(Radio Iowa) – Linn County leaders say Google is pulling out of their effort to build a data center in an unincorporated area there after they passed an ordinance regulating data center development. Supervisor County chair Kirsten Running-Marquardt says Google is now looking to build in Palo to bypass protections against excessive water use and noise pollution in the ordinance.

“We took this process seriously from day one. We invested significant time and resources to create an ordinance with strong protections for our residents and our water resources, all while having Google, a trillion dollar company, pay their fair share,” she says. Running-Marquardt says a Google representative told her that the six buildings that the company initially hoped to build would use roughly 12 million gallons of water a day. Supervisor Sami Scheetz says Google is trying to pit the two jurisdictions against each other.

“If I had to take a guess, I assume, as they’ve done across the country, they’re looking for less regulation when it comes to water specifically, and to pay less money to provide a larger return to their shareholders, which is the whole point of existing as a company like Google does,” Scheetz says.

The county supervisors emphasized that data center projects have regional impacts on natural resources and urged Palo to consider a similar approach to the one adopted by the county. The water for a data center in Palo would still be taken out of the Cedar River, which is prone to drought conditions.