Northampton's City Council voted unanimously to enact a yearlong moratorium on data centers, blocking new construction of server farms and related facilities across the city while a newly formed committee studies how such projects might affect local power, water and noise levels. Before reaching that unanimous vote, councilors first killed a proposed carve-out that would have let smaller operations skip the ban entirely.
A Carve-Out Dies Before the Moratorium Passes
Ward 6 Councilor Chris Stratton had proposed exempting businesses that use 250 kilowatts of electricity or less from the moratorium, arguing the broad pause could sweep up businesses running small servers that aren't really data centers in any meaningful sense. That amendment failed 7-1, with Stratton casting the lone vote in favor and At-Large Councilor Meg Robbins abstaining, according to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Stratton had defined a data center as a facility whose power is consumed by technology infrastructure for the storage, processing, management or transmission of electronic data.
Council President Rachel Maiore said Stratton's minimum-energy-use amendment might prove necessary a year from now, once the city's new select committee has had time to dig into the issue further, the Gazette reported. With the exemption off the table, the council then approved the full moratorium with no amendments attached, voting unanimously Thursday night, November 5, to enact the yearlong pause reported by The Reminder. The moratorium blocks construction of data centers and facilities designed or used to house computer servers or related technology for storing or managing electronic data for one year.
Why Councilors Wanted the Pause
Maiore said the yearlong moratorium gives the city's select committee time to research the issue and make recommendations without the pressure of an active project moving forward in the meantime, and she called the moratorium the right action for the community right now. The move follows concerns Northampton officials raised earlier this year that a data center could bring noise along with added strain on water and power utilities, as reported by MassLive.
The vote capped weeks of groundwork. The city's Planning Board and the council's Committee on Legislative Matters had both unanimously recommended the yearlong pause ahead of the council's discussion, the Gazette noted in earlier coverage, and those two bodies held a joint public hearing on the issue on October 29 before bringing their recommendation forward.
Who Will Sit on the New Select Committee
The push to form a select committee was cosponsored by Maiore along with Ward 1 Councilor Gwen Nabad and Ward 3 Councilor Laurie Loisel. Thirty residents applied for a spot on the committee, which ultimately selected five residents to serve alongside Stratton, who will represent Ward 6, and Ben Weil, the city's climate action and project administration director. Maiore said the pool of applicants reflected formidable expertise within the community.
The committee, according to the City of Northampton, is tasked with studying the impacts of commercial data centers on host communities and recommending regulations to govern their construction and operation. It will also work to define the different types of data centers the city might eventually regulate.
A Board of Health Seat Without a Formal Vote
During the meeting, Stratton suggested adding a Board of Health member to the select committee, or at least having one appear regularly before it, a position Robbins backed. Councilors did not file a formal motion to secure that membership, but they did agree that Board of Health input should be folded into the committee's work, and Maiore said she wants the Board of Health to review whatever recommendations the committee eventually produces. A state Board of Health attorney has advised municipalities that having a Board of Health representative involved is critical to data-center legislation work, per the Gazette's reporting. Northampton's own Board of Health was expected to take up data centers at its meeting Thursday, where members were set to discuss how much they could participate in the broader study, per Maiore.
Stratton's underlying worry — that the moratorium's broad language could catch businesses running their own in-house servers rather than true commercial data centers — remains unresolved for now. Under the moratorium as passed, it will fall to the city's building commissioner to decide whether a business storing its own data on-site actually qualifies as a data center under the ordinance.
Part of a Statewide Wave
Northampton is far from alone. The Gazette reported that the city joins Greenfield, Easthampton and Westfield, which have enacted similar moratoriums, while Shutesbury and Holyoke have gone further and banned data center development outright — Holyoke's City Council approved its ban by a 9-4 vote. Agawam's city councilors enacted a 270-day moratorium of their own in September, and Beverly's council and Planning Board have both backed a one-year pause, with a final council vote scheduled for November 23, Patch reported.
Statewide, the numbers are shifting fast depending on when and how they're counted. MassLive found that as of October 15, 18 Massachusetts communities had enacted or approved a data-center moratorium, ban or restriction, with at least 17 more considering one; a separate count from the same outlet put the broader figure at more than 30 communities that had either enacted restrictions or were actively discussing them. A more recent report from Banker & Tradesman described dozens of communities as having enacted moratoriums in recent months specifically to buy time to draft regulations — a dynamic playing out in Sutton, where residents recently urged officials to reject the Kraft Group's proposed 900-megawatt data center, a project that has not yet filed a formal application with the town.
Governor Maura Healey has also weighed in at the state level, issuing an executive order that regulates data centers statewide while exempting businesses using 25 megawatts or less, according to the Mass.gov announcement of the order. A separate 2028 ballot proposal would go further, setting a lower 5-megawatt threshold and requiring a two-thirds vote of local approval before any new data center or expansion could move forward in a host community, according to the Boston Globe. The same report noted that voters have favored data-center restrictions in 40 of 41 local ballot contests so far.
