County Data Center Task Forces: What They Produced, and What They All Missed

Since 2023, at least four U.S. counties have convened a task force, advisory group, or working group to figure out what to do about data centers, and at least three more have been structuring or debating one. One Iowa county adopted rules without convening one at all.

We read what they produced — the resolutions that created them, the scopes of work they procured, the reports they delivered. They were doing genuinely difficult work, mostly without precedent and mostly under public pressure. But the same thing went wrong in each of them, and it is not the thing people assume.

Prince George's County, Maryland: 462 pages

The Qualified Data Centers Task Force was established by council resolution in April 2025 and began work in May, charged with examining energy demand and ratepayer impact, environmental effects on air, water and woodland, and quality-of-life impacts including viewscapes and mobility.

It delivered on time. The final report ran 462 pages and carried 14 recommendations.

The substantive criticism from the development side was not that the recommendations were wrong. It was that some of them needed to be better defined. Two months later the council was still working to enact them. In July 2026, the county adopted a two-year moratorium instead.

Seven months of work, delivered on schedule, and the output still required translation before it could become code.

Champaign County, Illinois: the borrowed ordinance

Created by unanimous board vote in February 2026, with a twelve-month moratorium following in April. The task force built a draft ordinance between May and August, scheduled to go to the Environment and Land Use Committee on September 21.

They did something understandable and revealing: they used the Aurora, Illinois ordinance as their working guideline, and brought Aurora's mayor and sustainability director in by video call to walk them through it.

Aurora is a home-rule city of 180,000 people. Champaign County is unincorporated agricultural land with no home-rule authority — as the board's vice chair put it, counties without home rule cannot do anything they have not been explicitly given authority to do.

They copied across a structural mismatch. Not out of carelessness. Because there was nothing else to copy from, and one real ordinance from a nearby jurisdiction beat starting from a blank page.

Prince William County, Virginia: the honest one

Prince William went furthest in structure. After a board directive on noise in 2022 and a resolution in 2023, the county created a Data Center Ordinance Advisory Group and wrote a consultant scope of work for sealed proposals.

That scope runs seventeen tasks over seventy-four weeks — ordinance and statutory review, a best-practices literature review, plain-English outlines, two rounds of community engagement, and materials for every committee, work session and public hearing along the way. It also includes a line most readers would skim past:

Attached to that scope is the advisory group's own list of potential impacts — thirteen categories covering health, property value, public facilities, tax methodology, traffic, wildlife, water, economic growth, county services, power reliability, decommissioning and cultural resources. And attached to that is a sentence the county wrote itself:

A county published its own stakeholders' list of concerns with a note saying none of it had been verified. Not because the county was being evasive — because it was being honest. It had no method for marking that list claim by claim, so it marked the whole thing at once and moved on.

The pattern

Three bodies, three states, three different structures, and the same gap underneath all of them.

It is not effort. Prince George's produced 462 pages in seven months. Champaign ran public meetings for months.

It is not access. Every document these bodies needed is public. Ordinances, tariffs, resolutions, staff reports — all published, all free.

It is not expertise, exactly. Champaign hired outside counsel specifically to map its authority limits. Charles County, Maryland's commissioners said plainly they needed subject matter experts on environmental, energy, infrastructure and economic questions.

The gap is that nobody was assigned to distinguish an established fact from a circulated claim — and to do it identically regardless of who brought it into the room.

A resident's figure about water consumption and an industry association's figure about job creation enter the same record, on the same page, carrying the same apparent weight. A statement in a press release and a provision in an adopted ordinance look alike in a summary. A draft recommendation and an enacted standard become indistinguishable three months later when someone cites "what the county decided."

Then the body produces a report. Then someone challenges a standard that rests on an unverified number. And the county discovers the problem at the worst possible moment.

What that function looks like

It is not complicated, which is part of why it gets skipped.

Every factual claim entering the record carries two marks. How it was obtained: verified in the original instrument; reported by an identified source with direct knowledge; derived by a calculation that is shown; or unverified and circulating. And its current state: settled, disputed, or open.

Four rules follow. No unmarked claim enters a finding. Unverified claims may be recorded but may not support a recommendation. Marking is source-neutral — an industry figure and a neighborhood figure are marked by how they were obtained, never by who supplied them. And disputes are described rather than resolved by preference.

The effect is not to exclude anyone. Anyone may put any claim in front of the body. What they cannot do is have it treated as established without saying where it came from.

For the county, the payoff is narrow and practical: a recommendation supported entirely by verified, settled findings survives a challenge. One resting on unmarked public testimony does not.

We have published the full method as A Framework for Public Deliberation on Data Center Siting, with model charter clauses a county can adapt directly. It is free to adopt, modify, or reproduce.

Why this is worth saying now

Maryland alone has several counties in some phase of this, and counties in Illinois, Virginia, South Dakota, Iowa and Oregon have acted or are acting. Most of these bodies were convened reactively — after a specific project, after a packed hearing, after a process that made residents feel ambushed.

A few are not. Washington County, Oregon has no pending data center application in its unincorporated area. That is a rare and valuable position: a county can set thresholds without a specific project standing behind the number, and nobody testifying is defending their own property line.

Either way, the same question applies. When that body issues findings, will anyone be able to tell which of them rest on something checkable?

A task force without that function produces testimony. With it, it produces a record.

Calyx Intelligence maintains a public register of data center siting, power, and public finance provisions — each entry marked for whether it was read in the original document and whether it reconciles. register.calyxos.ai