New Castle County, DE Council Passes Data Center Siting Ordinance 12-0, Exempts Starwood's 'Project Washington' Near Delaware City

Opening paragraph

On Tuesday, March 10, 2026, the New Castle County, Delaware Council passed a data-center siting ordinance 12-0 with one member absent, after seven months of deliberation on legislation sponsored by Councilmember David Carter. The vote is the ADOPTED status this entry documents; Delaware Public Media’s contemporaneous report does not state a separate effective date, and this entry does not assert one. A same-night floor amendment, proposed by Councilmember Timothy Sheldon, exempted Starwood Digital Ventures’ “Project Washington” — the data-center project near Delaware City that Spotlight Delaware’s later August 13 Dover reporting referenced without naming — from the new rules, by applying the ordinance only to applications filed after enactment.

What Happened / Key Facts

• Instrument: an ordinance amending New Castle County’s land-use code — Delaware Public Media reports the underlying zoning code “is nearly 30 years old, written long before hyperscale data centers existed” — to add siting standards for data centers countywide in unincorporated New Castle County. No ordinance number was reported in the source consulted for this entry.
• Vote: 12-0, with one councilmember absent (exact tally and absence as reported by Delaware Public Media; no roll-call breakdown by name was published in the source, so no members are named as voting no — there were none).
• Sponsor: Councilmember David Carter, who worked on the legislation for months. The ordinance had the support of the County Land Use Department and the County Executive’s office by the time of passage.
• Substantive standards, as passed (eased from Carter’s original draft after Councilmember concerns, including from Janet Kilpatrick, that stricter rules would hurt investment):
  • 1,000-foot required buffer between data centers and residential zones, day care centers, and schools.
  • Developers may build within 500 feet of residential zones if they supply a site-specific noise study guaranteeing sound stays within allowable levels.
  • Landscaping, street trees, and bufferyards required “where appropriate to mask the development.”
  • Open-loop cooling systems (which use more water than closed-loop systems) are prohibited.
• The exemption amendment: Councilmember Timothy Sheldon’s floor amendment, described by Sheldon as coming “right from the original sponsor,” clarified the ordinance “shall be only applied to land use applications submitted after the [enactment] date[], unless the application, by written request… agrees to submit [to] the provisions of the ordinance.” Effect: Starwood Digital Ventures’ Project Washington proposal near Delaware City is not required to follow the new regulations unless Starwood itself chooses to.
• A parallel, failed loosening attempt: One day before the vote, Kilpatrick — who remained an opponent of the ordinance in principle even while ultimately voting for it — filed a separate floor amendment seeking further loosening of the restrictions. Several colleagues, including Kevin Caneco, opposed it as an attempt to “undo and kill this legislation.” Kilpatrick withdrew the amendment during the meeting “in order to compromise.”
• The named project: Starwood Digital Ventures’ “Project Washington,” per Delaware Public Media. Starwood spokesman Jim Lamb told the outlet the project would create “over 3,500 jobs” and provide “nearly $60 million each year” to county public schools once complete. The project’s live obstacle at the time of the county vote was not the county at all: Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) had denied Starwood’s permit request in February 2026 under the state’s Coastal Zone Act, a decision Starwood was appealing as of March 11.

Testing Spotlight Delaware’s “similar to Kent County’s” characterization

The claim under test, from Spotlight Delaware’s August 13, 2026 Dover piece, was that “New Castle County also adopted regulations similar to those of Kent County earlier this spring.” Spotlight Delaware’s own text, read directly rather than through the secondary Dover mention, is more precise than the sentence excerpted in this ticket’s lead: the August 13 article states “New Castle and Kent counties recently approved rules limiting where a data center could be built in unincorporated areas” — a claim about shared subject matter and jurisdictional scope (both are county-level siting/zoning ordinances limited to unincorporated areas), not a claim that the two ordinances’ substantive terms match.

