Tell the Mayor and City Council to reverse this approval

Dear Mayor Mobolade and Councilmembers,

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On June 11, at 3:25 in the afternoon, one City planner clicked a stamp and approved a 100-megawatt data center 368 feet from my neighbors' bedroom windows.

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No hearing. No vote. No public notice. Eighty-six days from application to approval — for 72 industrial chillers and 60 diesel generators, beside two hundred homes.

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I am not asking you to decide whether data centers belong in Colorado Springs. I am asking you to read the record this decision was made on, because it does not describe the project the City approved.The plan the   City stamped shows 72 chillers and 60 generators. Every study it relied on modelled 36 and 30. Half the machines. No analysis of the equipment actually approved exists — not at full load, not at any load, not by anyone.

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The City hired its own acoustic consultant to check that study. He returned it with seventeen critical comments. He wrote that the modelling software "seems like a 'freebie'" beside what serious consultants use. He wrote that without the underlying data, "a reviewer such as myself has no idea what they are doing." Eighteen days later the City treated his memorandum as approval and stamped the plan. And much was never examined at all. No comparative impact analysis. No thermal or heat-island study. No air quality finding. No fire or life-safety review. No water evaluation. Your Code required a comparison against the use previously approved — the City wrote "meets current standards" instead, and compared nothing.

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Your own code says a Major Modification may be approved only by the body that approved the original. Four different instruments have been named as that original — by the City, by the applicant, and by the applicant's own application form. They contradict one another. Two of them the City cannot produce at all — not a single document. Residents asked for that record on June 18. Sixty days later it has not arrived.

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Then the record itself began to move. On July 1 the City wrote that the approved plan "will not be revised as it would be interpreted as a subsequent plan modification, which would impact each of the appeals." Twenty-two days later it revised it at the hearing. On August 11 it re-stamped the entire plan set — two months after the decision, while five appeals were pending before you.

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And then there is the waiver.

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The law firm that argued for this applicant is the same firm this City pays $1,137,000 to lobby on its behalf. In April it asked the City for permission to act for the applicant — in a matter its own waiver describes as one "in which the City is involved as an adverse party." You did not need a law degree to see the concern — the firm's own people saw it first. Its conflicts director wrote: "The City of Colorado Springs is a client so we need to get waivers here." Its general counsel wrote: "if the City is a client, like a conflict." The waiver the firm drafted describes this City as an "adverse party" and recommends in writing that the City "seek independent counsel regarding the effect of this waiver."

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The City granted it in three days.

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On August 14, the Mayor announced six Community-First Data Center Standards — written, his office says, in response to the hearing on this project. As shown in this analysis, Project Taurus fails all six: on ratepayers, on water, on neighborhoods, on development standards, on community contribution, and on the public's voice — the six things the standards are named for. Either those standards mean something here, or this City has announced protections that exempt the one project that caused them to be written. Mayor, that question is yours.

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This appeal pleads nine independent grounds and 171 separate counts. Any one of them defeats the approval.

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That is the question before you on September 17. Not whether this is a good project. Whether this is a lawful approval.

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I ask you to reverse it, remand it for review on a complete record before the body your code requires, and adopt a six-month moratorium while this City writes the standards this record proves it does not have.

You did not make this decision. You are the first elected officials with the power to look at it.

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"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." — Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union, February 27, 1860

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[First Name] · [Last Name] · [Zip Code]

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Every fact above is documented at integritymatterscos.org/project-taurus-data-center