Earl Warren Showgrounds Leadership Rejects Data Center Proposal
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) – The Earl Warren Showgrounds announced Wednesday that it will not consider an unsolicited proposal to put a data center at the local events space.
"We want to be absolutely clear: Earl Warren Showgrounds will not consider a data center on this property," stated the show grounds' CEO Ben Sprague in a press release Wednesday. "Our focus remains on preserving and strengthening the Showgrounds as a community asset, supporting agriculture and equestrian activities, recreation, public gatherings and emergency preparedness for generations to come."
According to the Earl Warren Showgrounds, the proposal from Global Stack LLC. was shared with their organization through the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Your News Channel reached out to the state agency for more information about the nature of its partnership with the Santa Ana-based company and its response will be added to this article when it is received.
"Our vision is to create a true public-private partnership that serves communities every day while standing ready for the moments that matter most," states Global Stack's Founder and CEO Dan Kang on the company's website. "During normal operations, these sites support commercial mobility, innovation, and economic activity that generates long-term revenue for local fairgrounds. During emergencies, the very same infrastructure transforms into evacuation hubs, triage centers, resilient communications nodes, and logistics centers for first responders."
The proposal was unsolicited, shared the Earl Warren Showgrounds, and a Memorandum of Understanding necessary before a potential project could be discussed was rejected by leadership at the Showgrounds.
Notably, the use of the Earl Warren Showgrounds for emergency purposes by local first responders, often as an evacuation location for livestock, will continue into the future shared the event space's CEO Ben Sprague.
Providing a support space for local emergency responses is, "the core of what we do" noted Sprague to Your News Channel and nothing precludes the local organization from continued cooperation with local emergency response agencies.
Sprague explained that an agenda item still on the 19th District Agricultural Association's website for its Oct. 29th Board Meeting about the proposal was intended to inform the organization about the decision to not agree to go forward with the proposal.
Global Stack explains on its website that California has a unique system of public fairgrounds and the company was founded to use that existing statewide infrastructure to shop data center-based investments to cash-strapped fairgrounds in a partnership with non-profit group the California Emergency Response and Resiliency Venues and Fairgrounds.
The organization lists the Earl Warren Showgrounds as well as the Ventura County Fair as fairgrounds represented by the non-profit.
The Board of Directors at the Ventura County Fair rejected a similar proposal from the same company last month which has pitched its business plan to fairgrounds across the state.
