Plans for an $860 million data center project in Edgerton are moving forward despite the city’s planning commission rejecting it in June. On July 16, during a special meeting, the Edgerton City Council unanimously overrode the planning commission’s rejection of final plans from Dubai-based DAMAC Digital for a data center project at the Logistics Park Kansas City warehouse at 31800 W. 196th St. The city council’s override comes about a month after the city council voted on June 15 to deny a six-month ban on data centers, which would have temporarily prevented applications for facilities where the primary use was a data center. The vote for that was 3-2. The city council’s approval of DAMAC Digital’s plan was “disappointing … but expected,” Edgerton resident Kim Twente said in a message to the Johnson County Post. “This is incredibly disappointing, as it was the citizens that voted them in and that they are supposed to represent. We have expressed over and over again that we are against this project, but they continue to ignore our pleas,” she said. DAMAC still has a final plat for the data center that needs to be approved, which will need to go back before the Edgerton Planning Commission in August and then the city council after that, Kara Banks, a spokesperson for the city, said in an email to the Johnson County Post. DAMAC did not return a request for comment by the time of publication. When the planning commission denied DAMAC’s application in June, it did so because of concerns that the application did not meet the fifth standard of approval in city code: “The plan is consistent with good land planning and site engineering design principles.”
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