A Marietta Ward 4B resident is demanding the city halt an 18-megawatt data center planned for 1155 Powers Ferry Place in the Franklin Gateway neighborhood, saying construction has already started inside the building with no environmental review completed. The site sits less than a mile from the East Cobb border and backs up to Rottenwood Creek, a protected waterway that flows through East Cobb before joining the Chattahoochee River.
Gretchen Krohn published a letter in the Cobb County Courier on Wednesday, Aug. 5, calling on city leaders to require a full environmental study before any approval moves forward.
"There has been no environmental review," Krohn wrote. "The site backs up to the protected Rottenwood Creek, raising wastewater concerns. There is also a high electricity demand for the cooling fans and the 8-10 generators that are expected to be tested monthly. This leads to intense health, noise, and emission concerns."
Who's behind the project
The facility is branded Prime Edge and owned by Prime Storage, a subsidiary of Prime Group Holdings, a Saratoga Springs, New York-based private equity firm that manages more than $10 billion in gross assets across roughly 450 self-storage properties nationwide. Data center design firm Alosanar is the listed operator. Prime Storage filed its rezoning application on May 19, according to Atlanta Press Collective reporting.
The converted portion would occupy about 40% of Prime Storage's existing 90,000-square-foot building. A second data center already operates at 1130 Powers Ferry Place, less than half a mile away.
In April, Prime Group CEO Robert J. Moser announced a nationwide rollout of edge data centers across the company's self-storage portfolio in partnership with Microsoft and Hanwha subsidiaries Qcells and TransGrid Energy.
Zoning mismatch and moratorium exemption
The site is zoned for office and commercial use, not industrial. Marietta planning staff found the proposal misaligns with the city's long-range comprehensive plan and noted they lack specific data center guidelines, forcing them to review the application under existing commercial categories.
On July 8, the Marietta City Council voted 7-0 to table Prime Storage's application until August. That same night, the council unanimously passed a six-month moratorium on new data centers through Dec. 31 but explicitly exempted the Powers Ferry Place project from that freeze, according to Atlanta Press Collective.
At that July 8 meeting, former NFL player Chris Conley, a Marietta resident who lives less than four miles from the site and has a daughter with a respiratory condition, told the council: "Each of you knows that nothing comes without a cost. There are costs associated with air pollution, noise pollution, water contamination, water storage, rising electricity rates, and others."
Prime Storage representatives told the council the facility would use a closed-loop water system and agreed to conditions limiting noise to 60 decibels during the day and 50 at night, with a 10-foot sound attenuation fence and enclosed generators.
Why East Cobb residents should watch
Rottenwood Creek runs directly through East Cobb before reaching the Chattahoochee. The Chattahoochee Riverkeeper has identified roughly 100 data centers in the river basin, concentrated in Cobb, Douglas and Fulton counties, and has flagged soil erosion and stream sedimentation as anticipated impacts during construction and operation.
The Cobb County Board of Commissioners is scheduled to vote Tuesday, Aug. 11, on extending its own data center moratorium. As we reported Aug. 4, the county's 1972 zoning code has no category for data centers, and Community Development Agency Director Jessica Guinn has said large-scale facilities "can impact local infrastructure and utilities significantly."
Krohn is asking the city to require a full environmental review, create a citizens task force on data center zoning, and cap the facility's IT load and sound output. The Marietta City Council's next scheduled vote on the project falls on the same Aug. 11 date as the county moratorium decision.
