Planning panel goes slow on fiber-optic project
Staff writer
County officials are weighing a fiberoptic project on farmland in the southwest corner of the county, slow-walking the proposal to mollify public anxiety about potential connection to data centers.
Goessel farmer Matthew Voth asked the planning and zoning board Thursday for a conditional-use permit to build an in-line-amplifier on a piece of his farmland on Alamo Rd. between 70th and 80th Rds.
The permit would be a condition of sale of a three-acre plot to Lumen, which owns long-haul fiber lines in conduits parallel to natural gas pipelines running along Alamo.
The utility substation would tie into long-existing fiber lines and boost optical signals — the rapid pulses of light that transmit data — much the way cell tower repeaters relay signal over long distances.
“The Marion County site is one of 11 planned ILA locations in Kansas that will support an expanded fiber route connecting to Denver and strengthening Lumen’s broader national network,” Lumen spokesperson Stephanie Meisse wrote in an e-mail. “These facilities play an important role in carrying the growing volumes of data that move between major metropolitan areas, data centers, cloud providers, and businesses across the country.”
Lumen operates an existing ILA facility on Falcon Rd., — due east of Voth’s proposed facility, that was built in the 1990s, she wrote.
Voth, Lumen engineer Justin Reynolds, and a Lumen contract civil engineer said at the board meeting that the project did not require a big power and water footprint like high-demand data centers do.
The site would consist of up to six equipment huts that house electronics used to amplify and regenerate optical signals. Each 24-by-36-foot precast concrete- and-steel unit may require up to 300 kilowatts of power, about the equivalent of electricity consumed by three average households, they said, adding that existing power lines could accommodate that.
There would be no water or sewage connections. The huts would sit on concrete foundations with fencing. Each would have a 600-gallon diesel tank for backup power.
“The fear of the day is data centers,” planning commissioner Delbert Lowe said. “And I think there’s a lot unknown or misunderstood, but it’s got everybody’s hair on fire.”
Mindful of a county moratorium on data center development and the misunderstanding, planning board chairman Josh Weiser is taking pains to give the project a slow, thorough airing — even postponing a decision on a conditional use permit until an August meeting.
“I got a lot of questions and a lot of calls with concerns that this was the beginning of a massive data center in Marion County,” he said in an interview.
At the board meeting, he said, “I purposely asked, are they going to store data? Do they have storage nodes in there? Are they going to have TPUs [tensor processing units], which are synonymous with AI, and that would be what a ChatGPT would have to have.”
The answers were no.
Weiser, an engineer who has spent his career building high-speed data storage and building data center hardware, said he saw the 80-minute discussion with public input at Thursday’s meeting as trust-building.
Weiser even went to Monday’s meeting of county commissioners to urge care when they ultimately consider approval of the CUP.
“I see and hear a lot of skepticism about our government, mistrust in our planning board and this commission,” he told commissioners. “I think we have a huge opportunity with this deal right now, which is one reason why I proposed — and the board voted 10-0 — to postpone getting this CUP written until next month, to get the conditions correct on it.”
He said he planned to design the permit so that it restated and duplicated conditions implicit in the plan already. Those spelled-out conditions, he said, “will go a long ways to start bridging that trust with the community.”
The planning board asked for a full development plan that would state specifically that there would be no need for sewer and water. He also asked for road maintenance agreement and more detailed description of fire suppression equipment.
Voth said that he had contacted nearby neighbors — the closest 4,000 feet away — and there were no objections.
Lumen originally approached an adjacent landowner about buying land for the project. But, Voth said, the owner turned the company down “because they wanted to put this in an area where he needed to let out trucks. That would have hindered his farming activity.”
Another neighbor Voth polled initially was emotional about the potential for “overhead lines on her ground” but was satisfied with his explanation that Lumen would be taking power only from existing lines.
Weiser and Lowe put the Lumen project in a larger context, noting that while it is not a data center, it most certainly is a product of rapidly increasing demand from AI data centers.
“But if you look at the broader picture of where we are as a society and where we’re headed, data is the backbone of our society,” Weiser said.
The proposed fiber optic substation, he said, would provide key infrastructure for the larger picture.