Data Centers: Governing Ahead of the Build-Out
What 16,184 local-government meetings reveal about the data-center moratorium wave — and what municipalities are converging on
Executive Summary
Some of the most consequential decisions about America’s AI infrastructure are not being made in Washington or on Wall Street; they are being made by county commissions, city councils, and planning boards, often on weeknights, with thin information and borrowed ordinance language.
Between May 4 and June 30, 2026, WaterOne.ai attended 16,184 local-government meetings across the United States, and preserved their public record. One in ten touched on data centers; the records of 700 meetings — more than four of every hundred public meetings of any kind — mention a moratorium or an outright ban on data centers, and 277 meetings were confirmed as formally taking up a moratorium or ban.
The moratorium has become local government’s default response to the build-out, and the wave is accelerating: by the last week of June, a moratorium or ban was coming up in one of every two meetings that mentioned data centers, and decisions that tightened the rules outnumbered decisions that loosened them by roughly nine to one.
Three findings organize the report;
- The wave is anticipatory and imitative: roughly 60 percent of actions were adopted with no project on file, durations cluster on a few template round numbers led by the full year, and the stated purpose, in meeting after meeting, is to buy time to write rules that do not yet exist.
- The wave runs on concentrated concerns and an information vacuum: water concerns lead (83 percent of moratorium meetings), followed by electricity and grid capacity, land use, noise, and a secrecy problem — NDAs and code-named projects — that multiplies all the rest. The numbers boards hear vary wildly from one meeting to the next; in one of every five meetings that quoted water use, estimates heard in the same room differed by a factor of fifty or more. Where residents’ sentiment is legible it registers opposition 36 times for every once it registers support, while boards split far more evenly.
- Communities are answering along a spectrum, from outright bans, to separate permission paths that close the by-right loophole, to the most nuanced response: zoning standards with real numbers in them — residential setbacks, decibel limits, closed-loop cooling, minimum lots, and bonded decommissioning — as adopted in Bowling Green, Birmingham, El Dorado, Lee County, Grand County, and Holyoke. Interviews with officials in jurisdictions that moved from a pause to durable rules anchor the findings that follow.
Governing ahead of the build-out
Some of the most consequential decisions about America’s AI infrastructure are not being made in Washington or on Wall Street; they are being made by county commissions, city councils, and planning boards, often on weeknights, with thin information and borrowed ordinance language. One in ten of the meetings WaterOne.ai attended touched on data centers; more than four of every hundred public meetings of any kind mentioned a moratorium or an outright ban.
The moratorium has become local government’s default response to the build-out, and the wave is accelerating: by the last week of June, a moratorium or ban was coming up in one of every two meetings that mentioned data centers — a share that tripled from 17 percent in six weeks — and decisions that tightened the rules outnumbered decisions that loosened them by roughly nine to one among confirmed actions. With confirmed actions in 39 states across every region, no region and no party owns the issue.
Most pauses arrive before any project exists
Roughly 60 percent of confirmed actions were preemptive, adopted with no specific project on file, against 32 percent responding to a named proposal and 8 percent mixed. Towns are not drafting these measures from scratch — they are copying one another. When Bridgton, Maine adopted its pause, it used a 180-day template circulated by a regional council of governments; the durations communities choose cluster tightly on a few round numbers, led by the full year (27 one-year pauses). Gurnee, Illinois enacted a six-month moratorium while staff openly acknowledged there were no pending applications to respond to. Holyoke, Massachusetts adopted its citywide ban the same way — no formal proposal was on file — and its mayor is direct that the label overstates the policy:
“Even though it’s a ban, it’s still temporary in nature until stronger governing oversight is established.”
Mayor Garcia told us. An order to seat a data-center advisory committee is already in front of his council.
The stated purpose, in meeting after meeting, is to buy time. As a board member in McMinnville, Tennessee framed an eighteen-month moratorium:
“this just buys us time to further hear and study and learn about this issue and also hear from both sides.”
Given what boards are being asked to absorb, the pause is not panic; it is a rational bid for time. The failures share a recognizable anatomy, too: officials argued existing zoning already addressed the concerns, or that a pause invited legal challenge — and nearly every rejection was paired with an alternative regulatory step rather than inaction.
Boards are deciding in a fog
Water leads the concerns raised (83 percent of confirmed moratorium meetings), followed closely by electricity and grid capacity (77 percent) — the two appear together so often they function as a single resource ceiling. But the numbers boards hear span orders of magnitude. Megawatt figures read into the record run from 1 to 3,324 with a median of 50: one town hears about a 5 MW server room while another weighs a 3,300 MW campus. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, which wrote data-center standards into its zoning code this spring, planning commission executive director Ben Peterson described the drafting environment plainly:
“It wasn’t easy to determine the credibility of the sources. You just kind of had to take it all and pilfer through it and decide for yourself.”
