Coweta County GA / 180-day ban / 5 projects vested-rights exempt / fourth exemption pathway

Coweta County is southwest of Atlanta and is the second metro-Atlanta county after DeKalb to pause data centers. The vote was unanimous. Scope is data centers only (no battery storage bundling), but the pause is broad within that scope — it halts new permits, rezonings, conditional uses, variances, and the public hearings that would let any of those move forward. The pattern-relevant detail is the carve-out. Five data center projects already in the Coweta pipeline are exempt from the moratorium, not because the county chose to exempt them, but because Georgia vested-rights law automatically grandfathers projects that have reached a certain point in the entitlement process. The county had no discretion on those five — the statute does the exempting. That is a fundamentally different exemption mechanism than the ones already tracked in the corpus. Boone County Indiana's Meta LEAP carve-out worked through municipal annexation (the parcel left county jurisdiction). Nashville's EO 59 worked through state preemption (state law blocked a clean ban so the executive used other levers). Box Elder Utah's MIDA carve-out worked through a state special authority that bypasses county land use entirely. Coweta's exemption works through statutory vested-rights doctrine, which exists in every state but with very different thresholds for when a project becomes vested.

Primary source · Atlanta Journal-Constitution ↗