If the data center industry has a friend in the Inland Northwest, it’s Al French, the county commissioner who’s spent decades building a reputation as a shrewd broker of big business development deals — and is arguably the most powerful politician in the county.
“The word ‘moratorium’ … says ‘we are closed for business, thank you very much,’” French said during a Spokane County Board of Commissioners briefing on July 21, referring to a proposal to halt new permitting for data centers so officials can learn how to best regulate them. Like many jurisdictions in the US, the county lacks even basic zoning regulations for the facilities.
“Spokane County is not closed for business,” he said.
His remarks were in response to a proposal by Commissioners Amber Waldref and Chris Jordan, who are seeking to impose a nine-month moratorium on approvals for data center permit applications as big tech developers are trying to establish themselves the Inland Northwest. And French has been working for months to accommodate them.
As early as February 2026, French launched into a series of meetings with the Kalispel Tribe, officials from a local data center developer and power utility Avista Corp. to figure out the best way to bring a massive data center to the West Plains. He said he’d also been approached by other developers.
At the same time, he’s worked alongside Commissioner Josh Kerns — a fellow conservative — to begin developing a zoning framework for data centers, which would give the county an official pathway to welcome them.
“It's been suggested that to be against data centers is to be anti-American, because we know and the FBI is currently engaged in investigations where China and Russia have engaged in activities to oppose data centers, because they do not want the United States to take a lead from an economic standpoint with regard to data center development,” French said during the July 21 meeting.
The data center French wants to bring to the West Plains would be built by Apricus Energy Partners, a Spokane-based clean energy developer focused on clean hydrogen, power development “from traditional sources like natural gas while decarbonizing through hydrogen blending and carbon capture” and “data center development that incorporate energy and water efficiency through sustainable sourcing while ensuring energy resilience, according to the company’s website.”
It would be huge, using 1,000 megawatts of electricity, about two-thirds of Avista’s entire generating capacity. It would require new ways to generate and transmit that power.
Avista conducted a feasibility study for the proposal and concluded that was too big a facility for its infrastructure to accommodate. According to emails obtained by a community member, Inland Power & Light will also conduct a study. Apricus may have to build its own infrastructure.
While the project is in early stages and is not yet permitted, Apricus is hard at work diversifying its supply chains to make sure it has all the needed equipment at hand — just in case. In responses to questions from the Kalispel Tribe, Apricus said it was considering lead times to purchase Siemens SGT 800, Mainspring Energy and GE Vernova linear generators to produce power for the facility.
Government officials across the country have responded to feedback from constituents who fear large data centers may mean higher electricity bills, power cuts and damage to the environment, and in many cases are imposing permitting pauses for the development of those facilities. And those are just a few of the known problems some data centers have caused throughout the US.
The boom in data center construction nationwide has left some federal, state and local legislators scrambling to address regulatory measures to allay constituents’ concerns — or to smooth their development.
After Jordan and Waldref added their moratorium proposal to the agenda of the July 21 meeting, Kerns and French felt pressure to bring their own measure forward. Kerns, who like French did not respond to a request for comment on this story, said during the meeting that he and French scrambled to finalize a draft ordinance that could regulate data centers in Spokane County so they could avoid a moratorium.
Kerns was clear that he and French were trying to fast-track the proposal in light of what they see as the draft moratorium’s threat to the data center.
“We shouldn't be moving at the speed of government,” Kerns said. “We need to move at the speed of business and quite frankly get this taken care of by the end of August.”
The regulations proposed by Kerns and French — which are only a draft — include:
- Water use by data centers would be regulated by the water district where the center is located or by the Washington Department of Ecology;
- Data centers would not be located within 300 feet of a residence or 100 feet of a property line;
- Noise generated by a data center would not be allowed to exceed 65 decibels, about the volume of a normal conversation in a busy room, at the data center’s property line;
- The cost for electricity would be regulated by Washington State Utility Commission or an agreement between the data center developer, the power utility and the county; and
- Construction would have to comply with state environmental review requirements.
These regulations were all drawn from existing zoning requirements for other kinds of industrial facilities, such as the airport.
Kerns and French called for the regulations to be developed into a formal declaration by August 31.
However, the moratorium fronted by Waldref and Jordan would allow time for Spokane County residents to weigh in on regulations. Planning Director Scott Chesney noted during the meeting that Kerns’ and French’s proposal to proceed at a much faster pace would not require a public hearing, as it would technically be an “interim ordinance.”
Speaking to RANGE after attending the National Association of Counties conference July 17 through 20, Waldref said the consensus among other counties considering similar moratorium legislation was to establish a pause of between six months and a year.
