Seattle's City Council voted 9 to 0 on 9 and 10 June to enact the 365-day moratorium it had introduced on 30 April, making the freeze legally binding rather than provisional1. The threshold is any new load above 20 MVA (megavolt-amperes, a measure of apparent electrical capacity, here roughly the draw of 16,000 homes). The ordinance exempts Seattle's existing data centres, which may keep expanding under current rules, so the freeze bites only on new arrivals.
The enactment carries a delivery calendar the introduction did not. Seattle City Light, the municipal electric utility, must propose rate and capacity changes by 1 July, and Seattle Public Utilities must deliver a water-usage assessment by 30 October. A moratorium that names deadlines and assigns them to specific agencies is harder to let quietly expire than a blanket pause with no homework attached, because each missed date is a visible failure rather than an absence.
Seattle now joins more than 70 US cities and counties carrying bans or pauses2. Where Indiana is rural breadth with no veto point, Seattle is a major metro committing to concrete deliverables on power and water before it writes permanent rules. The two routes answer the same demand from opposite ends: one distributes refusal across many small boards, the other concentrates it in a single council willing to put dates on the page.
