The Pause Is Over. The Ban Is Here.

Picture the meeting. Cumberland, Rhode Island, a Wednesday night in September, item 8a. The public hearing opens at eight o'clock and closes twelve minutes later. What passes in those twelve minutes is not a six-month pause to study the question. It is Ordinance 26-22, which adds "Data Centers" to the list of uses prohibited in every zoning district in town, with no sunset date. Six votes to one.

Nobody had proposed a data center in Cumberland.

That is the story of the week of September 14, and it is a different story from the one the industry has been telling itself. For two years the local response to data centers has been the moratorium: a pause, a study, an ordinance eventually. This month, in three towns on three coasts, the pause got skipped.

Three towns, one week, no sunset

Cumberland, Rhode Island, September 16. The town's own planning memo, dated August 5, describes the ordinance as "immediate, proactive action" and cites national trends and a Meta facility in Newton County, Georgia, rather than anything planned in Cumberland. The text is simple: a facility counts as a data center if more than a quarter of its floor area is server and computing infrastructure, or if the building official finds housing servers is its primary purpose, and such a facility is prohibited everywhere in town. (Council packet with ordinance text and staff memos; Uprise RI on the 6–1 vote)

Raritan Township, New Jersey, September 15. Ordinance 26-32 was introduced on September 1 and adopted two weeks later. It works through definitions rather than a prohibition clause: it adds "Data Center" and "Accessory Server Room" to the township's land development code so that the first is a use no district permits and the second is the only thing a business may still build. Local radio reported the accessory exemption as the lesser of ten percent of floor area or 2,000 square feet; the codified text had not been posted when this was written, so that figure rests on the reporting. (Township Clerk's adoption notice; WRNJ Radio)

Calexico, California, September 16. This is the one that tells you the pause was a conscious choice to skip. On June 3 the council asked staff to explore a moratorium. On July 1 staff came back recommending the standard California tool, an urgency interim ordinance under Government Code section 65858. The council declined it and directed staff to write a permanent amendment instead. The result, adopted on second reading September 16 as a new Article XII of Chapter 17.11, reads: "Data Centers are prohibited in every zoning district within the city." Accessory server rooms incidental to a permitted use are exempt; a server room unrelated to the principal use is itself a violation, and a violation is a misdemeanor and a public nuisance. It takes effect thirty days after adoption. (Staff report and ordinance text, agenda item 13; Beyond Borders News)

Three permanent bans. Three towns with, as far as any reviewed document or report shows, no data-center application pending in them.

The town with an actual project said no to the pause

Now go to Massena, New York, the same Wednesday, 4:30 in the afternoon. More than 99 people are in Room 30 of the town hall for a public hearing that runs an hour and sixteen minutes. The subject is a proposed six-month moratorium on data-center development, drafted because, in the words of its own findings, the town has no zoning standard for data centers and "multiple applications" are "pending or anticipated." One of them is real: North Country Collocation Services wants a closed-loop-cooled facility near the former Alcoa East site on the St. Lawrence River, and its people are in the room.

The moratorium fails, three votes to two. Council members Raymond Lancto and Kristy Baker vote for the pause; Sam Carbone, Adrian Taraska and Jared Hollander vote against it. (Town Board minutes with roll call; the rejected draft local law; North Country Public Radio)

Hold those four votes side by side. The three towns with nothing on the table went permanent. The one town with a project, a hearing room full of neighbors and a developer at the back of the room voted to keep the door open. That inversion is the finding.

Counties restrictingnonefewersomemoremostOne restricting county

County-level records only, so a township or city moratorium inside an otherwise permissive county does not appear. Read the map as a floor.

SitePath data-center county records, read 25 September 2026.

Why the ban is replacing the pause

A moratorium is a promise to write rules. It buys time, and it obliges the town to spend that time on a study, hearings and an ordinance that eventually says where a data center may go. Cumberland and Raritan went straight to the end of that sequence and wrote "nowhere." Calexico's council was handed the interim tool by its own staff and declined it.

Two things make this the cheaper choice for a town without a project. First, there is no applicant to argue takings or vested rights, so the legal exposure of a flat prohibition is low. Second, the ordinance can be written entirely from other towns' fights. Cumberland's memo cites Georgia. None of the three had to describe a local site, a local substation or a local water supply, because there was none to describe.

Massena had to. When there is a named project, a named site and a hearing full of people who work nearby, "nowhere" stops being free. That is why the pause failed there, and it is why the permanent bans are appearing in the towns that have never been asked.

What this means if you're siting a data center

Screen the towns that have never been asked. Your risk map probably highlights the jurisdictions where a fight is under way. The bans this month came from places with no fight at all, adopted, in one case after a twelve-minute hearing, on the strength of national headlines. A town with no data-center record is not a safe town; it is an undecided one, and this month it is deciding in advance.

Read the definition, not the headline. All three ordinances turn on a definition and an accessory-use carve-out: a quarter of floor area in Cumberland, a reported ten percent or 2,000 square feet in Raritan, "incidental and subordinate to a permitted principal use" in Calexico. Those clauses decide whether a manufacturer's server room, a hospital's records floor or an edge node is legal. They were written in weeks.

Show up before the study, because there may not be one. The moratorium used to give you a window: six months to make the case for standards instead of a prohibition. Calexico's council closed that window on purpose. If a town near your site is "exploring" data-center rules, the exploration may end in a ban with no interim step, and the only hearing you get is the one on the ban itself.

What this analysis does not tell you

It does not tell you how Calexico's council voted; the local paper that reported the tally could not be read by the tools used here and the staff report does not record it, so no count is given. It does not give Raritan Township's roll call or the exact wording of its exemption, because the township had posted the adoption notice but not the codified text. It does not settle the size of the Massena project, which one outlet reported at 400 megawatts and another at 635; no filing from the developer was reviewed. It cannot say whether any of the three towns had a quiet inquiry from a developer that never became an application; "no project" here means none reported and none referenced in the towns' own documents. And the map above counts counties, not towns, so none of these three bans appears on it. In several states that is exactly where the restriction now lives, and the map should be read as a floor.