00:00Most places hitting the brakes on data centers call it a pause.
00:04One Kentucky county just skipped that step entirely and made it permanent, a flat.
00:10Outright ban.
00:12Passed unanimously.
00:13Before a single developer had even pitched a project there.
00:17And from a California courtroom to a 300 megawatt proposal in the New Mexico desert that.
00:24Residents found out about by accident.
00:26The line between pause and never is getting a lot thinner.
00:31We start in Woodford County, Kentucky.
00:35Where the fiscal court did something almost no local government in America has done.
00:41Instead of a moratorium.
00:43It passed a permanent ban, outlawing data centers.
00:47Landfills and large battery storage outright.
00:50The vote was unanimous.
00:52Judge executive James Kaye told the court afterward that the county has a finite, irreplaceable amount of land.
01:00And that its rolling pastures and historic horse farms are not just scenic views.
01:05They are the backbone of the local economy.
01:08What makes this striking is that no developer had even pitched a project there yet.
01:14Kaye said residents were universally opposed.
01:17So the county chose to get ahead of it rather than write rules a developer might find a loophole in.
01:23According to the National League of Cities.
01:26Only about a dozen local governments nationwide have enacted permanent bans this year.
01:33That same refusal to wait is now showing up in court.
01:37With far more expensive consequences.
01:39In Imperial County, California, a superior court judge has overturned the approval of what would have been the largest data
01:48center.
01:49Complex in the state, nearly 1 million square feet.
01:53Judge Brooks Anderholt ruled that the county prejudicially abused its discretion by approving a lot.
02:00Merger without first completing the environmental review that California law requires for the.
02:06Project as a whole.
02:08The Sierra Club's attorney called it classic segmentation.
02:12Breaking a project into small pieces and approving them one at a time to avoid scrutiny.
02:18Lawyers involved say the decision forces county planners to restart the approval process from.
02:25Scratch.
02:26The developer.
02:27Sebastian Rucci.
02:29Says he will appeal.
02:31Pointing to $12 million a year in projected tax revenue for one of California's poorest.
02:37Counties.
02:39In Ohio.
02:41A city is now effectively raising its own residents.
02:45Trenton City Council has placed a charter amendment banning data centers on the November 3rd.
02:51Ballot.
02:52But only after the Ohio Supreme Court ordered it to.
02:55Following a dispute in which the council's reading of a single word in the city charter raised the.
03:01Petition signature requirement from 128 to 820.
03:07At the same time.
03:09Trenton is trying to annex 601 acres from two neighboring townships for a $5 billion Amazon Web Services campus.
03:18Madison and St. Clair townships have both formally objected.
03:23Citing traffic and road maintenance with no written agreement in place.
03:27Butler County commissioners hold a hearing on that annexation September 15th.
03:33And here is the catch.
03:34If the land stays in the townships.
03:37The voters ban would not apply to it at all.
03:41Some communities do not get even that much warning.
03:44In Grant County, New Mexico, residents found out about a major data center proposal from a legal notice.
03:52A company called Site Layer 1, whose only listed address is an office floor in Manhattan, wants.
04:00To build a natural gas-powered facility on private land near Playa's.
04:05At the county's southern tip, the numbers in that notice are the story.
04:1032 gas-fired engines producing about 300 megawatts combined.
04:15Consuming roughly 2.3 million cubic feet of natural gas every hour.
04:21Projected emissions run to nearly 1.3 million tons of greenhouse gases a year.
04:27Comparable to 300,000 cars.
04:30Water was not addressed in the notice at all.
04:33Though experts estimate the site could draw up to 6,500 acre-feet from the Hechita Basin.
04:40A one-year moratorium goes before county commissioners September 24th.
04:46The demand driving all of this is not slowing down.
04:50It is accelerating on a scale that is.
04:53Genuinely hard to picture.
04:55Microsoft has laid out a plan to more than triple the capacity of its global data center network.
05:01Going from roughly 12 gigawatts today to more than 38 gigawatts by 2032.
05:08That is an addition of about 26 gigawatts of computing capacity in under 7 years, more.
05:16Electricity than many entire countries generate.
05:19And Microsoft is one company.
05:21The Energy Information Administration expects total U.S. electricity consumption to set records in
05:28both 2026 and 2027.
05:32Climbing past 4,300 billion kilowatt hours.
05:36Every one of the local fights in this briefing is
05:39underneath the same argument.
05:42Where those gigawatts are going to land?
05:45And who pays to deliver them?
05:48Which brings us to the timing problem facing local officials everywhere.
05:53In Lake County, Illinois, the county board approved an eight-month moratorium on data center development
06:00in unincorporated areas after receiving more than 1,200 public comments.
06:06One board member framed the vote simply.
06:09We choose our citizens.
06:10But the pause arrived after the decision that actually mattered.
06:14It does not touch the $18 billion T5 campus in Grayslake.
06:19Because the village approved that project at the municipal level, as much as 472 acres,
06:2818 buildings, roughly 10 million square feet, Grayslake has already issued the first building
06:34permit for an 800,000-square-foot facility.
06:38And construction can begin immediately.
06:41Nine residents and a community group sued in July to stop it.
06:46The developer separately suspended its own request to fill nearly 16 acres of wetlands at the
06:52site.
06:54Not every community is saying no.
06:57Some are saying yes.
06:58But strictly on their own terms in Kearney, Nebraska,
07:02The city council unanimously approved a project called Horizon, expanding an existing cryptocurrency
07:10facility into a 368-megawatt data center that will use up to 5 million gallons of water annually.
07:18What makes the approval notable is the sequence.
07:21Before voting, the council adopted 10 pages of new regulations covering water efficiency,
07:29noise limits and conditional use review, and then applied those rules to the project in front of
07:35them.
07:36The developers agreed to add sound deadening walls to address existing complaints about
07:41humming.
07:42From the current site, it is a template a lot of mid-sized cities are watching closely.
07:48Write the rules first.
07:50Approve the project against them.
07:52Instead of negotiating the rules after the concrete has already been poured.
07:58And the money behind all of this is still moving faster than the rules meant to govern it.
08:04In Festus, Missouri, the city council voted 5-2 to annex three more parcels tied to a $6 billion
08:14hyperscale campus being developed by CRG, a project already spanning more than 360 acres.
08:22The timing was not accidental.
08:24The annexation was finalized just before a new state law restricting annexations in
08:30Jefferson County took effect, locking in the city's control of the land before the window
08:36closed.
08:37Neighboring Crystal City has now sued over those same restrictions.
08:42It is a small illustration of a much larger pattern this year.
08:47Developers and the cities that want them are increasingly moving on a calendar set by pending
08:53legislation rather than by ordinary planning cycles.
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