Anne Arundel Stopped Taking Data Center Applications and Cut the Tax Break

Anne Arundel County, Maryland, has closed its intake window for new data center work. The County Council passed Bill 63-26 on October 5 by a 7-0 vote, and the ordinance takes effect 45 days from the date it becomes law. From that point the county will not accept any new applications of any type for proposed development of a data storage center. The bill also repeals the personal property tax assessment reduction for qualified data storage centers.

The measure started out harder. As introduced in July, Bill 63-26 would have banned new privately operated data centers outright; in September the council replaced the ban with a temporary moratorium, and all seven members asked to be listed as cosponsors. The pause runs until the earlier of January 31, 2028 or the effective date of legislation built on the recommendations of a new work group, whose report is due no later than ten months after the effective date. That group is charged with examining energy use, utility infrastructure, water resources, air quality and noise before permanent rules are written. The CCAN Action Fund counts sixteen Maryland counties and cities now operating under a data center pause or ban, covering roughly 90 percent of the state population recorded in 2020.

Work already in the pipeline keeps moving. Preliminary plans, site development plans, sketch plans, modifications and final plans filed before the effective period continue under prior law, along with associated applications submitted afterward and future phases of existing centers on adjacent or adjoining property. Hearings before the Administrative Hearing Officer and the Board of Appeals also proceed. Microsoft''s campus at Annapolis Junction Business Park is among the projects already in development; the company testified against the original ban and asked that existing campuses be allowed to continue building out.

For commercial electrical contractors in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, that split is the whole story. Permitted switchgear, feeder, busway and white-space fit-out scope inside Anne Arundel is unaffected, and multi-phase campuses can still add buildings on land they already hold. What disappears is the front end of the pipeline: greenfield sites that had not filed by the effective date have no county application to file. Electrical crews staffing county data center work will be drawing on a defined backlog rather than a growing one, and manpower planning for 2027 now depends on what the work group recommends and how fast the council acts on it.

The ordinance also binds the council itself. During the moratorium it may not introduce, consider, hear or pass legislation regulating data storage centers, except to address an acute emergency under the county charter, to form the work group, or to act on that group''s recommendations. The same bill strips out a 25-acre minimum lot size that had applied to data centers in the BWI and Fort Meade growth area, clearing the way for whatever framework replaces it.

Anne Arundel has not stopped building data centers. It has stopped adding new ones to the queue until it decides what the rules should be.