Richmond, California
A civic pamphlet. Not a newspaper. No ads. Nothing for sale.
Publius
17 September 2026.
By ten o’clock on September 15 the chamber had the stale, overheated air of a room that has been full since six. Thirty-eight people had signed up in person to speak on one item. The clerk’s voice had gone flat in the way voices do after hours of roll calls. Someone at the dais asked whether the Council expected to get through both remaining items, and somebody noted that the Police Chief had already sent his staff home.
So the Council chose. It took up the data centers and let the cameras wait.
The data-center item was an urgency ordinance: a 45-day moratorium on new data centers, under the State law that lets a city freeze land uses when it finds a current and immediate threat to public health, safety, or welfare. The City Attorney’s office explained the trade, and to its credit it explained it plainly. An urgency ordinance takes effect at once and needs a four-fifths vote. A regular ordinance needs two readings and thirty days. The urgency route requires findings of an immediate threat, and those findings can be challenged. “There is risk,” the Council was told, more than once. Staff had looked at how other cities had done it.
A councilmember asked, in effect, whether there was any pending application that made this urgent. The answer was that the statute does not require one. So the threat was real enough to be urgent, but not so concrete as to have an address.
The Council voted to end debate, with Councilmembers Brown and Zepeda voting no. Then it adopted the ordinance. On the video, Councilmember Brown can be heard saying “abstain,” and the clerk announces the motion passing “with Council Member Brown voting no.” The approved minutes will settle which it was; as of this writing they have not been posted.
I have no strong view about data centers. They use a great deal of power and water, and a city is entitled to think before it hosts one. A 45-day pause to write real rules may be prudent.
What interests me is the word “urgent,” and where it lands. The Axon contract, which bundles license plate readers, cameras, and drones and would raise a police technology agreement by $3.5 million to $12 million, had been on the agenda that night as item Q.1. It was not reached. Neither was the update on the settlement-money engagement, which by then had been in motion since January. Those are things the City is actually paying for, or actually owes, right now. They are not hypothetical buildings on hypothetical parcels.
Urgency, in Richmond, seems to be a feeling more than a finding. It attaches to what fills the room. Thirty-eight speakers make an item urgent. A contract whose staff have gone home is, by definition, not.
That is not quite how the law imagines it. The law imagines urgency as a fact about the world. The Council treated it as a fact about the evening. Both, I suppose, can be true at once. But a city that decides what is urgent by counting the people still awake at ten will keep finding its hardest decisions waiting until the room empties out.
The next regular meeting of the City Council is Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
— Publius