Illustration by Lexi Ocampo

CORRECTION: In November 2025, District 5 Councilmember Liz Sheehan placed an evaluation of Lexington’s rules and regulations related to data centers into committee, not the moratorium on data centers.

The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government Council unanimously passed a moratorium to pause data center advancement after a developer bought property in the city.

The moratorium resolution, introduced by District 5 Councilmember Liz Sheehan, contains several temporary bans on certain actions, including the acceptance of applications for zoning changes for the express purpose of creating a data center and the acceptance of development plans for data centers in any zone within Fayette County.

According to the resolution, the purpose of the moratorium is to give LFUCG sufficient time to study recommended Zoning Ordinance Text Amendments, as well as time to review research and comments from residents about data centers.

The moratorium became effective after passing at the Tuesday, June 9, Council meeting, and will remain in place until October 31, 2026.

The LFUCG Council also passed a second resolution Tuesday that directs the Planning Commission to create amendments in the city’s Zoning Ordinance to regulate data centers.

Sheehan said Council called a special meeting for a public hearing on July 30, 2026, regarding data center legislation language, and encouraged community members to follow the process and timeline for action regarding data centers in the city.

Although the resolutions came days after DartPoints, a data center developer, bought Lexmark’s Lexington property, Sheehan said the moratorium had been many months in the making.

Sheehan initially proposed rules and regulations related to data centers to the Council’s General Government and Planning Committee in November 2025, and said the process was “sped up” after council heard the community’s concerns about the DartPoints sale.

“We all, even Council, learned about that property sale at the Lexmark property at the same time as the public,” Sheehan said, “and that is when we started hearing more from the public about concerns around data centers.”

Small-scale data centers have operated in the community for years, according to Sheehan, who said hyperscale data centers raise new concerns.

Some concerns mentioned in the moratorium included potential environmental impacts, “nuisances” created by data centers and the effects such developments could have on residential energy costs.

District 4 Councilmember Emma Curtis said small-scale data centers have not proven to create environmental and utility cost issues beyond what residents have deemed reasonable.

“What DartPoints had hoped to do was to purchase that (Lexmark) property with the goal of expanding the data center capacity into parts of the property that were not previously functioning as such,” Curtis said, “and it sent off all sorts of red flags for us.”

According to Curtis, the Council’s unanimous decision to pass both resolutions Tuesday shows that the issue “transcends age, ZIP code, gender, religion, which political party you belong to,” and that the discussions had amongst Council members regarding data centers were some of the easiest she has had while on Council.

Passing the resolutions also speaks to the “failure” of the state legislature to pass data center regulations in the last General Assembly session, she said.

“Even though there had been discussions of that this legislative session, they dropped the ball, they couldn’t get anything over the finish line,” Curtis said. “That leaves local government as the last line of defense for communities across the Commonwealth.”

Curtis called the community’s opposition to data center development in Lexington an “overwhelming consensus,” and said she had not heard from anyone who supported the possibility of a large-scale data center.

“These massive data centers, you know, they don’t help communities, and in many cases they quite literally kill communities,” Curtis said. “So I’m hoping that here we can have a community that kills data centers.”