McPherson County Bans Data Centers and Utility-Scale Battery Storage

McPHERSON, Kan. — The McPherson County Commission voted unanimously Monday, Aug. 31, to ban data centers and large battery-storage installations from all county land outside city limits. The new zoning rules, adopted as Resolution 2026-21, also bar hydrogen energy systems except at refineries. The vote ends a freeze on such projects that the county has held in place since the summer of 2025. During those 13 months, planning and zoning administrator Jon Kinsey told commissioners, the county ran study sessions and public meetings, shared more than 90 research documents, and drew about 147 people to a planning board hearing on Aug. 10.

The bans lead a broader rewrite of the county's zoning rules, moved by Commissioner Tom Kueser and seconded by Chairman Keith Becker. Builders of any new or expanded industrial or warehouse building over 10,000 square feet must now tell the county how much electricity it will draw and what its backup generators, fuel tanks and cooling equipment will do. The county can then cite a building whose power use later balloons past what it declared, guarding against data centers arriving under another name.

New uses of industrial land will also need a public hearing and county approval rather than a staff-issued permit, a step further than the planning board recommended. The rewrite also lifts the county's old restriction on storing things in shipping containers, and it sets rules — required by a state law that took effect July 1 — for second homes on residential land.

The planning board backed the ban, voting 5-2 on Aug. 17 to recommend it after spending the week working through public comments from its Aug. 10 hearing.

Six of the seven residents who spoke Monday urged the commission to act. One resident, who with two neighbors gathered about 120 petition signatures — running out of paper before running out of signers — told commissioners that rural counties like McPherson are being called a "rural sacrifice zone": "lots of land, power, water, and few people."

Another pointed to the state's sales-tax break for large data centers, the forever chemicals used in cooling systems, and a falling water table, saying the Equus Beds aquifer, which supplies much of the area's water, dropped a foot in the last year. The lone caution came from the owner of an existing data facility, which commissioners toured in March, who asked the board to keep economic development in mind.

Before casting his vote, one commissioner read a lengthy prepared statement: "I'm voting not anti-technology. I'm voting pro-McPherson County," he said, arguing that data centers of any size would threaten the low-cost, reliable electricity that anchors the county's industrial base. "We are choosing stewardship over speculation."

Why it matters: Kansas counties are splitting on the question. While Emporia spent the summer writing rules to manage a gigawatt-scale data center campus and Reno County has voted to allow the facilities under regulation, McPherson County banned the industry outright — among the first counties in Kansas to do so. And where the county's temporary freeze was due to expire Dec. 1, the ban has no end date; it stands unless a future commission votes to undo it.

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