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I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days going back through Marshalltown’s data center ordinance process.
Not just the current ordinance. I went back through the Planning and Zoning packets, the different drafts, the public listening sessions, the meeting minutes and the changes that happened along the way.
And honestly, I came away with more questions than I started with. Because here’s the weird part: The early drafts were actually pretty good.
A lot of the things residents had been asking for were in there.
The City separated data centers by size. Projects over 60,000 square feet were considered Regional developments. There were also separate triggers for developments that placed unusually large demands on infrastructure.
One of those triggers was non-domestic water demand of 75,000 gallons per day. If a project was big enough or infrastructure-intensive enough, it triggered something called a Master Development Plan.
That required more information about the project at full buildout, not just the first building or first phase. It looked at utilities. Infrastructure. Transportation. Environmental conditions. Emergency services. Future phases. Expansion. And it required a public hearing.
There was also a decommissioning plan. The developer had to address what would happen when the facility eventually shut down, who was responsible, how equipment would be removed, how the site would be secured and restored, what that would cost and how those costs would be funded.
That’s important because decommissioning and abandonment were concerns specifically raised by residents. So were water and noise. And here’s where this gets strange.
Those protections didn’t fail to make it into the ordinance. They were already there. Then they started disappearing.
By October 8, some things had already changed. The earlier noise rules included actual numerical limits for C-weighted sound, which was supposed to help address low-frequency noise. Those numerical limits were removed.
The cooling language changed too. An earlier draft broadly required water-conserving cooling technologies and prohibited continuously withdrawing and discharging once-through cooling.
Later, that became a requirement specifically for the primary cooling system, while supplemental adiabatic cooling was expressly allowed.
Then, at the October 26 Council meeting, Clayton Ender acknowledged that the adiabatic provision had been added at the request of prospective developer Amir Atefi. Times-Republican reported the same exchange.
That makes me want to know a lot more about how these drafts were being changed. But the biggest change happened after the October 8 Planning and Zoning meeting.
Commissioners discussed concerns with the Master Development Plan process. They talked about workload, the legal limits of that type of review and whether holding a public hearing might give residents a “false expectation” that Planning and Zoning could stop a use that was otherwise permitted.
Then the Commission gave informal direction to remove the Master Development Plan. No formal motion. No recorded vote.
And by the next draft, it wasn’t just the Master Development Plan process that was gone. The size classifications were gone. The Infrastructure-Intensive classification was gone.
The 75,000-gallon-per-day water trigger was gone. The additional public hearing was gone. The decommissioning requirement was gone.
That’s the part I am having trouble getting past. If the Master Development Plan was the wrong process, fine.
Why did all of the protections attached to it have to die too? Why couldn’t the decommissioning requirement simply be moved somewhere else?
Why couldn’t a 500-acre hyperscale campus receive more scrutiny than a much smaller data center? Why couldn’t there still be automatic review when water or electrical demand reached a certain point?
And what evidence told Planning and Zoning that these protections were no longer needed? Because apparently we need a scale distinction after all.
On Oct. 26, the City Council spent a remarkable amount of time trying to figure out, from the dais, how to distinguish small data centers from hyperscale ones.
They debated megawatts. Then acreage. Then 50 acres. Then 100 acres.
Eventually Council sent the scale question back to Planning and Zoning. That’s incredible to me because we already had a scale system. Staff had written one. Planning and Zoning had reviewed it.
The public had seen it. It survived multiple drafts. Then it was removed.
And now we’re sending the issue back to Planning and Zoning so they can figure out how to do the thing their earlier ordinance already did. And then there’s the economic development side of this. The more I look at this process, the more I want to understand who had input between each draft.
John Hall and the Marshalltown Area Chamber of Commerce have been heavily involved in this discussion. Hall has consistently argued that Marshalltown should stay open to data center investment. He has pointed to construction jobs, permanent jobs, tax revenue and the economic opportunity these projects could bring.
And that’s his job. But the Chamber isn’t just another person showing up during public comment.
It performs contracted economic-development work for local governments. The City Council specifically directed City staff earlier in this process to work with the Chamber on data center development standards.
Hall is also publicly involved with Growing Iowa’s Economy, a statewide coalition that says it will advocate for policies supporting the “responsible development of new data centers.” The coalition says new data center development is important to Iowa’s economic future.
And another document a resident recently sent me provides some useful background. In January 2024, a 95.53-acre City-owned industrial property north of Marion Street went through Iowa’s industrial-site certification process.
The certification report says information was supplied by both the City and Chamber, and John Hall is listed as the site contact. The report specifically inventories the site’s water, wastewater, electricity, natural gas, fiber, roads and other infrastructure so the property can be marketed for industrial development.
It identifies Alliant Energy as the electric and natural gas provider and lists Amanda Accola as the Alliant Energy contact for both. Amanda Accola currently serves as Vice Chair of the Marshalltown Area Chamber of Commerce board. The board also includes City Administrator Carol Webb and Marshall County Supervisor Carol Hibbs.
That makes me even more interested in knowing what happened between the drafts. Who was reviewing them? Who was suggesting changes? Was the Chamber reviewing ordinance language? Was Alliant Energy? Were prospective developers?
We already know at least one developer request made it into the ordinance. So what else changed because someone asked?
And this isn’t just about business input. I want the same accounting for everybody. If residents proposed something and staff rejected it, tell us why. If Alliant Energy recommended something and staff agreed, tell us why. If the Chamber proposed something, tell us.
If a developer convinced staff that a provision wouldn’t work, tell us. Just let us see how we got from Draft #1 to Draft #5. Because that’s what I feel like we’re missing.
Marshalltown held a roundtable specifically to ask residents what they were concerned about. People showed up. People did the homework. They filled out the worksheets.
They submitted written comments. And some of the things they asked for showed up in the ordinance. Then some of them disappeared.
I don’t think “we had a public process” is an answer to that. I want to know what the process actually did with the information it received.
Why did one recommendation survive while another didn’t? Why did a protection make it through three drafts and disappear in the fourth?
Why was one concern handled with a mandatory “shall” while another became a discretionary “may require?" And why were major structural changes made through informal direction instead of an actual recorded vote?
These aren’t anti-data-center questions. They’re basic government transparency questions.
And before Marshalltown adopts an ordinance that could determine how some of the largest industrial developments our community has ever dealt with are approved for decades to come, I think they’re questions worth answering.
Show us the drafts. Show us the changes. Show us who asked for them. And tell us why. That’s it. If the answers are good, great.
But right now, after reading the City’s own record, I don’t think asking the public to simply trust the final draft is enough.
Layne Pieri of Marshalltown is the founder and operator of the Marshall County Data Center Moratorium Facebook page.