Durham County’s Board of Commissioners votes on a data center moratorium on Monday. Here is what is actually in front of them, what it leaves open, and how to get three minutes at the microphone.

A note on who is speaking: I am not one of the organizers. I am Daniel Aguilar, and I am sharing this to put a spotlight on the issue. The organizing is the work of the Stop Data Centers in Durham Coalition — 29 cosponsoring organizations, including Community Land and Power, Clean Water for North Carolina, and UE Local 150, NC Public Service Workers Union. The People’s Table runs the mutual-aid drive at the rally.

Ask these three

Three minutes is enough for exactly one thing: putting a question on the record that the board cannot answer with an opinion. Each of these requires a fact, a commitment, or an admission — and each comes from a gap in the county’s own documents, not from an outside position. That is what makes them hard to deflect.

1. The county’s memo says at least two projects under 100,000 square feet are close to submitting applications. What are they, where are they, and what will they draw?
   Evidence: supplemental memo — the sentence itself · Aug 3 work session (county video library)
2. Does the 100,000 square foot cap apply per building or per project? Section 2 defines a covered use as possibly a group of buildings.
   Evidence: ordinance §§ 2 and 4 · New Hill: four buildings of 200,000 sq ft each, Apex (WUNC)
3. What analysis supports the finding that sub-threshold projects will have minimal impact on public infrastructure?
   Evidence: the “minimal impact” assertion · Raleigh petition — the 12 MW comparison · Durham reservoir levels, updated daily · U.S. Drought Monitor

To speak remotely you must email clerk@dconc.gov or call (919) 560-0025 with your full name and address by 2:00 p.m. Sunday, August 23. The coalition suggests the subject line “Public Comment 8/24.” To speak in person, sign-up runs 6:30 to 7:00 p.m. on the night — fill out a Public Comments form, hand it to the Clerk, and mark it for item 26-0437.

Take the three questions with you — select and copy:

1. The county's memo says at least two projects under 100,000 square feet are close to submitting applications. What are they, where are they, and what will they draw?
2. Does the 100,000 square foot cap apply per building or per project? Section 2 defines a covered use as possibly a group of buildings.
3. What analysis supports the finding that sub-threshold projects will have minimal impact on public infrastructure?
Durham County BOCC — Monday, August 24, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
200 E. Main Street, Durham — item 26-0437

What is being voted on

County staff recommend a nine-month moratorium on accepting and processing applications for new or expanded data centers, running from August 25, 2026 to May 18, 2027. It ends earlier if the board adopts new development standards first, and it can be extended.

The ordinance is drafted for the board to adopt it the same night. Its recitals already say the hearing was held on August 24, and it closes “Adopted, this the 24th day of August, 2026.” The board could still defer.

It reaches site plan approvals, special use permits, and building permits throughout unincorporated Durham County. Covered uses include data centers, data processing facilities, cryptocurrency mining, and — named explicitly — artificial intelligence computing facilities.

The exemption

data centers covered under section 2 with a maximum size of 100,000 square feet that utilizes a closed-loop cooling system or other cooling technology to achieve equivalent or greater reduction in potable water consumption and relies exclusively on non-diesel backup generation

Ordinance § 4, posted August 20, 2026

The expansion carve-out was tightened too. The August 3 draft left a blank; the final text reads “100,000 square feet in total space, inclusive of the expansion,” which means an existing facility cannot grow repeatedly in sub-threshold increments.

Staff considered setting the threshold by electricity use instead and rejected it: the County “does not have the statutory authority to regulate electricity usage and does not have access to such information.”

The thing that is not in the news coverage

The County has been made aware that there are at least two projects under 100,000 square feet, that are close to submitting development applications.

Durham County supplemental memo, August 24, 2026

The exemption is not theoretical. Two projects are already lined up to use it. They are unnamed, unlocated, and undescribed beyond their size.

“Loophole-free” is the coalition’s defining phrase for this fight. The Stop Data Centers in Durham Coalition — 29 cosponsoring organizations — is not asking the board for a better-calibrated exemption. It is asking for none. The questions above are not an argument for tuning the number. They are a way of establishing, on the record, how much the carve-out actually lets through.

Pass a moratorium without loopholes and listen to your constituents.

A complete moratorium with no carve-outs. Putting carve-outs into it undermines the point of having one.

