La Crosse County WI / 26-2 vote / 18-month pause / study committee bundled / MISO territory

La Crosse County sits in western Wisconsin along the Mississippi River. The Board of Supervisors is 28 members; two were absent, so 28 effective votes were cast and 26 of them were yes. That is a 93% margin among voting members. The ordinance has two structural features that are different from the other moratoriums in the streak: • Duration: 18 months, versus the 6-month (180-day) duration that has become the modal county pause in 2026. Most county-level moratoriums are written to expire in time for the next budget cycle so they have to be affirmatively renewed. An 18-month pause skips that natural review window. • Study mechanism: the ordinance simultaneously charters a special committee to study environmental and economic impacts. That bundles the pause with a structured fact-finding process — when the committee reports, the County Board has a defensible factual record to either let the moratorium expire or write a permanent ordinance. The combination — 18 months plus an explicit study committee — looks like the template a jurisdiction would use if it does not want the moratorium to be a stopgap but rather the prelude to a permanent zoning regime. La Crosse County is in MISO territory (Midwest Independent System Operator), which is one of the six RTOs hit with yesterday's FERC show-cause order. The state-vs-local layering means MISO is being asked to defend its large-load tariff at the federal level while one of its counties pauses any new data centers from being approved into that tariff regime for 18 months.

Primary source · WXOW La Crosse ↗