A Warren County Counsel Drafts New Jersey's Model Data-Center Ban Ordinance; a Commissioner Sends It to Municipalities and Advocacy Groups Amplify It

The model ordinance behind New Jersey’s data-center ban wave was drafted inside a county government’s legal office, not by the activist groups that distribute it. The PDF’s author metadata reads “Joseph J Bell IV”, created in Microsoft Word for Microsoft 365 on February 26, 2026 — verified directly against the file, whose XMP dc:creator field carries that name. Bell IV is an attorney at Bell, Shivas & Bell, P.C. and Assistant Warren County Counsel. Warren County Commissioner James R. Kern III, who sits on the county Planning Board, circulated a model data-center ordinance “with mayors and governing bodies across the county,” reported by early January 2026 and offered as advisory rather than mandatory.

The document is a four-page fill-in-the-blank template. Its placeholders are unfilled throughout — “[BOROUGH/TOWNSHIP/TOWN/CITY] OF […..]”, “ORDINANCE #”, “COUNTY OF ……”, a specimen address reading “1234 Anystreet Way, Anywhere, New Jersey” — and its title carries a typo, “DESIGINATE,” that serves as a convenient fingerprint. It prohibits data centers outright as a “non-permitted use in all zones,” with no square-footage or megawatt threshold. Its recitals supply the factual predicate: that large data centers “can use as much as 3 to 5 million gallons of water in a single day between liquid cooling and water consumed to generate the energy that powers them”; that some “require 300 MW of electricity, which is roughly equivalent to the output of a small modular nuclear reactor”; and that most of the state has seen consumer energy costs rise “more than twenty percent (20%)” in a year. It asserts the legal ground — “municipal regulations designed for the preservation of the environment and the protection of ecological values are a well-recognized, legitimate and proper exercise of municipality authority” — and then supplies the full Municipal Land Use Law procedural sequence: ten-day notice to the county planning board and adjoining municipalities under N.J.S.A. 40:55D-15, referral for a 35-day master-plan-consistency report under N.J.S.A. 40:55D-26 and 40:55D-64, and filing of the adopted ordinance under N.J.S.A. 40:55D-16. Those are precisely the procedural steps whose omission the developer suits against Andover and Montgomery allege. The template is litigation-hardening as much as it is policy.

Two advocacy organizations amplify it, and neither wrote it. The Pinelands Preservation Alliance has hosted the file since February and told readers in a March 25, 2026 post to “Ask your town council to adopt an ordinance explicitly prohibiting data centers as a permitted use in your municipality—like Pemberton Township already did. View a model ordinance here.” The Climate Revolution Action Network links the same file from its campaign page under the words “By bringing our model resolution against data centers to your town council meeting, you can start the fight in your community.” CRAN calls it “our model resolution”; the file it distributes is the county-counsel-drafted model ordinance. That correction matters for any account of this wave that casts the Gen-Z climate group as its drafting shop — CRAN’s contribution is turnout and redistribution, not text.

Adoption is real, and partial. Measured by 8-gram sequence overlap against four adopted or introduced ordinances:

Warren Township is a direct descendant — its longest contiguous shared word-run with the model exceeds 115 words, and it carries the distinctive recitals verbatim (“3 to 5 million gallons,” “300 MW,” “twenty percent,” “subterranean aquifers”). Warren edited as it copied: it added a threshold the model lacks (“Any use with a power density of 2 to 4W or more per acre shall be considered a data center,” the units apparently garbled as printed), added supplementary performance standards, split transformers and substations out as separate uses, and inserted the line “A data center is not a warehouse.”

Jackson and Pemberton are independent drafts. Their only overlap with the model is generic New Jersey enacting boilerplate — “now therefore be it ordained by the mayor,” “N.J.S.A. 40:55D,” “upon final passage and publication.” Pemberton is the more telling case, because it is the exemplar the Alliance itself names: it contains zero WHEREAS clauses, zero citations to N.J.S.A. 40:55D, and no master-plan reference, the three things the model is largely built from. It is a different instrument entirely, surgically amending five existing zoning-district subsections (§190-24(B)(12), §190-24.1(B)(10) and (11), §190-24.3(B)(3), §190-26(C)(1) and (3)) to append “not including Data Centers, which shall be expressly prohibited” to each permitted-use listing in the GCLI, GCLI-1, GCLI-3 and OP/LI districts. Elk Township’s Ord. O-7-2026 is a third lineage again, framed as a declaratory confirmation that data centers were never permitted because they were never listed.

What this does to the “convergent outcome, not coordinated mechanism” finding: it revises it for New Jersey rather than overturning it. The Florida test found no shared consultants, model ordinances, or advocacy fingerprints — each design tracked local procedural facts. New Jersey is different in a specific and bounded way. Real model text exists, with traceable government authorship, demonstrably copied in at least one municipality. But three of the four ordinances tested were independently drafted, and the wave contains at least three drafting lineages and five distinct mechanisms — township-wide prohibition, zone-specific removal (Jersey City banned data centers in its Industrial District only), moratorium (Sayreville, 18 months), performance standards (Bridgewater), and declaratory confirmation (Elk). The accurate description is partial template diffusion inside a broader convergent wave.

The more consequential fact is the template’s origin. A wave propagated partly through county-government legal infrastructure — a county counsel drafting model zoning language and a county commissioner mailing it to municipalities — is a different phenomenon from one propagated by activist pressure alone, and it is a channel the corpus has not previously documented anywhere in the moratorium wave.

Three additional notes on scope. Only four ordinances were text-compared against a wave that trackers count at between 38 and 69 municipalities; do not generalize in either direction from this sample. Pemberton’s PDF is a scanned image and was read via 300-DPI OCR (935 words recovered), but OCR noise cannot manufacture a negative of this magnitude — the structural differences are visible in the plain text. And the Kern distribution rests on a single radio report; how many Warren County municipalities actually received the model, and what the transmittal said, is not established.

See research-new-jersey-datacenter-ban-wave-cran-and-developer-litigation-2026-08 for the comparison method, the contested counts, and the developer litigation.