City Council Anticipates Development Debates As Data Center Interest in Region Intensifies

WAUKESHA — The city's Planning and Development Department has begun preparing for what internal memos describe as a likely increase in data center and large-infrastructure proposals over the next budget cycle, a shift staff attribute directly to last week's announcement that Generac and Amazon will jointly expand backup power capacity across the region to support data center growth.

Three memos reviewed by this paper, the longest of them 11 pages, outline early conversations between department staff and Councilman Gary Puchalski, who has asked the city to hold a workshop on development review procedures before any formal applications arrive. Puchalski said he wants the council to be, in his words, "prepared for sophisticated developer presentations," a phrase that appears twice in the memos and once, underlined, in his own handwriting on a printed agenda.

The workshop, tentatively scheduled for October 14 at 6 p.m. in the council chambers, would walk aldermen through the standard site-plan and conditional-use approval process, a procedure Senior Planner Doreen Katzenberg said has not changed in any meaningful way since a 2019 warehouse proposal on the city's east side, but which she conceded "reads very differently when the word megawatts is involved instead of loading docks."

"I want us prepared for sophisticated developer presentations. I don't want to be the guy asking what a rack unit is in front of a room full of consultants."

— Councilman Gary Puchalski

Three Inquiries, Zero Applications

Katzenberg told council staff that the department has fielded three preliminary inquiries from prospective developers since the Generac-Amazon announcement on September 24, none of which has advanced to a formal application or named a specific parcel. Two of the inquiries, she said, asked only about the city's industrial zoning capacity and substation proximity; the third requested a copy of the city's noise ordinance, which Katzenberg said she found "a promising sign that somebody had done this before."

The inquiries follow two data center proposals that have already moved through the Planning Commission since June, both the subject of a recent opinion piece by retired Department of Public Works supervisor Bob Krueger, who argued the city's ratepayers, not the developers, would end up covering the cost of grid upgrades. Katzenberg said Krueger's column had been circulated among staff "more than any single memo we've produced this year."

What Neighboring Communities Learned The Hard Way

Katzenberg's briefing to Puchalski's office cited public hearings in other southeastern Wisconsin communities that have already fielded data center proposals, where residents raised concerns about power consumption, increased truck traffic during construction, and whether the properties would generate meaningful tax revenue given the tax incentive structures such projects commonly receive. She recommended the city get ahead of those questions rather than field them for the first time at a packed public hearing.

"Other communities did this reactively," Katzenberg wrote in the September 22 memo. "We have an opportunity to do it proactively, assuming the council reads the briefing packet before, and not during, the meeting." Puchalski's chief of staff forwarded the memo to all six other council members with the subject line "FYI - important, please open."

A Glossary, Requested

Puchalski has also asked staff to prepare a one-page glossary of data center terminology ahead of the workshop, after acknowledging in an email to Katzenberg that he did not know what "hyperscale" meant until he looked it up on his phone during a call with a county economic development official. The glossary, still in draft form, currently defines eleven terms, including "colocation," "PUE," and "rack unit," the last of which Puchalski specifically requested after the pullquote above was recorded.

Katzenberg said the glossary will be distributed to all council members before October 14, along with a one-page summary of the standard conditional-use permit timeline. Whether any developer shows up with an actual site plan before then, she said, remains "an open question, and honestly the one I'd most like answered."