A Bridge Needs a Destination
Eighteen months in - my open letter to the Reno City Council on the data center moratorium.
On June 1st, 2026, the Reno City Council will take up the final data center moratorium - and the direction that will decide whether the standards behind it ever get teeth. What follows is the open letter I’m submitting for the record and delivering as oral remarks during the hearing.
A note on where I sit: I serve on Reno's Planning Commission, but I write here in my personal capacity - these words are my own, not on behalf of the Commission. For eighteen months I've chronicled this emerging land use in this space.
Hello Mayor, Council, and staff. I’m Manny Becerra, a Reno resident speaking in my personal capacity - and for those who don’t know me, I serve on this city’s Planning Commission. The concerns before you today are not new. In December 2024, as the region’s first major data center request arrived, I immediately advised this Council to pause and set standards - the role our code gives the Commission. When that went unheeded, I brought a formal resolution and presentation that January and February; Reno’s then-Planning Commission passed it by a majority, and this Council declined to advance either the pause or the standards in late February - though a few council members stood with the community, and I remain grateful for it. In parallel, on motions I carried, the Regional Planning Commission unanimously directed TMRPA to begin studying these impacts in January of 2025 - collaborative work whose benefits we’re seeing today. I don’t recount that to relitigate it, but because the public deserves an honest account of how we got here, and because the eighteen-month delay has cost us - in time, resources, and public trust. The real test today is whether we turn that lesson into something durable.
Here’s how a planner may read item C.1, the draft moratorium before you. The critique isn’t that it’s illegitimate - it’s that a bridge with no defined destination, and an early off-ramp, may not do the job people believe it does without a certain level of specificity.
This pause has teeth in exactly one place: the direction to reject new data center permit applications. Much of what people care about - water and energy, sustainability, sound and fire, community benefits, siting and more - appears only as the broad recital of “health, safety, and welfare,” or as topics in staff’s materials still to be studied, not yet as binding requirements. It reads like a commitment, but it commands nothing: no deliverables, no milestones beyond the year-end expiration, no link to TMRPA’s work. Effectively, a clock with no assignment - and what isn’t written, as you know, can change with the next agenda, or the next Council. This isn’t a knock on staff - if anything, I believe they’ve been eager to get to work long before today, and their own staff report asks you for clarity and direction. A moratorium is, by design, a simple, yet powerful tool; your talented planners can only build to the direction they’re given - and only as far as they’re empowered to go. Today is the moment to give it, and put it on the record.
I hope it’s clear now - including to those who long held our conditional use permit (CUP) process was enough - that it isn’t. That administrative path was built for warehouses, not for the water, energy, and grid loads a modern data center carries. And the pause is forward-only; it doesn’t reach what’s already in the pipeline. Only an ordinance closes those gaps - and that ordinance is Reno’s to hold, as it is each sibling jurisdiction’s. TMRPA cannot adopt our code or hold the ordinance as its own; what it can do is align the region and, through the Project of Regional Significance (PRS) process, hold the largest projects to a shared floor - a public process we should re-evaluate so high-impact, high-energy uses - data centers, and whatever comes next - reliably enter it. Make it a floor any jurisdiction can rise above, but none should fall beneath - a bar set high, and well within reach of any partner who comes ready to build responsibly, for today and for long after our time here. The best operators rise to the occasion - clean power, resource stewardship, good local jobs now and long term - and clear, predictable rules simply make it the standard.
Both items are before you today, so let the direction you give on the text amendment shape how you finalize the moratorium - and capture it in the motions, because intentions voiced but not written down rarely, if ever, survive the next meeting or Council composition. With that, three asks. First: give staff a real study scope today, anchored in the nine priority areas I've previously shared with you and TMRPA. They reflect more than a year of cross-sector coalition work, informed both by peer communities facing the same questions, with Aurora, Illinois a particularly instructive example, and by professional frameworks from the Urban Land Institute (ULI), the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), and the American Planning Association (APA). Together they span water and energy, community benefits, siting, and more - and they should be shaped by the stakeholders before you: in this room, online, and mindful of those who couldn't be here today but whose stake is no less real. Second: condition the moratorium so it lifts only when an ordinance that truly addresses these impacts is adopted, not the moment any ordinance exists - and define what "adequate" means up front, a plain success rubric, so the off-ramp can't be tripped by an ordinance in name only. Third: seat tribal nations at the table, government-to-government, where the rules - including which lands are off the table - are shaped by them. And when anyone's input changes the outcome, say so; when it doesn't, say why. That's how trust is built - and trust is infrastructure too.
Whatever you decide today, the community deserves your reasons - spoken and in writing, backed by reliable information. To everyone who’s shown up these eighteen months: thank you - residents and neighbors; your own planning staff, whose professionalism through a long process deserves real recognition; and the more than seventy cross-sector partners of the Consortium, from business, science, and labor to conservation and higher education, who built this body of work together. My hope is that this body will be honest about how we got here and carry the lesson forward, so the next challenge facing the Biggest Little City doesn’t wait a year and a half just to begin.
For me, this has always come down to a duty to everyone we serve - a high floor for all of us, not a low bar for a few.
Eighteen months in: let’s build it, and build it to last. Thank you.
Want to take part on June 1st? Pre-register here to attend or speak virtually, or join in person at Reno City Hall at 10 a.m. Also, check out Alicia Barber’s The Barber Brief for additional, historical context on this pressing matter.