Comparing the two ordinances on their reported terms:

Finding: “similar” holds at the level Spotlight Delaware itself actually asserted — both are county-level, siting/buffer-and-cooling-standard ordinances confined to unincorporated territory, passed within about seven weeks of each other, amid the same statewide data-center-buildout debate. It does not hold at the level of specific numeric standards (300-foot vs. 1,000-foot buffers) or grandfathering treatment, which the Kent County entry’s sources do not address either way, making a full comparison on that point currently unresourced beyond noting the gap. The ticket’s excerpted sentence (“similar to those of Kent County[’s]”) is a compressed paraphrase of Spotlight Delaware’s own broader framing, not a distinct or stronger claim by Spotlight Delaware.

Why This Event Matters

This is New Castle County’s own entry in the same Delaware sub-state data-center-regulation sequence this KB has been tracking: Kent County Levy Court (July 21) and Dover’s committee-stage moratorium advance (August 11) — see Related Entries. New Castle’s vote is chronologically first among the three (March 10), which reframes the sequence: New Castle acted first, Kent County followed in July, and Dover’s moratorium proposal in August cited Kent County’s “recent passage of strict regulations” (per Dover officials, in the Dover entry) as a reason Dover itself needed to act — without, in that reporting, crediting New Castle’s earlier action by name. New Castle’s ordinance also supplies the specific case study the corpus lacked for the “grandfather exemption” pattern seen elsewhere in the national moratorium wave: an explicit, floor-amendment carveout for one named, pending project (Starwood’s Project Washington), passed the same night as the restricting ordinance itself — a faster and more direct grandfathering mechanism than the “rush of filings before an effective date” pattern documented in other jurisdictions.

Research Gaps

• No ordinance number located. Delaware Public Media’s report, the tier-1 source for this entry, does not cite one; New Castle County’s legislative record (CivicClerk portal at newcastlecode.portal.civicclerk.com) is JavaScript-rendered and its underlying OData API does not expose legislation/ordinance-number records at the endpoints probed in this pass (Events, Meetings, Search all returned empty or schema-mismatched for text queries). A County Clerk records request is in bounds for a follow-up if the ordinance number is load-bearing for later work.
• No adopted-ordinance effective date confirmed independently of the March 10 vote date; Delaware Public Media’s report describes passage, not a separate effective/enactment date. Do not assume same-day effectiveness.
• Second independent source not obtained in this pass: WHYY’s “‘A modest start’: New Castle County passes zoning rules for regulating massive data centers” and delawarelive.com’s “New Castle County Council Approves New Data Center Rules, But Won’t Apply Them to Existing Projects” were both identified via evidence-search’s news index but could not be fetched directly in this session — Google News RSS redirects require JavaScript to resolve and were not citable; delawarelive.com returned HTTP 403 on direct fetch; WHYY’s own site search is JavaScript-rendered. Revisit with evidence-search web once its rate limit clears (it returned RateLimited on every attempt this session, coverage 78-79/84 responsive with Brave/Google CSE/Wikipedia/DuckDuckGo/Startpage among the non-responsive engines) — this is a tooling gap, not a content absence.
• Whether DNREC’s February 2026 Coastal Zone Act permit denial to Starwood was subsequently resolved (Starwood’s appeal was pending as of March 11, per Delaware Public Media); Delaware Business Times’ “Starwood Digital Ventures appeal to be heard” headline (identified via evidence-search, not independently fetched) suggests a later hearing — candidate for a separate follow-on entry if it resolves the permit status of Project Washington.
• The full roll call (who was absent, whether any of the 12 “yes” votes came with stated reservations beyond Kilpatrick’s) was not published in the source consulted; Delaware Public Media names Kilpatrick as the one on-record opponent who nonetheless voted yes, and Caneco as a vocal supporter, but does not publish a member-by-member tally.

Related Entries

• 2026-07-21–kent-county-de-first-data-center-ordinance
• 2026-08-11–dover-de-committee-advances-18-month-datacenter-moratorium
• 2026-08-17–harrington-de-city-council-denies-data-center-conditional-use-ordinance