By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News
The Wellington City Council convened on Wednesday, March 12, for the city’s biweekly meeting. Operating on a skeleton crew, council member Kathy Hascall stepped in as mayor pro tem to conduct the meeting.
The meat of the meeting came when resident Bethany Perea took to the podium, voicing concern about data centers and asking the city council to consider a moratorium on all data centers until more information on the technology becomes available.
“AI is not popular with the American people. It polls very low right now. What they’re doing is they are preying on communities like ours, where we don’t have a really good source of revenue,” claimed Perea. “They come into the area where we have land to offer. They will tell us they’re going to bring in jobs; they bring in short-term jobs when they come in, and they put up these data centers. They do not need more than 20 people to run these gigantic complexes. It’s going to burn up resources. It’s going to create noise pollution; the water that they say they put back out is coming out with toxins.”
While no data centers have been publicly announced to be constructed in the city, residents across the state have shown up in force to speak against the facilities. Most recently, residents in Provo spoke out against a data center proposal in the city, leading the city council to deny a zoning ordinance that would have opened the door for a data center.
On the national level, in 2025, Sen. John Curtis spoke highly of making Utah lead the nation “with data centers and advanced technologies” to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, signaling a federal push for the technologies in the state.
One concern Perea brought before the council was that of the water usage these facilities require. “There’s just not the data there to support that the water we’re going to get back could even be used for anything anymore,” she said.
During the 2026 legislative session, the state legislature passed HB76, a bill that requires large data centers to notify water providers of their projected demand and share their actual water consumption with the state.
Another concern Perea spoke about was the revenue these facilities could generate.
“If you look up how much revenue they actually generate, all of everything that’s coming out is projected revenue. What a lot of these facilities are doing is projecting a revenue that you’ll get, but they’re asking for tax incentives when they come in. They last for about five years before they completely burn through their supply of the electronics and stuff that they have inside of those centers, and then it is cheaper for them to build a new one rather than replace what is in there, and they go somewhere else.”
Closing her remarks, Perea stated,” The county is going to decide what they want to do with their land use. However, I do think that it would be appropriate for us to consider, as we’re getting ready to create this plan to consider, not utilizing AI data centers right now.”
Hascall asked Perea where she was getting the data for her comments, to which Perea responded that it was mixed data, coming from places like Texas, West Virginia and Florida, which are currently heavily invested in data centers.
With the item being only a discussion, no action was taken by the council. However, Perea was invited to present to the Wellington Planning and Zoning Commission on the information she presented to the council.