Groups ask court to require Spartanburg County to provide transparent review of proposed data center 

COLUMBIA, S.C. — On behalf of Concerned Citizens of Spartanburg County, the Southern Environmental Law Center is asking a state court to require Spartanburg County to follow its own land development ordinance by publicly reviewing the proposed Valara Data Center before the Planning Commission as a major land development. Spartanburg County and Valara are now avoiding the public Planning Commission process by treating the almost $3 billion data center as a “minor” land development. Minor developments are reviewed by staff and not by the Planning Commission in a public process.

While its application remains under review, Valara is actively constructing a massive data center campus spanning 500,000 square feet of new buildings, a power yard, internal roads, and other infrastructure. The data center includes a 450-megawatt gas-fired power plant, the size of a utility electric plant, that will be one of the largest industrial air polluters in Spartanburg County. The project will clear many acres of trees and fundamentally alter the character of surrounding neighborhoods.

At almost $3 billion, it is the second most expensive project in South Carolina history and believed to be the most expensive development in the history of Spartanburg County. In spite of its size and scale, Valara has filed a permit application for only a minor land development and has been allowed by Spartanburg County to advance the project through an abbreviated staff permitting process without the Planning Commission’s review and the Commission’s public process.

The Valara Data Center has been marked by a lack of transparency from the start. At first, the public was told that the Valara project was not a data center. Valara split its permitting process and initially presented a smaller project for both its air and land use permits, only to later expand the scope significantly after the public process and construction had begun. As a result, Spartanburg County residents did not receive timely information about the proposal’s true nature, scale, and impact, resulting in widespread public outrage when this information came to light. 

Since the County continues to allow Valara to move forward with its minor land development permit application, the groups have filed suit asking the South Carolina circuit court to declare that the County must comply with its own ordinance and require Valara to obtain a major land development permit before the full Planning Commission. The groups are also asking for a permanent injunction ordering that the County immediately stop the processing of Valara’s minor land development permit application. 

“This multi-billion-dollar data center is a major project in every sense of the word,” said Frank Holleman, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “Instead, Valara and the County are trying to move this massive data center through the process as a minor land development—twice—without the transparency and public process that the law requires. Surrounding communities have every right to be fully informed about this massive project and the impacts upon their health and quality of life.”