HomeMy WebLinkAbout2026-09-02 Jo Vitales Support Testimony
From: Jo Vitales
To: Planning WPC Testimony
Subject: Bill 170 testimony
Date: Wednesday, September 2, 2026 2:00:55 PM
Aloha,
My name is Jo, living on the Big Island of Hawai'i, and I'm writing in strong, strong support of Bill 170. I am asking the Windward Planning Commission to recommend one additional change before sending it back to the County Council; below:
The original Bill 170 uses language that includes subjective phrases such as "industrial-scale operation" and "beyond that typically accessory or incidental to office, commercial, or public institutional uses" that a well-resourced developer's attorney may be able to argue
around. To prevent communication issues of what this bill should include, the definition below should replace the subjectivity with objective physical criteria and a clear 20 megawatt
threshold that cannot be disputed.
This is the specific, alternative language that I am asking the commission to recommend instead:
Hyperscale data center means any facility or campus of facilities in which its primary purpose is of the housing, operation, or co-location of computer servers, networking equipment, and associated cooling, power, and support infrastructure, including but not limited to servers, networking equipment and appliances, telecommunications equipment, data storage systems, systems for monitoring and managing infrastructure performance, environmental controls, fire protection systems, security systems, electrical substations, generators, and redundant power supplies; and which requires or is designed to require 20 megawatts or more of electrical capacity at full build-out. This definition includes a single facility and any campus of multiple facilities on contiguous or adjacent parcels under common ownership of control which combined electrical demand meets or exceeds 20 megawatts. This term includes facilities commonly described as large-scale, hyperscale, neocloud, and artificial intelligence or LLM data centers and colocation campuses. This term does not include telecommunications facilities regulated under Section 25-4-12, hospital or governmental data systems, university educational and research facilities, or business offices in which servers are incidental to primary use.
Recently, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City has effectively placed a ban on
generative AI in school settings for kindergarten to 8th grade learning material, which includes all software that uses student-facing generative AI and companion chatbots.
He is a leader and an ally to his respective community and I believe we should follow this
example and be proactive in our own community, to protect the Big Island's closed water system, fossil-fuel dependent grid, and already strained infrastructure that cannot support or
house these types of hyperscale data centers.
The environmental impact has been irreversible, and I believe with the climate's increasing temperatures and the natural disasters that Hawai'i County has seen in recent months with the
flooding during Tropical Storm Lala, this community must be ever-present and stand against potential data center talks to take over our massive amount of unused and protected lands.
These data centers have great potential to threaten our resources and cultural life ways.
Mahalo for your time, Jo Vitales