HOW IT HAPPENED
Look at the facts and timeline for yourself, then decide whether the process was fair.
October 2025
The county’s own Planning Commission recommends keeping data centers inside the acreage already approved at the Eastalco site.
December 23, 2025
The Council votes 5–2 to nearly double it instead — about a thousand acres beyond what the Planning Commission recommended. Two days before Christmas, with no public comment taken on the amended ordinance. Jerry Donald and Republican Steve McKay vote no.
January 2026
Ordinance 26.01.001 takes effect, establishing a 2,600-acre Critical Digital Infrastructure Overlay Zone.
Jan-March 2026
About 300 volunteers gathered more than 21,000 signatures in 59 days: Well past the 15,000 needed to put the map on the ballot.
June 2026
The courts throw the petition out. One reason: the county charter treats an “ordinance” differently from a “law.” The other: volunteers printed the maps in black and white instead of color, to save about a thousand dollars. The judge called that fatal. Maryland’s Supreme Court agreed.
July 2026
With the referendum dead, the County Executive pauses new data center approvals by executive order, pending a state cost-benefit study.
September 2026
The county announces a $110 million community benefits package for the Adamstown campus and, in exchange, freezes that site’s zoning permanently, so no future council can revisit it.
Twenty-one thousand people asked for a vote. Nobody got one.
What Supporters Say
More than eight thousand construction jobs a year. Fifty-five million dollars already collected. As much as $215 million a year by 2036 — roughly a fifth of the county budget — which pays for things like free transit and farmland preservation.
All of that is true, and I have never pretended otherwise.
What I Continue To Say
I did not vote to ban data centers. I voted against doubling the zone before anyone had honestly measured what it costs us in water, in power, and in farmland.
Steve McKay, a Republican, voted with me, for the same reason: we still had no neutral study of the true costs
You do not get that study by rezoning first and asking later.
Why You Can Check Me On This
Voted no on the overlay expansion: one of only two on a seven-member council.
Refused to sign non-disclosure agreements with data center developers.
Published my seven reasons in the newspaper, under my own name, ten days after the vote.
Wrote the county’s riparian buffer law in 2015. Endorsed by the Sierra Club and the Maryland League of Conservation Voters.