The Denver Post story captures the setup, but the real circus is easy to spot: the paid activist class has now discovered Weld County and is doing what it always does when modern infrastructure shows up. Panic. Performance. Apocalyptic hand-wringing. A fresh villain has entered the morality play, and this time it is the data center, apparently one server rack away from eco-fascism.
The harder part is saying two true things at once, which most of these people cannot do because their politics runs on hashtags and nervous system spasms. First, data centers are critical infrastructure. Scott James was right about that. In a modern economy, they matter every bit as much as roads, utilities, and water systems. The fantasy that Colorado can keep demanding high-tech growth, AI capacity, cloud services, and digital everything while pretending the physical infrastructure behind it should be banished to the moon is unserious garbage.
Second, James was also right that the code Weld County passed was not good enough.
The county did one important thing correctly by restricting data centers to industrial zones instead of pretending they belong in agricultural areas. Good. That should have been obvious from the start. Agricultural land is for agriculture, not giant humming power-hungry boxes dressed up as harmless neighbors. On that point, the commissioners finally landed in the realm of common sense.
But then they chickened out on water.
That is the hole in this whole performance. The final code set noise rules and zoning rules, but ducked direct limits on water usage. James wanted tighter guard rails, especially against evaporative cooling systems that can gulp down millions of gallons a day. And that is where the free-market sermon starts to get a little more complicated, because “let the utilities handle it” sounds great right up until OpenAI, Meta, or Microsoft is effectively competing with Farmer Brown for water in a state where water is not exactly falling from the sky in buckets.
That is not eco-left hysteria. That is reality.
So yes, the activists are still ridiculous. Their performative politics remains exhausting. But James had the better argument because he was not trying to kill the facilities. He was trying to force reality into the code. Data centers are vital. We need to learn to live with them. But coexistence does not mean waving them through with weak rules and hoping somebody else deals with the water fight later.
Weld County got halfway to serious. Industrial-only zoning was smart. Passing the code without real water limits was not. James was right to vote no.
Source: The Denver Post
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