Sacramento Just Handed Cities a Veto They Can't Use

In Vernon, a small industrial city south of downtown Los Angeles, crews spent the summer framing a 49.5-megawatt, three-story data center. Projects like it are why Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills on Monday meant to give communities more say.

The new laws have real teeth. Data centers must disclose water use to local governments, pay their share of grid upgrades and lose access to blanket environmental exemptions. Developers will have to file a water supply assessment and a water scarcity plan as part of permitting. Los Angeles County didn't wait: its planning director had already ordered a temporary ban on large AI data centers in unincorporated areas. In Maryland, Anne Arundel County is weighing a 15-month pause of its own.

Assemblymember Diane Papan, who wrote two of the water bills, put the logic simply: "We cannot manage what we do not measure."

She's right. Too bad the bills don't pay for any measuring.

The veto exists on paper. Using it takes a GIS office that many jurisdictions have staffed with one person, or none.

Every one of these reviews comes down to a question about location. Where is the nearest substation, and does it have capacity? Which aquifer feeds the site? What runs under the property? A county planner answering those questions needs parcel, utility, water and elevation data that is current, sits in one place, and is kept up by someone. In most counties, those layers are scattered across three departments, two consultants and a filing cabinet.

So the veto exists on paper. Using it takes a GIS office that many jurisdictions have staffed with one person, or none.

This matters because developers bring their own maps. Their consultants will show up with polished site studies. A county that can't check those studies against its own records is left taking the developer's word for it. That isn't oversight.

Some help is arriving from outside government. Compute Atlas, an independent project, now tracks more than 2,000 U.S. data center sites, with power figures, water-stress overlays and records of local opposition, each tied to a source. It has gaps. It's still more than many planning departments have on their own desks.

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The same blind spot showed up underground this week. The Common Ground Alliance released state-by-state figures behind its estimate that hitting buried utility lines costs the U.S. economy $83.2 billion a year. The repair crew's bill is the smallest part. For every dollar spent fixing a line, the group estimates, nearly sixteen more disappear into outages, closed roads, delayed projects and emergency response.

A modeled number, yes. But anyone who has watched a street stay closed for a week over a severed fiber line knows the math isn't crazy. And every data center approved means more trenches, more conduit and more chances to hit something nobody mapped.

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Out West, some good news arrived from orbit. Earth Fire Alliance and Muon Space released the first fire imagery from three FireSat satellites launched in July. Fire agencies enrolled in the program are supposed to start receiving the data at least twice a day by year's end. Fire chiefs should hold them to that date. They should also ask their state agencies now how that data will actually reach a county dispatch center, because the answer is often "nobody has decided."

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One more thing, filed under problems nobody budgets for. On back-to-back days last week, a KLM flight and an Air Canada flight lost GPS over Sweden. Both landed safely. The same reporting noted that the FAA still lacks real-time detection for jamming and spoofing. Europe's problem, mostly. Still, your 911 center, traffic signals and utility networks almost certainly depend on satellite timing. Someone in your organization should know what happens if that signal disappears for an afternoon. Probably someone doesn't.

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State legislatures are quick to give local governments new responsibilities and slow to pay for the data needed to carry them out. California has just done both halves of that at once.

Councils that want to use their new power should start with the least glamorous line item in the budget: the people who keep the map right.