Three more entries in the local-moratorium tape, each illustrating a different sub-pattern. Penn Township MI: pure preemptive moratorium with no land sold and no developer named. The Diamond Lake Association (the local lake-property-owner organization) drove the petition; residents wanted a 1-year moratorium and the township supervisor compromised at 30 days as a procedural stopgap while the planning commission writes a longer-term ordinance — the public-record statement 'we're going to shoot for a one-year moratorium' makes the 30-day stopgap a near-certain bridge to a 1-year action. Penn Township pushes the Michigan moratorium cluster past 20 jurisdictions (Marengo Township in Calhoun County joined yesterday's tape; Penn Township is in Cass County, the southwestern corner of the state near the IN border), confirming Michigan's status as the second Midwest state with critical-mass moratorium adoption alongside Wisconsin. Washington, IN: the inverse case — a specific developer (Outrigger Industrial) brought a 250-500 MW data-center proposal to the Washington City Council in March, the council asked questions over April, the developer refused to answer, and the council on May 11 unanimously killed the deal and directed the city attorney to draft a forward-looking moratorium. The 250-500 MW load is in the hyperscale tier — comparable in size to the AWS Ohio data centers — and the unanimous-with-attorney-direction outcome is the strongest possible signal that the developer's strategy of 'we'll explain later' is dead in any small-city council. The Outrigger Industrial corporate identity is opaque (no public LinkedIn presence, no clear principal-equity disclosure, no associated hyperscaler-backed-development shell pattern), which is a thread Cliff's CRM and journal should pull on separately. Nassau County, FL: the moratorium passed first reading May 11 and the final commission vote is June 8 (a four-week procedural window matching Florida's standard county-commission second-reading practice). Nassau is contiguous with Camden County GA, which passed its own moratorium last week, and the regional pattern is forming: Camden GA (passed May 5), Glynn County GA (debating, no formal action), Nassau FL (first reading May 11, final June 8), Duval County FL / Jacksonville (no formal action, discussions reported). The Florida-Georgia coastal corridor is becoming the next regional cluster after the Wisconsin and NC clusters reached critical mass. Sheboygan WI Plan Commission also meets tonight (May 12, 5:30 PM Central) on the 1-year moratorium for data centers >10,000 sq ft, referred 7-3 by the Common Council May 4 — Sheboygan is another pure-preemptive case (no specific project proposed). Sources: WNDU ('Officials approve 30-day moratorium for data center in Penn Township'); WSBT ('Penn Township Michigan Board considers data center moratorium in Cass County'); ABC57 ('Penn Township Residents rally for a Data Center moratorium'); IPM News ('Washington city council cancels data center development, will explore moratorium'); Washington Times-Herald ('Washington City Council says no to data center'); News4Jax ('Pass the moratorium: Nassau residents press leaders to hit pause on data centers'); Seehafer News / 1330 WHBL (Sheboygan).
Primary source · WNDU / WSBT / IPM News / Washington Times-Herald / News4Jax / Seehafer News ↗
Why it matters
Three updates. (1) The 'reactive defense' moratorium pattern has fully decoupled into three sub-patterns: (a) preemptive moratorium with no live application (Penn Township MI, Sheboygan WI, Cheyenne WY's 70-pipeline framing, Marengo Township MI yesterday), (b) defensive moratorium killing a specific proposal then forward-looking (Washington IN unanimously killing Outrigger Industrial then directing the attorney to draft a moratorium), and (c) classic single-application defense (the historical April pattern, e.g., Kingsland GA's Tovey rezoning). Sub-pattern (a) is the dominant pattern of May. The implication for Cliff's de-rate calculator: the 'baseline-moratorium-eligible' geographic-feature input added yesterday is now operationally necessary — any rural county adjacent to a Midwest data-center corridor or a Mountain West cluster should be flagged regardless of whether a specific application is pending, because the preemptive pattern means the moratorium can land before any developer files. (2) Washington, Indiana's outcome is the strongest single-city signal in the small-city tape this year. A 250-500 MW data center is a tier-1 hyperscale facility (AWS Ohio's largest single-site campus is ~700 MW; Microsoft's Quincy WA flagship is ~800 MW; 250-500 MW is comparable to Meta's Eagle Mountain UT). For a hyperscale-tier developer to walk into a small Indiana city, fail to answer council questions, and lose a unanimous vote (with an attorney instruction to draft a moratorium) signals that the political ceiling on hyperscale entitlement in small Midwest cities is now near zero unless the developer brings full transparency on power-source, water-source, tax-revenue, and noise-level disclosures. The Outrigger Industrial corporate-identity opacity is also a Cliff-relevant data point — the air-permit and BTM SKUs both depend on knowing who is actually developing the facility (because the operator's environmental compliance history materially affects the air-permit approvability and the BTM economics). If Outrigger Industrial is a thin-shell entity for a hyperscaler-backed JV (the standard pattern for hyperscale site development), the disclosure-failure in Washington IN is a process failure that can be replicated. Cliff's CRM should track Outrigger Industrial as a watch entity and see where they re-emerge. (3) The Florida-Georgia coastal corridor is the next regional cluster to track. Nassau FL (June 8 final vote), Camden GA (May 5 passed), Glynn County GA (debating), and the Kingsland GA City Council May 11 vote (outcome being reported through tomorrow's morning press) together form a contiguous coastal-county pattern that mirrors the NC moratorium cluster's geographic clustering pattern (the NC tape was concentrated in piedmont counties east of Charlotte and west of the Triangle; the FL-GA tape is forming along the I-95 corridor from Jacksonville north through coastal Georgia). For Cliff's site-readiness map, add a 'FL-GA coastal corridor' regional-risk row to the regional matrix. The Nassau June 8 vote should be added to the pending-verification list as a critical near-term decision.
Related filings
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WHYY / WESA / Utility Dive / KGW / KOIN / Beaver County Radio / RTO Insider ↗
CO HB 1030 / killed 11-2
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WY / Cheyenne / first Mountain West moratorium / 70-project pipeline
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Cowboy State Daily / KGAB / Cap City News / Wyoming News / Casper Star-Tribune ↗
Box Elder referendum / LaPorte ordinance / Sheboygan / Charlotte
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CNN / KSL / WVPE / 95.3 MNC / Seehafer News / WBTV ↗