Among the 122 meetings that quoted water figures, one in five heard estimates differing by fifty-fold or more in the same room — the widest, in Front Royal, Virginia, spanning a factor of 177,500.
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The information vacuum compounds the fog: only 110 of the 700 moratorium meetings confirm who the developer is, and explicit non-disclosure language appears in dozens more, with proposals surfacing only as code-named placeholders. A community that cannot learn who the end user is, or what it will draw, has no way to weigh the questions in front of it — so it pauses. Where the public’s stance is legible, it registers opposition 36 times for every once it registers support; boards, better briefed and more procedural, split nearly evenly (51:49 opposed among board utterances, against 64:36 at the podium). The dais is measurably calmer than the podium — but the pressure of that gap lands on the people who must vote. “These elected officials are put in impossible situations,” Peterson said.
Beyond the pause: the regulatory menu
A moratorium is a deadline, not an answer: when it expires, the town is back where it started unless it has written something durable in the meantime. The jurisdictions ahead of the wave used the pause to do exactly that, and their choices fall along a spectrum. At one end is an outright ban, the simplest to pass and the most legally exposed, since a blanket prohibition on a lawful use invites challenge. In the middle sits a separate permission path: the town defines “data center” in its zoning code and requires a discretionary permit, so each project is judged on its merits instead of approved by right — the route El Dorado, Kansas took.
At the far end, and the most durable, are zoning standards with real numbers in them: closed-loop cooling so a facility does not draw on municipal water, a requirement that power be generated on site or contracted rather than pulled from existing capacity, minimum setbacks from homes, decibel ceilings at the property line, appearance standards, and a bond posted up front to cover decommissioning if the facility is abandoned. Standards like these survive a change in council membership and give developers something to design against. Six jurisdictions in our interviews had done exactly that, each arriving at a different mix. Bowling Green deliberately declined to carve the industry into tiers: Peterson said,
“We just said we’re going to regulate all data centers, regardless of the size. If you’re a five-person cryptocurrency data center in a 10,000-square-foot building, you’re going to get treated the same as a million-square-foot facility…“Here’s the requirements. Here’s what our community will accept.
How five communities wrote their rules
The meeting record and field interviews with officials in these jurisdictions show pathways communities can take;
- Birmingham, AL — a “20 protections” framework: closed-loop cooling, 500-foot residential setbacks, five-acre minimum lot.
- El Dorado, KS — defined “data center” in code and required a special-use permit.
- Bowling Green, KY — wrote setbacks and decommissioning into code, then declined a moratorium in favor of the standing rules.
- Grand County, CO — paused only to draft land-use regulations on water, power, and decommissioning.
- Holyoke, MA — paired a citywide restriction with a calibrated carve-out for an existing research-computing center.
For local governments
- Close the by-right loophole: define data centers in the zoning code and require a discretionary permit.
- Tie the pause to a concrete deliverable, so it stays a deadline for writing rules rather than drifting toward an open-ended ban.
- Put resource questions in the code: require disclosure of projected water draw, grid load, cooling technology, and backup generation.
- Coordinate at the county or regional level, so the copying dynamic doesn’t push facilities to the next town.
For developers & hyperscalers
- Disclose early and voluntarily: the end user, the resource draw, and the mitigation plan — opposition tracks what communities cannot verify.
- Bring the resource solution to the first meeting, not the last: closed-loop cooling, contracted or on-site generation, and paying for upgrades.
- Negotiate community benefits in the open rather than under NDA — a host agreement residents can see turns a zero-sum fight into a deal.
About this research
Between May 4 and June 30, 2026, WaterOne.ai attended and documented 16,184 local-government meetings (city councils, county boards, town councils, planning and zoning boards, etc.) across the United States, in person and remotely. Findings draw on three groups of those meetings: all 16,184; the 700 whose records mention a moratorium or an outright ban on data centers; and the 277 confirmed as formally taking one up between May 11 and June 24. Each figure notes which group it draws on. Classifications are automated and were spot-checked against the underlying minutes. Sentiment is measured only where a record reports it, and the patterns shown are associations rather than established causes.
Alongside the meeting record, we conducted interviews with municipal governance officials across the country — planning staff, county commissioners, city council members, and mayors in jurisdictions on both sides of the moratorium question — to understand how these decisions are actually made. Quotes in this report from Bowling Green, Kentucky and Holyoke, Massachusetts are drawn from on-the-record interviews conducted in June 2026. Verbatim quotes are transcript-verified.
This report was prepared by the WaterOne.ai research team. WaterOne.ai, a startup spun out of Stanford, attends hundreds of public local municipal and utility board meetings every day. Source: WaterOne.ai Data Center Watch, May 4 — June 30, 2026.
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