# Arkansas Democrat-Gazette — "Little Rock Board of Directors unanimously approves data center regulations" (2026-06-02) Reporter Joseph Flaherty. The City of Little Rock's governing body unanimously adopted Mayor [[Frank Scott Jr.]]'s data-center regulations ordinance on 2026-06-02. ## Source metadata - **Publisher:** Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (arkansasonline.com); by Joseph Flaherty; updated 2026-06-03. - **Archived:** 2026-06-03, by Invoke-WebRequest (sha256 logged). ## Extract (key passages) - "The city of Little Rock's governing body on Tuesday unanimously approved a set of new regulations on data centers as Google is preparing to build a large facility at the city's port." The vote came "nearly 4 1/2 hours into the meeting. City Directors Antwan Phillips and Ken Richardson were absent." - "Scott's ordinance classifies data centers into three tiers ... the largest category dubbed 'hyperscale.'" Hyperscale = facilities that "occupy more than 250,000 square feet or draw more than 75 megawatts of electricity from the grid"; "hyperscale data centers can only be built in areas of the city zoned for heavy industrial use." - "Hyperscale data centers face a minimum 900-foot setback from adjacent residential-zoned properties. 'Major' and 'accessory' data centers will have to be set back at least 250 feet and 100 feet, respectively." Noise limits vary by adjacent zoning. - "Facilities must be either fully air-cooled or rely on high-efficiency liquid cooling ... Developers are barred from using wells to draw groundwater as the primary source of cooling water." - Google official **Laurel Brown**: "we're just at the beginning"; "A final decision to build is only made after all diligence and public reviews are complete, and, candidly, we have not reached that point." Google "is seeking to build a complex with five main buildings of more than 280,000 square feet each ... likely to require more than 100 megawatts of power." - City Attorney **Tom Carpenter** "confirmed in response to a question from City Director Virgil Miller Jr. that Act 851 of 2023 prevents the city from banning data centers." - Background: in April 2025 the board "cleared the way for the Google project," selling "acreage near the port to the front company behind the development while approving tax breaks, including a minimum 65% property tax abatement for 30 years," then rezoned heavy-industrial and annexed land for the data center and "a new Amazon warehouse." CAW says the port data center "could use an average of 1 million gallons of water per day or up to 4 million gallons per day during peak demand." - City Directors **Capi Peck** and **Kathy Webb** wrote a weekend op-ed arguing 2025's process "was flawed" and calling for "a moratorium until all the questions ... are answered." ## Notes - **Tier 3.** Establishes the 2026-06-02 City of Little Rock ordinance and its specifics; corroborated by KARK (whose original returned 403 on archival fetch). Used to contextualize, not to establish, the underlying [[Willowbend Capital, LLC|Willowbend / Project Boar]] / Google record. The firewall holds: Google's role at the Port is reported (Tier-3) and confirmed by the company per other reporting, but is not asserted here as an Arkansas-agency-established fact.