Lewiston City Hall on the night of the vote.
“Lewiston is tight-knit and people showed up in droves when they heard about [the data center],” said Sarah Demarest, an independent project manager in Lewiston who spearheaded some of the citizens to protest. She was concerned about the center’s downtown location and proximity to the riverfront, effects on water and air quality, and how little time there was to digest the 19 pages of details about the project.
“I’m 45 and I remember driving over the bridge and holding my breath because it smelled so bad,” she said of the drive over the Androscoggin River between Lewiston and Auburn, an area that has been cleaned up. “It felt like the data center plan was a contradiction to everything we had worked for.”
City administrators and councillors said they have learned from hindsight to not try to rush a project through without input from the public.
“I think the underlying lesson here is that developers need to stop planning these data centers in secret and then complaining about how much they’ve invested in the process once the public finally becomes aware of it and pushes back,” Harriman said.
Lori Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN’s Maine Focus investigative team. Reach her at lvaligra@bangordailynews.com. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation, a fund at the Maine Community Foundation and donations by BDN readers.