“You just have to have a lot of community input, and there's a lot of research,” Waldref said. “And when you don't have a best practice out there, you kinda have to build it yourself, which takes time.”
Waldref and Jordan each said they’d received more than 1,000 emails from constituents, the vast majority either expressing concern about data centers and wanting the commission to be cautious, or to oppose to data centers altogether.
The emails were generated from a model text, which is a common way of organizing political letter-writing campaigns; but, after The Spokesman reported on French’s activities last week, Waldref told RANGE that she began receiving about 30 uniquely written messages a day.
“My assistant was laughing yesterday because one of the emails was from an individual, and it just said, ‘Data center: No,’” Waldref told RANGE.
But the tone among the majority of the commission suggested members are more interested in serving large data center developers rather than constituents.
“The business community outside of Spokane County, when they're looking for places to go, it's like if they're willing to put a moratorium in for that, what else are they doing?” said Mary Brooks, who is the third member of the conservative bloc including Kerns and French on the commission, implying that moratoria make businesses worry about regulation.
“So I'm not in favor of a moratorium,” she said. She also did not respond to a request for comment.
Season of the data center
Each time you Google something, outsource your term paper to ChatGPT or ask Claude what the internet knows about your darkest secrets, electronic signals are generated and stored in a data center, which takes up physical space, consumes electricity and generates heat.
The South and the Midwest regions of the US lead the country in the number of planned and new data centers, seeing a 62% and 64% increase in the facilities, respectively, according to the Pew Research Center. Virginia and Texas are home to the largest number of existing and planned data centers. Washington currently houses 114 data centers, according to the Data Center Map.
In Richland Parish, Louisiana, Meta has secured rights to build a six-square-mile facility. According to a recent report in The New York Times, Meta convinced lawmakers to codify tax breaks and favorable lease conditions through secretive relationships with state and local officials. If constructed, it would use more juice than the entire city of New Orleans, The Times reported.
In other places, large data centers have consumed so much power that utilities have hiked rates and even cut off power to their other customers.
Data centers also create “heat islands,” raising temperatures in the areas around them nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
As data centers proliferate, developers are looking more frequently toward rural areas — like Eastern Washington — rather than cities to expand. As Pew reported, most existing data centers are located in urban places, while most proposed ones would be located in rural regions, such as the areas outside Airway Heights or Medical Lake.
Data centers currently have a much smaller footprint in Spokane County. There are at least five such facilities in the county, but they are all relatively small compared to the ones proposed to French and Avista.
The project is far from the only proposed data center in the county.
As of October, Avista Corp. was fielding requests for 17 “large load” projects — the type of power development AI data centers fit into, according to company documents. And the utility inked an agreement in June to continue conversations with an unnamed developer that wanted to build a 500-MW data center before pausing those talks in response to community outcry.
A moratorium or a wing and a prayer
The specter of a Spokane County data center has loomed large in local political circles since Representative Tim Ormsby, D-Spokane, proposed a tax exemption for new data centers in Spokane during the most recent legislative session. (Part of a larger package of data center regulations, it died in committee in February.)
Ormsby told RANGE he supports governments taking more time to learn about how they should regulate data centers before they allow them in their communities.
“I think a lot of people are concerned about it just being a Wild West situation, and [developers] would queue up to access the opportunity,” said Ormsby, who added that he supports the moratoria other governments in Washington have recently implemented, including in Seattle and Spokane.
Spokane County could go the way of Jordan and Waldref or the way of Kerns and French: taking time to learn more about the way data centers work in order to better regulate them, or hastily enacting some basic rules based on existing zoning restrictions.
The deciding vote on either proposal will be Commissioner Mary Brooks, who opposed the moratorium.
If conversations on social media and public advocacy surrounding the data center are any measure, the public is at odds with the BOCC’s conservative majority. Though they have not had a chance to weigh in on Kerns’ and French’s proposed regulations, residents of Spokane County protested Avista’s negotiations with an unnamed customer outside its headquarters late last month. And dozens of people spoke against the project at the July 30 meeting of the Spokane County Planning Commission. Not one member of the public who testified supported inviting a data center into the county without more information and regulation. Many called for a moratorium and some said the county should not permit a data center at all.
Brittany Anderson, the Spokane resident who obtained and published on Facebook many documents that revealed French’s under-the-radar conversations with developers, was one of the people who spoke to the Planning Commission.
“Residents should not have needed a public records request to discover the meetings and communications involving county officials of Avista, Inland Power, possibly tribal power and project-related parties that were already happening,”Anderson said. “I am asking for a moratorium longer than nine months because I feel like nine months is not long enough — [we need] at least a year.”
