Nine councillors, not one in favour: Pehčevo rejected the data centre because it does not know who wants to build it

Nine councillors. Five from VMRO-DPMNE and its coalition, three from SDSM and its coalition, one from the ZNAM Movement. All nine voted against.

In a country where party lines on municipal councils can usually be read off the seating plan, a unanimous vote against a private investor's initiative is rare enough to note. The council of Pehčevo municipality rejected the initiative to launch a procedure for drafting urban planning documentation for a data centre on plots in Pančarevo.

What was actually on the agenda

Formally, the councillors were not deciding on construction. The second item on the agenda of the 11th session concerned accepting an initiative that would start the procedure for an urban planning project outside the scope of a zoning plan - forming a building plot for a facility with the designation G4.7, structures for storing and warehousing digital data. Five cadastral plots in the Pančarevo cadastral municipality are covered.

That is the technical description. In language anyone understands: the first step in a procedure that can end with a data centre.

SDSM council group coordinator Nikolčo Jovčev asked for the item to be withdrawn right at the start, arguing that the initiative had not been adequately explained either to the councillors or to the public.

"I cannot disclose the investor's name"

Mayor Aleksandar Kitanski also asked for the item to be taken off. He defends the procedure as routine - the initiative is only a beginning and does not constitute a building permit, and any eventual construction would have to pass through several institutions and procedures, including environmental protection processes. If any competent institution issued a negative opinion, the process would be halted.

But then comes the sentence the whole case turns on: under the law, as he explained, he cannot disclose the investor's name.

That is probably a correct reading of the regulations. And that is precisely why it is a problem. When the residents of a municipality are asking who wants to build on their land, and the mayor faces a legal barrier to telling them, then the law is working against the very public the planning procedure is supposed to protect.

"We cannot speculate without relevant data and expert analyses," Kitanski said. True - but the absence of data is not a natural state. It is a product of how the procedure is set up.

Power and water, but nobody says how much

The objections that came from every side are practically identical, which is why the vote was unanimous. How much electricity the facility would consume. How much water. What the benefit to the municipality is. What the environmental impact is.

The Green People's Guard demanded the procedure be halted, stating that no data has been published on the investor, on the planned electricity and water consumption, on the value of the investment or on the environmental impact. Levica and DOM raised similar objections.

And the VMRO-DPMNE council group - the governing party at local level - put it in terms that are hard to argue with: "We are not against development and investment, but projects like this should be supported only when there are clear guarantees that the interest of Pehčevo municipality and its citizens is fully protected."

A question bigger than Pehčevo

Data centres are among the hungriest facilities for electricity and water that exist. That is not a local circumstance of Pančarevo - it is the definition of the technology. Which is why the questions from Pehčevo's councillors are not local questions.

Jovčev called for broader public information on investments of this kind in future, and noted that his council group supports a moratorium on investments of this type where they are unknown to the public and to councillors.

What happened in Pehčevo is a council that did its part of the job: it asked for data, did not get it, and did not vote for it. If that is the model, the question is whether the next municipality handed the same initiative will have nine councillors ready to repeat it.