The data-center brakes are coming from city hall — and now from Richmond's budget

What changed (week of June 15–20, 2026): In a single week, three more local governments moved to slam the door on data centers, and Virginia lawmakers — who can't ban them — moved instead to tax them. Read together, the two stories are the same story: the cheap, frictionless siting environment that defined the last data-center build-out is closing, and the friction is now showing up in both zoning codes and state budgets.

The moratorium wave reached three new places this week

• Versailles, Kentucky (Woodford County) enacted a moratorium on data centers running "through 2026." (lex18.com, via SitePath's news index, source-quality 0.85, published 2026-06-18.)
• Superior, Wisconsin passed a data-center moratorium, joining what its coverage calls a "growing number of Wisconsin communities" doing the same. (wpr.org, 0.70, 2026-06-17.)
• Winnebago County, Wisconsin is pursuing a 12-month data-center moratorium. (duke.fm, 0.85, 2026-06-17.)
• A Kentucky roundup confirms the pattern is statewide there: "Some Kentucky counties and cities are hitting pause on data centers." (highlandcountypress.com, 0.70, 2026-06-18.)

None of these are in SitePath's core PJM/Mid-Atlantic footprint, but the trend is exactly what our data-center risk layer exists to catch. For context, SitePath's SitePath's data-center dataset already tracks a dozen or more active data-center moratoria nationally (plus several at township level) as of the last feed snapshot — this week adds at least two newly enacted local moratoria (Versailles, Superior) and one advancing (Winnebago Co.) that are not yet reflected in the structured feed.

Virginia can't ban — so it's reaching for the tax code

Virginia is the most important data-center market in the country, and its localities operate under a different constraint than Kentucky's or Wisconsin's. Under HB 711 / SB 347 — the statewide solar/BESS siting-preemption law already in SitePath's SitePath's regulatory tracker (enacted 2026-04-13, effective July 1, 2026) — the state has shown it will preempt outright local bans on favored infrastructure. So the pressure valve in Virginia is fiscal, not prohibitive:

• The Virginia Senate's budget proposal keeps the data-center sales-tax exemption but adds a new tax on the industry. (wydaily.com, 0.85, 2026-06-19.) That is a notable pivot: preserve the incentive that anchors the cluster, but start extracting revenue from it.
• A separate Senate impact-fee proposal aimed at data centers "meets pushback" as budget negotiations continue. (29news.com, 0.85, 2026-06-18.)
• Meanwhile, energy advocates are urging lawmakers to slow the timeline on the Dominion–NextEra merger (29news.com, 0.85, 2026-06-18) — a utility-market move that bears directly on who controls generation and interconnection in the territory where most of these data centers want to plug in.

There is also a solar-side signal in the same week: Virginia lawmakers, with Rep. Spanberger, celebrated the signing of an agrivoltaics bill at a Loudoun County farm event (rappnews.com, 0.70, and wtop.com, 0.85, both 2026-06-18) — a state nudge toward co-locating solar with active farmland, the politically durable middle path between farmland-preservation opposition and clean-energy targets.

Why it matters for siting

The combined message to developers: approval risk is migrating upstream. A year ago the binding constraint was local zoning. Now it is (1) a thickening patchwork of local moratoria in secondary markets, and (2) in the premier market, a state fiscal regime that keeps you in but raises your cost of staying. For SitePath's grading model, that argues for treating "no moratorium on the books" as necessary-but-not-sufficient — a county can stay open to data centers while the state quietly reprices the whole asset class. The Dominion–NextEra item is the wildcard: a merger that reshapes generation control in PJM's biggest load zone would ripple through interconnection queues and co-location economics far beyond any single county vote.