Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – In a move which has raised the suspicions of at least one activist, the city council is preparing to repeal an eight-year-old ordinance which chief utility engineer Scott Rogers says is badly out of date.

“This ordinance was put in in 2018,” Rogers told the council’s Committee of the Whole Tuesday. “At that time, we had all four coal-fired units still in service. We had plenty of excess energy. At that time data centers were primarily bitcoin miners, and there were some entities that would primarily do credit card transaction processing, so we were trying to incentivize some of that in some economic development.”

Much has changed since then. Were a large-scale data center to come online now, the city-owned utility could not afford to serve it under the rate category established in 2018.

Lori McKiernan, who frequently speaks to the council on utility matters, says she has enough information to be skeptical of Springfield’s ability to, and / or interest in, reining in the growth of large-scale data centers. “I’ve heard too many stories from around the state where townspeople and county and city residents have been deceived by these elected officials and data center developers.”

McKiernan also suggests there is more to the story of the CyrusOne project near Waverly than meets the eye. “We are finding out that the CEO of the (Springfield Sangamon) Growth Alliance grew up with the sellers of the data center property, and we are supposed to believe that there’s nothing deceptive going on.”

Wednesday morning, Growth Alliance CEO Ryan McCrady said McKiernan is not telling the truth. “There will never be a data center in Springfield, and you can quote me,” McCrady said. And about the sellers, McCrady said they all grew up in Divernon but are not friends, nor did he pick out the site.

McKiernan says Batavia passed a similar ordinance, and now, in a workaround, has a data center coming in. The power is to be purchased elsewhere and delivered to that center by Batavia’s city utility. McKiernan said CWLP could provide a similar function, noting that generation and delivery are separate activities.

“I hope someone can prove me wrong on this,” McKiernan added before calling Sangamon County board members “naive and uneducated” and warning aldermen not to make the same mistake.

The full city council will debate the ordinance June 16.