Required independent road and traffic studies before approval, with binding road-improvement and maintenance agreements.
Multi-year construction traffic — heavy trucks, concrete, and oversized loads — damaging county roads not built for such loads.
Road upgrade and maintenance costs shifted to county taxpayers without developer cost-sharing agreements.
Ongoing service, delivery, and fuel-truck traffic after construction.
11. Property Values and Neighboring Landowners
Documented declines in residential property values near large data center campuses.
Difficulty selling homes and farms adjacent to industrial facilities.
Bonded compensation mechanisms for neighbors harmed by noise, lighting, well interference, or lost property value (see Section 16).
12. Public Health of Neighboring Residents
Chronic exposure to continuous 24/7 industrial noise is linked to sleep disruption, elevated stress hormones, hypertension, and cardiovascular effects; the World Health Organization treats environmental noise as a serious public health issue, and residents near existing data centers report exactly these harms.
Diesel generator emissions — fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and NOx — near homes, schools, and farms, with health effects that occur even at low concentrations and during routine testing, not just outages.
Contamination risk to private drinking-water wells, magnified in karst terrain (Section 3).
Light at night disrupts sleep for nearby residents.
Critically, there are no long-term epidemiological studies of the health effects of living near hyperscale data center campuses — the industry at this scale is simply too new. The absence of evidence of harm is not evidence of safety. This gap argues for a precautionary approach: larger setbacks, stricter performance limits, and continuous monitoring, with the burden of proof on the applicant rather than on residents.
Require applicants to fund baseline community health documentation (noise, air, water) before construction so that future harms can actually be measured and attributed.
13. Livestock, Pets, Wildlife, and Animal Agriculture
Continuous noise and vibration stress on livestock — documented to affect feed intake, weight gain, milk production, and reproduction in cattle, and to cause piling and mortality events in poultry.
Stray voltage and ground currents from substations and high-voltage transmission serving the facility
a well-documented problem for dairy herds, affecting milk production and animal health.
Similar noise, vibration, and light impacts on pets and companion animals of nearby residents.
Light pollution disrupting wildlife, migratory birds, bats, and pollinators, and altering predator-prey behavior around neighboring farms.
Habitat loss and fragmentation from campus footprints, perimeter fencing, and new transmission corridors.
Water drawdown and thermal or chemical discharge affecting streams — including the Driftless Area's coldwater trout streams, which depend on the same groundwater a data center would pump.