By Darren Svan | The Center Square
A view of downtown Shreveport, La. Photo: Emilee Calametti / The Center Square
STACK Infrastructure is moving forward with Amazon-related development at two project sites near Shreveport, whereas the city’s planned data center sits in limbo amid civil litigation against the mayor and City Council.
The legal action shifted priorities toward the rural centers. Contractors and vendors are exploring initial opportunities around those early site buildouts, with additional meetings to come for professional services.
Meanwhile, a hearing is scheduled on March 23 in the First Judicial District Court to consider dismissing the litigation. At stake for Shreveport is the promise of sales tax revenue, more jobs and substantial investment dollars.
Ironically, Shreveport’s Resilient Technology Park is the place that originally attracted Amazon to the region, leading to a $12 billion commitment to Caddo and Bossier parish technology hubs. The park is roughly 313 acres in west Shreveport adjacent to Interstate 20 that is development-ready.
“They saw what we knew – we have a great industrial park that has all the utilities in place,” Justyn Dixon, a key figure in local economic development, told The Center Square in an office interview.
Dixon is president and chief executive officer of North Louisiana Economic Partnership, a nonprofit based in the heart of downtown Shreveport. The organization works closely with state and local governments to advance regional economic growth, and serves as the leading resource for large companies looking to invest in the area.
NLEP helped secure the deal with Amazon.
Dixon and his NLEP team capitalized on Amazon's desire to develop multiple campuses.
“We quickly said, ‘We know you like this site, would you be willing to look at two other sites?’” Dixon said.
Multiple campuses is a redundancy feature that protects Amazon cloud computing technologies from events like a natural disaster or network failure. One takes over if the other fails. Amazon will lease the data campuses from STACK, a Denver-based development company.
The team identified potential locations near north Caddo Parish and north Bossier Parish, ensuring both sides of the river benefit, as growth is faster and more sustainable when the communities work together, Dixon said.
“They said ‘yes,’ and we were off to the races,” he recalled.
At public hearings and through media reports, dating back to September, the benefits and drawbacks of a data center in Shreveport were examined. So it was unexpected that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry did not announce Resilient Park during his press conference on Feb. 23.
“It stung a little but it was a light sting because we feel we’ll get there quickly,” Dixon said of the litigation that caused Landry to leave Shreveport out of the historic jobs and investment announcement at Municipal Auditorium.
Mooringsport Mayor Tyler Gordon, along with two other concerned citizens, Michael Craft and Mary Blakemore, filed their suit in January against Mayor Tom Arceneaux and the city. The suit seeks judicial review of the City Council’s decision to approve the development after the planning commission initially blocked it.
A special-use permit is needed for a data center to operate at Resilient Park.
“Throughout this entire process, we feel very confident we'll get it there. But, yeah, it stung a little bit because it was the catalyst for all this,” Dixon said referencing Resilient Park.
“I don't want people to think that I am trying to stop development in our area,” Gordon told The Center Square in an earlier interview. "I would love to see development here that benefits us but we just need to do it in a way that won’t harm long-term water security."
The nine-page civil suit says, among other things, city leaders failed to provide “sufficient transparency,” failed to consider “environmental impacts” and the City Council "violated its constitutional and statutory obligations" when it overturned the Metropolitan Planning Commission's denial of a special use permit.
“We 100% believe it is a frivolous action that has no merit,” said Dixon.
Amazon Web Services is considered one of the three largest hyperscalers, alongside Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. A hyperscaler is a company that provides cloud computing services at an extremely large scale, according to company documents.