Leslie St Dre · Community Land and Power

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What 100,000 square feet actually is

Drawn to scale — every bar uses the same 25,000 sq ft per 30 px. Radius DC Raleigh 1’s square footage and three-story height come from its Raleigh annexation petition (AX-009-26); the 300,000 sq ft figure is that footprint multiplied by three stories, not a published number. New Hill Digital Campus near Apex, withdrawn in March, was proposed as four buildings of 200,000 sq ft each — the four-building case is not hypothetical. Durham County has published no power or floor-area analysis for any project.

A data center at 99,000 square feet is not a small building — roughly 1.7 football fields of floor area, or about half a Walmart Supercenter. The nearest real comparison is 25 miles away: a roughly 100,000 square foot project proposed in Southeast Raleigh, rated at 12 megawatts, whose annexation petition was withdrawn on August 15 after hundreds of residents signed up to speak against it.

But that comparison only holds if you know what is being measured, and the ordinance never says. Radius DC Raleigh 1 was ~100,000 square feet and three stories. Read as a footprint, that is roughly 300,000 square feet of building — three times past the line. The same number, two readings, opposite outcomes. That question belongs on the record alongside the three above.

The water

Photo credit: City of Durham

On June 15, 2026, Durham skipped Stage 1 entirely and imposed Stage 2 mandatory water restrictions, banning all spray and in-ground irrigation with city water, when Lake Michie dropped to roughly 40% capacity — about 100 days of supply.

Statewide the drought has genuinely eased since. Exceptional drought has fallen from 3.48% of North Carolina in May to 0.33% as of the August 18 U.S. Drought Monitor.

Photo credit: U.S. Drought Monitor (USDA / NDMC / NOAA), author David Mocko, NASA/GSFC/SSAI

Durham’s reservoirs have not recovered with it. From the city’s own Lake Levels page, dated August 19: Lake Michie stood at 333.20 feet against a full pool of 341.00 — 7.80 feet below full. Little River Reservoir stood at 342.50 against 355.00 — 12.50 feet below.

Lake Michie was at 334.54 feet on August 9. Ten days later it was at 333.20. It went down.

Raleigh has lifted its restrictions. Durham and Chatham County have not. To exit Stage 2, Durham requires a 95% probability of reaching 95% full. Nothing in the current numbers approaches that.

The conditions survived — and that is not the same as enough

The August 3 draft’s closed-loop-cooling and non-diesel-backup requirements did survive into the final ordinance. That is worth knowing. It is not a reason to stop asking.

There are natural gas turbines. That is still air pollution for our communities… closed-loop cooling systems often use PFAS, right? … Those exemptions are not sufficient… to protect us.

Steph Gans · Clean Water for North Carolina (X: @CleanWaterforNC)

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Non-diesel is not no-emissions — it generally means gas turbines. Closed-loop cooling is not automatically clean water; the coolant chemistry is its own question.

What the neighbors did

Photo credit: Durham Workers Assembly

Greensboro drew the line in megawatts. The city’s moratorium covers facilities “with an electrical power demand exceeding 10 megawatts,” running to February 14, 2027. Council voted 9–0 on August 3, less than two weeks after voting 5–4 against a moratorium. Residents had asked for 32 months; they got 180 days.

Photo credit: FOX8 WGHP

Durham County says it “does not have the statutory authority to regulate electricity usage.” Both are Chapter 160D jurisdictions. There may be a real distinction — Greensboro’s threshold is a definitional trigger for which applications pause, not a regulation of consumption. That is a question worth asking, not a charge to level.

Randolph County already wrote standards, adopted unanimously on August 3 after a nearly three-hour packed hearing, with no data center having ever applied there.

• A 1,000-foot impact study radius around outdoor equipment — double the 500-foot radius in the pending state bill
• A pre-construction sound study sealed by a licensed acoustic engineer, including narrow-band frequency and tonal analysis
• Closed-loop cooling required
• Conditional use zoning for data centers

Durham’s own ordinance commits staff to “review how other local governments in North Carolina regulate Covered Uses.” The hook is already in the text.

Industry marketing language should not be what guides our county commissioners’ decision-making. Polarities like whether a data center is or is not ‘hyperscale’ distracts from the main issues.

Stop Data Centers in Durham Coalition

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Where this guide uses “Enterprise” and “Edge,” it is quoting the county’s own stated rationale for the carve-out — not adopting the frame.

