Larimer CO / preemptive / public-comment closes today / Aug 25 effective

Plain-English framing. Larimer County sits north of Boulder and Denver and contains Fort Collins (Colorado State University, where Aspen Aerogels was founded) and Loveland. The county is the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park and historically not a data center destination. The Public Service Company of Colorado (Xcel Energy) serves most of it. Larimer's January 27 moratorium was preemptive — there are no data centers proposed today — and explicitly written as a 'develop the rules before anyone applies' framework, not a reactive freeze. The county published a 14-question public survey in April and accepted comments through today, June 12. The county's stated focus is on water consumption (Colorado is a Prior Appropriation water-rights state, where every gallon for cooling has to be sourced from a specific senior or junior water right) and on noise. The land-use code today contains zero data center references. Staff plan to use the next 11 weeks to draft regulations and bring them to the Board of County Commissioners before the August 25 moratorium expiration. Colorado is the second state (after Washington and parallel to Oregon) where the regulation conversation is happening at the *county* level rather than the state level. SB26-102 (the Colorado state-level large-load data center bill) is sitting in the legislature but did not advance in this session. So the county-by-county map matters a lot — Larimer, Weld, Adams, and Arapahoe counties are all running parallel rule-making processes, and the rules can diverge significantly from one county to the next.

Primary source · Larimer County Planning / Rocky Mountain Real Estate Law / engage.larimer.gov ↗