A data center application lands at a county of forty thousand people. The planning department is three people, one of whom is half-time on code enforcement. The applicant arrives with attorneys, a site plan, and a press packet. The vote will eventually take one evening. Whether that vote holds up — to the public, to an appeals board, to the next board of commissioners — depends entirely on what was in the file before it. This is the record set to build first.
Power
- Load by phase, in megawatts, inside the application itself — not in a slide deck from the pre-application meeting. Phase 2 load tends to arrive five or eight years later, after the planner and the public works director who negotiated phase 1 have both left. If the phase schedule isn't in the record, the institution doesn't know it.
- A will-serve letter from the serving utility, and the status of the interconnection study — in writing, dated, in the file. "The utility is supportive" is not a record.
- Who pays for transmission and substation upgrades, on what schedule, secured how.
- Backup generation: fuel type, permitted run hours, and which air permit covers it.
- What happens to rates for existing customers. This is the first question at the hearing. Have the answer on paper before then.
Water
- Cooling design and consumption in gallons per day, peak and average. Designs differ by orders of magnitude; "water-efficient cooling" is a brochure phrase, not a number.
- The source, by document: a municipal will-serve, a groundwater right with a certificate number, or a reuse agreement. Each carries different limits.
- What summer peak does to the system the county already operates.
- Discharge: where, how much, at what temperature, under whose permit.
Land Use and Site
- Exactly which approvals are requested — CUP, zone change, site plan — versus which the applicant is treating as assumed.
- Noise modeled at the property line, at night, with a re-measurement schedule written into the condition. The common failure: the noise condition gets measured once, at certificate of occupancy, and never again. Ten years of cooling fans later, the neighbors are at the podium and the county has one reading from 2027.
- Traffic split into construction years and operating years. Different problems, different fixes.
- Setbacks, lighting, and screening as committed drawings, not renderings.
- Decommissioning: what happens to the building and the site if the operator leaves in year fifteen, and who pays.
Fiscal Terms
- The actual abatement terms, in the planning record. Tax terms have a habit of living in a side agreement signed by the county administrator and filed in a drawer — never scanned into the record the planning file points to. In year six the assessor asks what was agreed, and nobody can produce the document. Put it in the same file as the approval.
- Jobs numbers recorded somewhere enforceable. The figure quoted in the press release — 200 construction jobs, 40 permanent — is not a commitment unless it appears in a condition or a development agreement. A number that exists only in a press release was never promised.
- Fees and system development charges tied to triggers the county controls.
- Who pays for the public services the site draws — fire response for a high-load facility is not free.
The Conditions Register
Everything above produces promises: load caps, water caps, noise ceilings, payment schedules, hiring targets. Promises need a home that outlives the people who negotiated them. Every commitment goes into a conditions register — the condition, its source document, the responsible party, the trigger, the evidence required, and its current status — maintained for the life of the facility. Conditions that live only in hearing minutes get rediscovered during enforcement disputes, which is the most expensive way to read your own record.
Before the Vote, Not After
An application isn't ready for a decision until this record set is full — that completeness standard is also what protects staff from pressure to advance a thin file. And both outcomes get challenged. The county that can produce what it knew, what was promised, and which conditions attached can defend an approval or a denial. It's the same record either way. If your county is reviewing a large-load application and these items have no obvious home in your current systems, that's the gap to close first. I help agencies build it — intake checklist, impact fields, public record, conditions register, staff dashboard.