Camden County, Georgia enacted a 9-month data-centre moratorium on Tuesday 5 May, the first local pause in a state operators had treated as a clean political runway 1. Normal, Illinois voted on a 6-month pause on Friday 15 May. Denver votes Monday 18 May on a one-year moratorium that would take effect three days later if approved. Seattle's Parks and City Light Committee and Land Use and Sustainability Committee both meet on Wednesday 20 May to vote on the 365-day freeze introduced on 30 April after City Light received 369 MW of new connection requests . Minneapolis votes Thursday 21 May, alongside Minnesota's HF 4888 statewide pause. South Dakota's SB 135, which authorises local governments to ban data-centre construction outright, has already passed.
The vote calendar lands two weeks after Maine Governor Janet Mills vetoed LD 307 and the House sustained the veto on Wednesday 29 April . The veto did not slow the movement; it relocated it to a jurisdictional layer where no single industry lobbying campaign can contain it. Good Jobs First tracks 11 active state bills and dozens of enacted local pauses; the datacenterbans.com tracker now updates weekly. The South Dakota authorisation model is the most consequential of the lot: a state legislature voluntarily ceding the right to pre-empt local bans converts every county hearing into a potentially binding moratorium vote.
The industry's communications case rests on the job-creation argument used in Camden County and lost. A commissioned hyperscale campus typically employs a few dozen staff, a figure that maps poorly onto the construction-jobs framing that builds local political support for refineries or auto plants. Lobbying capacity built to contest one state house at a time now has to run dozens of city-council fights in parallel, with the tax-abatement case making a weaker showing at municipal scale than under a state-level subsidy umbrella. The 18-21 May results will signal whether Camden County is the lead indicator or the outlier.
