HomeMy WebLinkAbout08 17 2026 - Item 8.1 - Serina M.1
Stefan Mercer
From:Serina-Yahoo <serinam19@yahoo.com>
Sent:Monday, August 17, 2026 8:09 PM
To:Public Comments
Subject:EXTERNAL - Item 8.1 – Public Comment – Ordinance Does Not Address Table 30.23.10
I’m a Gilroy resident submitting written comment on Item 8.1. My full remarks are below.
Good evening. My name is Serina, and I’ve lived here my whole life.
Here’s what I keep getting stuck on. A small business downtown, one that hires our neighbors, has to
ask. Ask to open. Ask to hang a sign. Ask to change a storefront. And two data center buildings, running
on drinking water? Nobody had to ask anybody.
In 1981, somebody sat in a room like this one and wrote a zoning code. They were trying to make it easier
to build things so Gilroy could grow. That’s not a villain. That’s somebody who loved this place.
They just had no idea what was coming. In 1981 there was no internet in anybody's house. "Data center"
would have meant a room full of filing cabinets.
45 years later, that automatic yes was still sitting there when a trillion-dollar company showed up.
98 megawatts. Its own power substation. 25 diesel generators. New transmission lines from PG&E. This
couldn't run on the same grid the rest of us use — so they built it one.
The International Energy Agency says a plant that size uses as much power as 100,000 homes. Gilroy has
about 18,000.
That's the scale. One signature. No hearing. No vote.
It was convenient for somebody. And it wasn’t us.
Tonight’s ordinance is a real step, and thank you for that. But it changes how we get told. It doesn’t touch
Table 30.23.10. Data centers are still an automatic yes in that zone. Right now, as we sit here. A hospital
needs a hearing there. So does a warehouse. So does a concrete plant. A data center doesn't.
So next time we’d hear sooner. We still wouldn’t get asked.
And there were things I would have asked.
The noise. We’re told it’s quieter than the highway, and on paper that’s true. But the highway stays
outside. You close a window and most of it’s gone. A low hum goes through walls (that’s just how sound
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works). So it isn’t instead of the freeway. It’s on top of it, and it never stops. Nobody measured that. They
measured decibels in a field.
The water. We’re told the cooling system is like the ones in schools and hospitals. Maybe so. But “like a
hospital” isn’t a list. Warm standing water grows bacteria and that’s how people get Legionnaires’
disease, a pneumonia that can kill you. So you dose it with chemicals. A school mixes that recipe in a
bathtub. This one mixes it in a swimming pool, every day. And a school gets inspected. Who inspects
this, how often, and who tells us if something’s off? Publish the list. Then it’s answered.
The farms. This is Gilroy. We’re the garlic capital of the world, and that site sits in farmland. A 2023 study
in Science Advances found that the electric fields around high-voltage power lines stress honeybees and
cut pollination. This project brings a substation and new transmission lines. Nobody asked what that
means here.
The money. The City expects four million a year. Most of that is a five percent tax on their power bill,
which means their power bill is around eighty million. To a company Amazon’s size, that’s a family of four
getting Chipotle.
Four million is real. But it’s their lunch money. And we get the noise, whatever’s in the water, and bills
nobody will promise won’t go up. We don’t know how this affects our health. Nobody has shown us it
won’t. That shouldn’t be our homework. It should be the company asking to build it.
And I’m not opposed to AI. I work in it. There’s real good in it.
But we used to need a room-sized computer to do what fits in my pocket now. That happened because
somebody decided a room-sized computer wasn’t good enough.
These data centers aren’t good enough either. Not yet. Somebody’s going to build a better one. One that
doesn’t need its own power plant and a swimming pool of chemicals. I just don’t think Gilroy should be
the place that settles for the old version.
Here’s the part I came to say.
I don’t think anyone up there wanted this to happen the way it did. You inherited a rule you didn’t write,
from somebody who couldn’t have imagined this, and it did exactly what it was built to do.
But you ARE the ones sitting there now. And you’re the only ones who can change it.
Somebody has to be first to say we can build these things and do right by the people who live next to
them. I don’t know why that couldn’t be Gilroy.
Seven thousand four hundred people signed their names. Not to fight the building going up, but to be
asked next time.
We live here. Amazon doesn’t. Ask us.
Thank you,
Serina