Three of the five commissioners on Calvert County’s outgoing board lost their seats in June for opposing a moratorium on data centers. On Tuesday, that same lame-duck board — joined by the two commissioners who kept theirs — directed staff to make sure the moratorium, and more, gets locked in before any of them leave office.
At a work session during the Sept. 22 meeting, Planning and Zoning Director James Brinkley and planner Will Hager walked the board through four regulatory paths for dealing with data centers: extend the existing moratorium, strip data centers from the list of permitted uses in industrial zones through a formal text amendment, rezone the county’s heavy-industrial land back to what it was before 2025, or write new development standards data centers would have to meet. Before the presentation got far, Board President Todd Ireland cut it short. “We know what the public wants, we know what they expect from us,” he said, directing staff to advertise now for a vote to extend the moratorium two years at the board’s Dec. 15 meeting — the same day the newly elected board is sworn in.
The board settled, through informal consensus rather than a recorded vote, on pursuing three of the four options: the two-year extension, the permitted-use removal (which staff estimated could reach a vote by January), and the rezoning (which requires a Comprehensive Plan amendment and a 60-day review by surrounding jurisdictions, putting it roughly six months out). One commissioner raised a caveat on the rezoning option, noting that Constellation Energy’s pending plan to roughly double nuclear generating capacity at Calvert Cliffs sits on some of the same industrially zoned land, and that a broad rezoning could complicate that unrelated project. Staff argued the point was largely moot regardless: extending the moratorium and removing data centers as a permitted use would already block new projects without touching the zoning map.
The urgency traces back to the county’s own recent history with Amazon. Residents discovered Amazon’s proposal for a data center campus near the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Lusby through a job posting in February 2026, and a petition drive led by resident Melissa Emmal gathered more than 10,000 signatures opposing it. Amazon withdrew the project on Aug. 4, calling it a “business decision.” Two weeks later, the board voted unanimously, 5-0, to pause new data center applications for six months. That vote came after a June primary in which voters ousted Ireland, Cox and Hance for having repeatedly opposed moratorium proposals before the Amazon withdrawal — a result the Chronicle previously reported was part of a broader wave of data-center-driven primary upsets across Maryland.
During the afternoon’s public comment period, one Lusby resident, Patrick Flaherty, argued the board’s plan Tuesday morning may not be as simple as described. He read from the moratorium ordinance’s own sunset provision, which states the ordinance “shall automatically be repealed” at the end of the moratorium period and that “any amendment, extension, reduction, or other substantive change” to it requires “the same public notice, public hearing, and adoption process” as the original ordinance. If that’s accurate, Flaherty argued, neither the outgoing board nor the incoming one can simply vote to extend the moratorium on Dec. 15 without first holding a properly advertised public hearing of its own — a step staff’s Tuesday timeline didn’t appear to account for.
Other speakers pressed the board on data centers’ reach beyond Calvert’s borders. Resident Len Zuza cited an independent Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission-backed study — conducted by Synapse Energy Economics and reported by trade outlet Utility Dive — that found the PJM regional grid’s 2030 reliability risk could run nearly six to more than 100 times worse than the grid operator’s own planning standard if data center growth continues unchecked. Zuza also cited Maryland Public Service Commission data showing roughly 115,000 Maryland households had their power or gas shut off in 2025 for nonpayment, about 60,000 of them by Baltimore Gas and Electric — and argued that rising delivery costs tied to data center growth elsewhere on the grid could still hit Calvert ratepayers even with the local moratorium in place. A third speaker, Michael Block, urged the board to rezone the Lusby site back to forest and farming, noting that a state-mandated study of data centers’ environmental and economic impacts, required under legislation the General Assembly passed over Gov. Wes Moore’s veto in December 2025, was due Sept. 1 but still hadn’t been released as of Tuesday’s meeting.
Not every public comment opposed data centers outright. Tom Peter, an Ashburn, Virginia-based data center developer who said his company approached the county’s economic development office earlier this year without requesting a non-disclosure agreement, thanked the board for the pause and credited Commissioner Michael Hart specifically for “perseverance on this issue through many votes that didn’t go your way.” Peter argued the moratorium’s real value is time to define what a data center project “this community could actually welcome” would look like, rather than a permanent door-closing.
Nothing the board discussed Tuesday is final. The Dec. 15 vote will fall to a board that will include at least two new commissioners — Kenneth Lee, Patti Stueckler and Jason Scaggs are running to replace Ireland, Cox and Hance — all of whom, according to Tuesday’s board discussion, campaigned against data centers.
