Cherokee County appears to be farther away than ever from anything resembling a silver bullet fix for complaints about noise from unenclosed crypto mining operations.
County attorney Darryl Brown suggested a handful of alternative options during a Jan. 24 public hearing in which he recommended against adopting a noise ordinance, one of which being a possible land use ordinance. But even if county officials pursue and adopt a land use ordinance, it is not expected to have any effect on the existing crypto mining operations.
“Everything that exists already is grandfathered in,” Brown said.
For now, that likely means residents’ best hopes of a more immediate solution are in the hands of Ankr/Exponential Digital, the parent company of the county’s two unenclosed crypto mining facilities.
The company began construction in January on a noise abatement wall around a portion of the controversial facility on Harshaw Road. However, residents said during the public hearing that construction on the structure had been paused in favor of erecting chain-link perimeter fencing topped with barbed wire. Others complained that noise now reverberates off of the noise abatement wall, and is worse at homes and locations on sides of the facility not insulated by the barrier.
Commissioner Cal Stiles took some criticism after he suggested canceling the public hearing on the noise ordinance. He emphasized that he simply did not expect the noise ordinance to move forward and instead wanted to directly focus on addressing the crypto mining operations.
“That’s now what we’re doing,” Stiles said. “I don’t know what that’s going to look like, what that framework is going to be, but I do think
that at the end of the day we’ll come up with something that’s workable.
“We have no real regulations against (crypto mining operations), so they’ve come in here and taken advantage of that, and they’ve taken advantage of the fact that we have cheap power. We can’t do anything about the power portion, but we do need to do something so our citizens aren’t being taken advantage of by some corporation moving in here.”
However, in politically conservative Cherokee County, a term like “regulations” tends to be a non-starter as a solution to problems. The same can be said of anything that might technically fall under the umbrella of “zoning,” such as a land use ordinance.
“I’m not going to say that word,” Brown said of zoning. “Land use ordinances fall under Chapter 160D of the North Carolina General Statutes, which was just adopted in 2019. It was a consolidation of different statutes that apply to counties and other municipalities.”
Chapter 160D references “zoning” about 200 times.
In nearby Clay County, the board of commissioners has scheduled a public hearing for 6:45 p.m. Thursday at the courthouse in Hayesville to consider adopting a moratorium on crypto mining facilities. For neighboring officials, Cherokee County has become a cautionary tale.
“When these crypto mining facilities started popping up over there (in Cherokee County), my commissioners got really concerned, asking, ‘Do we have anything in our ordinances that would help us to control it?’ ” Clay County attorney Merinda Woody said. “And to be honest, we don’t, so that’s the reason I went in and asked for a resolution just to see a moratorium.
“It’ll be just a temporary moratorium to give the planning board and county staff, and the county commissioners, time to evaluate and really look at these crypto mining facilities, see how much energy they are taking, see if we’ve even got the infrastructure to be able to say, ‘Yes, you can put one (here).’ ”
Woody said Clay County commissioners approved the adoption of a planning board in the early 1990s to oversee growth and development. Although that board didn’t meet on a regular basis for many years, the county adopted a variety of related ordinances in the years since its creation, including a 2011 ordinance that regulates solar farms.
“In that ordinance, it says if you do place a solar farm on your property, you’ve got to put buffers all the way around, you’ve got to make sure it’s environmentally safe, etc.,” Woody said.