The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council extended its countywide data center moratorium in a fast-tracked move Thursday night, but issues related to regulating future development will have to wait.
The council passed the extension with 11 votes at a council meeting in chambers. The remaining four council members —Whitney Elliott Baxter, Joseph Hale, Tyler Morton and Jennifer Reynolds — were absent from the meeting. The full, 15-member council voted to place the extension on the agenda after a packed special hearing Tuesday.
The ban on such development will now remain in place through Oct. 31, 2027.
“What's been made clear to us is that everybody across the spectrum wants us to slow down and get this policy right,” District 4 council member Emma Curtis said of the move to extend the temporary prohibition on new data centers within Fayette County. “And so, while not every motion passed tonight, the most important one did.”
Normally, city ordinances require two readings at separate meetings before the council can take a final vote, but Curtis made the motion to move the extended development ban along.
Last May, data center developer DartPoints announced it had acquired the former Lexmark campus in North Lexington, with plans to eventually build out 70 megawatts of capacity for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
In response, council members unanimously enacted a moratorium through the end of this month. Some Lexingtonians have called for a total ban on data centers larger than 25 megawatts of capacity.
DartPoints did not speak at the Thursday meeting, but Jon Woodall, a company lawyer, told council members Tuesday the developer was not looking to build a large-scale project.
“DartPoints is not a hyperscale data center,” Woodall said at the Tuesday hearing. “It does not want to be, will not be. We’re a known animal, as far as that IBM site.”
In Kentucky, and across the U.S., the data center boom has faced intense backlash for the vast amount of energy use, pollution and the industry’s ties to AI. Neighboring areas, like Woodford County, have enacted their own bans.
“I grew up on my family's farm with access to clean fields, good farmland, the ability to grow and work within our communities,” Curtis said before motioning for a second reading Thursday. “That is inherently threatened by the potential of data centers, and that protection, to me, is more important than doing things the way that they've always been done.”
Curtis also moved to fast-track other, related items that would charge city planners with restarting the process for how data centers are zoned. But the council opted to slow approval of those motions, calling for more opportunities for public input.
Those items will instead be on the agenda for second reading at the next council meeting, Oct. 22.
“A major part of the upset that we have seen over data centers is due to a lack of transparency, and due to fast-tracking of proposals in other communities,” District 5’s Liz Sheehan said. “And for me, the rule that we have on two readings, where they are spaced out, is to increase transparency for the public.”
Those two items include an ordinance that would remove proposed zoning language detailing how data centers can be built in certain business areas, along with a partner resolution that would task the city with creating separate zoning specifically for data centers.
District 1’s Tyler Morton forwarded those suggestions Tuesday with the intent that a specific zoning classification for data centers would allow them to be regulated more stringently and keep them away from historically marginalized neighborhoods. The proposed DartPoints project is in Morton’s district.
If council gives final approval to those items later this month, it will reset the process to dictate where and how data centers can operate in Fayette County, with more opportunities for public comment.