Photo credit: UE Local 150, NC Public Service Workers Union

Photo credit: Terri (@puente6of10) · base map © 2005 digital-topo-maps.com

Four things that are not true

If someone at the podium overstates, it gets fixed in the room — and everyone who agreed with them looks worse for it.

• “The state is about to take this power away, so act now.” False. Senate Bill 730 says the opposite in plain terms: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit, limit, or otherwise supersede existing local zoning authority.” A proposal to ban local moratoriums was floated this session and rejected.
• “A hyperscale data center is coming to Durham.” Not that anyone has named. When the City Council passed its moratorium in May, staff said there were no current plans for a large-scale data center. The honest framing is proactive: acting before a proposal arrives.
• “A 100 MW data center uses as much water as 2,600 households, according to the IEA.” The IEA did not say that. It said about 2 million liters a day — roughly 6,500 households — with over 60% used off-site at the power plants supplying its electricity. The 2,600 figure is the Congressional Research Service’s calculation of the on-site share only.
• “Apex beat their data center.” Partly. Natelli Investments withdrew its applications for New Hill Digital Campus — up to 300 MW — on March 5, 2026, but withdrew the applications, not its interest in the land.

The legal ground

Moratoriums are legal in North Carolina. N.C.G.S. § 160D-107 expressly authorizes them and tells the county what its ordinance must say: the problems that make it necessary, which approvals are affected, an express termination date with a justification for the length, and the actions the county will take during the pause. There is no fixed maximum length in state law.

What the county cannot do: reach projects that already hold valid development approvals, complete applications filed before the hearing was called, or projects with substantial good-faith expenditures under prior valid approvals. Those exemptions are statutory and the board cannot waive them.

Eco TIP West LLC v. Chatham County, filed April 23, 2026, is the live challenge to a North Carolina data center moratorium. The developer says it spent over $11 million toward an approximately 750 MW project and received a county zoning permit before Chatham’s moratorium passed. As of August 21, 2026 there has been no ruling, no injunction, and no reported settlement. Chatham’s moratorium is still in force.

How to speak on August 24

Two cautions. The monthly “Citizen Comments” period is a different thing from this public hearing — sign up for item 26-0437. And check the posted agenda before you go; items can be renumbered or pulled.

Your commissioners: Chair Michael “Mike” Lee · Vice Chair Nida Allam · Michelle Burton · Wendy Jacobs · Stephen Valentine.

If you only remember one thing

You will have about three minutes. The board has allotted 90 minutes to this item. For scale: Raleigh gave the Jones Sausage Road hearing 30 minutes and capped it at 30 speakers.

Do not spend your three minutes on national statistics. Spend them on what the ordinance leaves open — the three questions at the top of this page. Then sit down. Those questions are on the record, and they have to be answered.

The closed-loop cooling and non-diesel backup conditions did survive into the final text. That is worth knowing — and it is not the same as their being enough. The coalition is asking for a moratorium without loopholes. That is the ask.

When commissioners place the voices, concerns, and health of constituents after the profit-making of an industry, they show us where their allegiances lie, and we won’t forget.

Stop Data Centers in Durham Coalition

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How this was made (mistakes and all)

Researched and written by Danny Aguilar with Claude. Every factual claim was checked against primary sources — the county’s Legistar records, the ordinance texts, the statute, the bill text, the Raleigh annexation file, Durham’s own lake readings, and the IEA report itself — across seven independent verification passes. Where a claim came from news coverage rather than a primary document, the source is named.

The Edgecombe County photograph is published at the resolution it was posted at, deliberately un-enhanced. We ran it through an AI upscaler to sharpen it and the upscaler rewrote the protest signs — “DON’T SELL EDGECOMBE TO BIG TECH POLLUTERS” came back as “PANT DELL EORECSNBE TO BOR TRCH POLLUTERS,” along with several other invented variants. The result looked sharper and said things nobody wrote. It was discarded. No photograph in this guide has been AI-enhanced. A slightly soft image of what people actually held is worth more than a crisp image of words they did not.

Three things this guide still gets less than certain, stated plainly.

• The two projects are unnamed. The county says at least two sub-threshold projects are close to submitting. Nothing more is public, and we could not identify them.
• The 5–15 MW estimate for a sub-threshold facility is ours, from general industry figures — not a county number.
• The Chatham case number could not be obtained. North Carolina’s eCourts portal is not publicly searchable.

Free to copy, quote, reprint, or hand out at the door. No rights reserved. Found an error? It gets fixed and credited.