As the Hutchinson City Council deliberated over temporary regulations for data centers and battery energy storage systems (BESS) during its July 7 meeting, Council Member Greg Fast asked whether the city would ask the same questions of Sonoco if it came to town.
Sonoco operated a paper mill that was in Hutchinson for more than a century and employed more than 100 people before it closed in 2023.
“They used almost 3 million gallons of water a day and a whole lot of electricity,” Fast said, while noting that the paper mill employed more people than a data center likely would.
Council Member Stacy Goss replied that maybe city officials a century ago would have been wise to ask about what would be done when the paper mill was eventually decommissioned.
Both council members made good points. As Fast alludes to, data centers have become figurative bogeymen to large swaths of the public across party lines, sometimes on the verge of conspiracy-theory thinking, and drawing intense scrutiny.
Concerns about data centers have driven seldom-seen amounts of public comments at meetings. Fast is right—a paper mill probably wouldn’t be as closely scrutinized as hypothetical data centers have been this year.
But what is and what should be are two different things. Maybe the public should take more of an interest in all kinds of developments. Hutchinson and Reno County have concrete examples of industries becoming everybody’s problem.
Hutchinson spent about $18 million for a reverse-osmosis water treatment plant, $13 million for pipelines and remediation facilities, and $4 million for deep disposal wells because of industrial contamination of groundwater with volatile organic chemicals. According to a 2009 publication from the Kansas Rural Water Association, the city had to basically double its water rates to pay for the project.
Further south, a plume of chemicals has been spreading in groundwater from the Hutchinson Air Base Industrial Tract since at least the mid-1990s. Just last year, the county agreed to allow the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to install a monitoring well at the county public works building—6 miles north of the industrial tract—to watch for the plume reaching South Hutchinson.
Taking the time to identify risks, learn the right questions to ask, and establish safeguards to protect the interests of the broader public isn’t anti-development or anti-business. It’s due diligence. Credible developments that have done their own due diligence should be able to stand up to some scrutiny.
And maybe some of the people coming to city council and county commission meetings with concerns about data centers and BESS will take a broader interest in how local governments work and even volunteer on planning commission or another board.
– The Hutchinson Tribune Editorial Board