Governor Janet Mills vetoed Maine LD 307 on 24 April 2026, killing what the state legislature had passed a fortnight earlier as the first US statewide data-centre moratorium. The Maine House voted 72-65 on 29 April to override the veto, short of the two-thirds threshold needed. Hours later, Mills signed an executive order creating the Maine Data Center Advisory Council in place of the moratorium her own party had drafted.
Mills said she would have signed the bill had it carved out the $550 million Androscoggin Mill redevelopment in Jay, an 800-job construction project on a derelict pulp-mill brownfield site. The carve-out was rejected by the bill's sponsors, who treated it as the thin end of a wedge that would gut the moratorium for any project labelled economic development. The veto turned that argument into a counter-factual.
The pattern this exposes is one Good Jobs First has been tracking through 2026: state-level moratorium bills meet executive resistance because governors weigh community concerns against economic-development logic and almost always come down on the side of construction jobs. City councils, utility boards, and zoning judges face no comparable counter-pressure. Within a single calendar week of the override failure, three Northern Virginia jurisdictions, one Pacific Northwest city, one Ohio town, and one Michigan utility authority all moved against new data-centre capacity while Augusta, Maine could not. Maine's veto did not stall the moratorium movement; it pushed it to a tier the executive veto does not reach, where bans are faster, narrower, and harder to challenge than their statewide cousins.
