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Not only is the town of 62,000 people Pima County’s second largest municipality after Tucson, but officials representing Project Blue have already had two meetings with town officials to express potential interest in locating there.

On Monday, officials of the Caliber Group, which handles media inquiries for Beale Infrastructure, Project Blue’s developers, didn’t respond to an email from the Star asking whether the company will look seriously at trying to locate a data-center complex in Marana.

But if Project Blue officials try to build data centers in Marana, they will face much stricter rules in the crucial areas of water, energy and noise than they faced in Tucson.

Here are some examples:

— The developers will have to bring in their own water supply, because the Marana data center ordinance doesn’t allow the town to deliver its supplies to data centers.

— The developers will have to provide the town estimates of how much water and how much energy their centers will use. They also have to say from what source or sources they’ll get the water.

— The data centers not only will have to adhere to limits on the amount of noise coming from their facility but before they get Town Council approval for their project they’ll first have to submit a noise study performed by a qualified, outside acoustic engineer to document what noise levels are before the centers are built at the site, and project how noisy the centers will be once in operation.

By contrast, Tucson Water was not only willing to serve water for two proposed Project Blue data-center complexes in Tucson, city of Tucson staff recommended annexing one of the two Project Blue sites lying in unincorporated Pima County just for the purpose of serving it water.

The Tucson City Manager’s Office did release an estimate in mid-July for how much water the Project Blue complexes would use. That happened after several City Council members and county supervisors raised major concerns about city and county officials’ previous refusal to release that information because of non-disclosure agreements Tucson and county officials had signed with Project Blue officials.

As for energy use, Tucson officials never released an estimate of how much energy Project Blue would consume, although they did provide an estimate of the total capacity for delivering electricity that the centers would require. Electricity use was also covered by the non-disclosure agreements.

Marana enacted its data-center ordinance last December. Speaking in general terms about the ordinance itself, Town Mayor Jon Post and Development Services Director Jason Angell said they essentially wanted to get ahead of the process by having regulations in place before having to react to a formal data-center proposal.

In contrast, Tucson Mayor Regina Romero asked the City Manager’s Office to review and propose a similar set of regulations for future data centers on July 31 — but that was only six days before the Tucson City Council was set to have its first discussion of Project Blue — more than two months after the Project Blue proposal publicly surfaced. It was at that council meeting on Aug. 6 that Project Blue was killed in Tucson by a 7-0 vote.

Marana officials have an annual retreat every year to discuss future plans for potential council, and the last couple years they held it in Chandler, Post said.

“Every year, the Chandler mayor and town manager welcome you, and we just started having conversations about data centers with these two people in Chandler,� Post said. “They started warning us to make sure we have plans in place. They told us they’re noisy and they make high-pitched sounds that some people can hear and some people can’t.

“We wanted to make sure they were not just big boxes placed on the property. We wanted to talk about how they look and that they have landscape requirements and if they’re next to a neighborhood they have to have 400-foot setbacks.�

Town officials did “extensive research across the country, meeting with Mesa, Casa Grande and Chandler,� Angell added.

As for the water requirements, town officials learned through their research that data centers can be heavy water users, depending on their cooling system, because the water in data centers is used for cooling, Angell said.

“What we put in our ordinances is that a potable water system shall not be used for a cooling system for data centers, although it can be used for offices or bathroom facilities,� he said. “Every water source is limited (but) a data center could use a lot of water with limited return on that source, limited as far as there are not as many jobs created with a data center facility. And a lot is being lost through evaporation. We did not want one user to take a disproportionate share of (our) supply.�

But if Project Blue officials were to come in and prove that their project would be “water positive,� by replenishing the town’s water supply more than it would use up, it’s something that we would be receptive to,� said Angell, adding, “I’m not the policymaker.�

“We just didn’t feel like there was enough benefit to our community for us to supply them water out of our portfolio,� Post said. “Let’s say one of those uses 500 acre-feet. That would be 500 acre-feet we could use for other purposes.�

He added, however, that if a data center could obtain Central Arizona Project water rights, they could exchange them with the town in return for use of the town’s existing groundwater supplies.

Post has also held out the possibility that data-center operators could buy water rights from farmers who grow cotton, alfalfa, wheat and other crops in and around Marana, a longtime farming community before it became one of Arizona’s fastest-growing suburbs in the 1990s.

Brian Wong’s family has farmed on about 4,500 acres for decades in that area, mostly inside Marana and mostly on state-owned land. He said he’s heard nothing about any interest in using that land by Project Blue but said that for it to obtain water rights, it would have to buy the state land or acquire easements to use it, “because the water rights go with the land.�’

All of the water used on the farmland is Central Arizona Project water the Wong family has had put on their farmland by the city of Tucson, the town of Marana and Metro Water. These water providers have put CAP water on the farmland for the lands to get classified as “groundwater savings facilities,� in which the CAP water is used in lieu of pumping groundwater.

“We haven’t pumped groundwater since the 1990s,� Wong said.

If Project Blue developers wanted to acquire the state land, they’d have to compensate the Wong family’s BKW Farms for all the improvements it had put in. But “I don’t know if we would really have a choice� as to whether to accept or fight the project’s efforts to acquire water rights, he said.

“I’m sure they would pay a higher dollar than we could pay,� Wong told the Star Monday.

A second farming operation in that area is the Cortaro Marana Irrigation District, which has grown crops on land inside and outside the town for many decades. The district holds 11,000 acres but farms 8,000 acres today, with the rest having been subdivided and developed for homes and businesses.

“I have signed a non-disclosure agreement concerning data centers, (but) I don’t honestly remember who was on the contract. I don’t remember when. If I had to guess it would be in the last couple years,� said the district’s general manager, Doug Greenland.

“We’ve had a lot of inquiries —people asking what water sources are available to them, by coming in and getting rid of agriculture.�

“None of them have come past any initial questions we have. None have been worth going forward with,� he said.

Right now, he’s not excited about selling any land or water rights to a data-center developer in any case, said Greenland, adding, “Why get rid of hottest commodity in the country at the moment?