Plain-English framing: a 'moratorium' is a city or county council voting to stop accepting, reviewing, or approving any new data-center applications for a fixed window (here ranging 30 days to 12 months) while staff study water, power, and noise impacts. It is not a permanent ban — it is a pause button. The reason it matters for site readiness is that a moratorium can kill a deal's timeline overnight even if the project would have eventually been approved. The new fact this week is geographic spread. Earlier coverage framed this as a Mountain West phenomenon (Denver, Cheyenne, Reno). It is now clearly national and cross-partisan: a college town in central Illinois (Normal), a rural Illinois county (Logan), a Minneapolis suburb (Inver Grove Heights), a Nevada city doing it twice (Reno), and a deep-blue Pacific Northwest city (Seattle) all moved in one week. The Reno detail is the most operationally telling: a city that already paused conditional-use permits on May 14 came back five days later and added a separate 30-day pause specifically on construction permits. That is a council closing a perceived loophole — making sure projects that already had use permits couldn't just proceed to break ground. Expect copycats to pass layered moratoria, not single ones. Sources: WGLT 'Normal to vote on 6-month data center moratorium'; Fox Illinois / WAND 'Logan County passes 12-month data center moratorium'; WGLT 'Bloomington City Council members signal support for 6-month data center moratorium'; CBS Minnesota 'Inver Grove Heights officials approve 1-year moratorium on data centers'; Hoodline 'Inver Grove Heights Pauses Data Center Plans After 3-2 Vote'; KUNR 'Reno City Council approves 30 day moratorium on construction permits for data centers'; Seattle City Council Blog 'Councilmembers introducing moratorium on data centers in Seattle'.
Primary source · WGLT / WAND / CBS Minnesota / KUNR / Seattle City Council ↗
Why it matters
For Cliff's site-readiness map this changes the base rate, not just the data points. If you assumed moratorium risk clustered in a few regions, a site in a 'safe' state looked clean. The correct read now: any U.S. jurisdiction can pass a pause on roughly 30 days notice once a developer's interest becomes public, regardless of region or politics. That argues for two product features. (1) A 'moratorium velocity' field per jurisdiction — not just 'is there a moratorium today' but 'how fast could one appear,' driven by whether neighbors recently passed one (Logan County → Bloomington/Normal is a clear contagion chain in one Illinois media market). (2) A layered-moratorium flag: Reno proves a single pause is no longer the worst case — a council can stack a use-permit pause and a construction-permit pause to close loopholes, so 'we already have our use permit' is not a safe-harbor assumption. The Inver Grove Heights case also names the developer (Fortress Investment Group) and a specific parcel (the former Travel Tags site), which is the kind of structured fact — developer + parcel + vote margin + duration — the approval-outcomes corpus should capture for every one of these.
Related filings
Minneapolis 5-month moratorium / passed Jun 25 / 350k sqft + downtown geographic exemption (I-35W / I-94 / Plymouth Ave / Mississippi River) / first size+geo combined exemption mechanic / Inver Grove Heights 1-year moratorium / passed 3-2 Jun 26 / QLevr 54k sqft Carmen Ave / $150M damages letter Iverson Rivers Law Firm / EAW petition filed Jun 25 / second large-damages-threat moratorium-still-passed / MN becomes 4th state cluster / MISO show-cause territory
Plain-English background. Minnesota sits in MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) — the same RTO that just received FERC's June 18 show-cause order on large-load tariff design. Minnesota's data center growth had been more measured than...
Hood County / rescinded / $100M lawsuit / Dillon's Rule / first reversal in US
Plain-English framing. Hood County sits about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, on Lake Granbury. It's a rural county with a small planning staff and limited industrial base. The county was the first in Texas to enact a data-center moratorium — passed quietly...
Texas Tribune / KRGV / Salon ↗
Seattle 9-0 emergency / 20 MVA threshold / Tier 1 tech city
Plain-English framing. The Seattle moratorium freezes any new data center at or above 20 MVA (which is roughly 16 MW of real load using typical 0.8 power factor). The roughly 30 existing co-location facilities in the city are grandfathered and each can expand...
Seattle City Council official blog ↗
NV Reno / 6-1 vote / first Nevada moratorium / June 1 final
Reno is the second Mountain West city to enact a data-center moratorium this month (after Denver's May 18 vote, which is happening today), and the first in Nevada to do so at any level of government. The 6-1 vote at a 7-hour special meeting is one of the...