Hexa Builders Sues Monroe Township, NJ Over Data-Center Ban, Pleading That Data Centers Are Protected Speech

Hexa Builders, LLC and 3043 Williamstown Urban Renewal, LLC filed a twenty-count Complaint in Lieu of Prerogative Writ against the Township of Monroe, Gloucester County, New Jersey, in Superior Court on June 5, 2026, docket GLO-L-000805-26. The complaint seeks damages in excess of $300 million and attacks Ordinance O:25-2026, a township-wide prohibition on data centers. Among its counts is a First Amendment claim — the theory that a ban on data centers is a ban on the physical infrastructure of speech, and therefore a speech restriction. Both the count and the theory are confirmed on the federal docket at the primary-document level, and the count number is identified in the township’s own briefing: Count Four, plus a First Amendment component of Count Twelve.

The sequence the complaint attacks is procedural and specific. Monroe designated the property at 3043 Black Horse Pike in Williamstown an area in need of rehabilitation in 2019 and a non-condemnation redevelopment area in 2024; adopted a redevelopment plan permitting warehouse, storage, and distribution uses in February 2023; and amended that plan by ordinance in March 2025 to add data centers as a permitted use. Hexa applied in September 2025 for two warehouses totaling roughly 1.6 million square feet, and the Planning Board approved that application on January 8, 2026. The council then directed the Planning Board to draft performance standards for data centers covering noise, emissions, water consumption, heat and glare, lighting, utility capacity, and viewshed. The standards ordinance was listed for introduction on March 11, 2026 and pulled from the agenda. Two weeks later the township introduced an ordinance repealing data centers as a permitted use; on April 8 it introduced a second ordinance banning data centers and any substantially similar use in every zoning district. Hexa filed its amended site plan converting one approved warehouse into a data center the same day. Both ordinances were adopted April 22 and took effect May 13. On May 12 — one day before the effective date — the Planning Board found the amended application incomplete.

The First Amendment theory, in the plaintiffs’ own words on the federal docket, is narrower and better-lawyered than the widely quoted line suggests. Plaintiffs’ counsel wrote that “the ability to engage in expressive activity, namely generative AI, and the sending, storing and retrieving of electronic communications, is impacted by the data center ban,” that “mere data collection is commercial speech,” and — the load-bearing citation — that “First Amendment concerns are raised when a law ‘foreclose[s] an entire medium of expression,’” quoting TikTok Inc. v. Garland, 604 U.S. 56, 69 (2025). They add United States v. Holena, 906 F.3d 288, 291 (3d Cir. 2018): “Bans on computers and the internet are considered to impact First Amendment concerns even though neither the computer nor the internet are speech or expression. They are a means to facilitate speech and expression. Likewise, data centers are a means to facilitate speech and expression.” The much-repeated sentence — that data centers are “a medium of expression and banning data centers would impose a significant burden on the free speech rights of all citizens in the United States” — is quoted by New Jersey Monitor from the complaint itself, which is attached to the removal notice as Exhibit 1 and sits behind a PACER paywall; the underlying pleading has not been read directly and that specific sentence is therefore tier-2, not tier-1. The theory it expresses is confirmed at tier 1 from both sides’ briefing, and traces to complaint paragraphs 194-202 and 207-209.

The township’s answer is the sharpest available statement of the counter-position, and it is short: “The challenged ordinance regulates whether a physical data-center facility may be established or operated in the Township. It does not regulate the content of speech, a speaker, a message, or Plaintiffs’ ability to engage in expressive activity. The fact that data centers support electronic communications does not transform a land-use regulation into a speech restriction.”

The procedural posture inverts the natural reading of the case, and this is the finding that most resists summary. It was the municipality, not the developer, that removed the case to federal court — Monroe filed a Notice of Removal on July 6, 2026 under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331, 1367, 1441, and 1446, docketed as No. 1:26-cv-08284-ESK-EAP before Judge Edward S. Kiel in Camden. The town used the developer’s own federal counts as the jurisdictional hook to pull a state land-use fight into federal court, where the Third Circuit’s substantive-due-process and class-of-one doctrine is hostile to converting zoning disputes into civil-rights claims and where the federal bench is, in plaintiffs’ own citation, “admonished from acting as a ‘zoning board of appeals.’” Hexa then moved for partial remand — asking that fifteen of its twenty counts go back to state court and that the federal counts be stayed. The plaintiff is trying to get out of the forum its own constitutional pleading created. Judge Kiel denied the remand request without prejudice on August 13, granted the township leave to move to dismiss, and set a September 2, 2026 deadline for that motion. Both sides have told the court that if the federal claims fall, it should decline supplemental jurisdiction over the rest.

A threshold argument may decide seven counts without reaching any constitutional question. The property sits in the Pinelands Area, and N.J.A.C. 7:50-4.34(b) bars a local agency from deeming a development application complete without a Pinelands Certificate of Filing. Hexa did not obtain a new Certificate for the data-center application, contending the earlier warehouse filing sufficed. If the court agrees with Monroe, the completeness-determination claims collapse on state regulatory grounds.

No court has ruled on the merits of anything here. As of late August 2026 the docket shows a removal, letter briefing, and a scheduling order. A filed suit is not a ruling, and the First Amendment count has survived nothing yet — it has not been tested. What makes the case load-bearing is not its outcome but its existence: it is the clearest instance of the developer-side legal counterattack against municipal data-center bans, and it is running against a home-rule New Jersey municipality with unambiguous zoning authority, not an authority-poor county operating under Dillon’s Rule. That distinction is the point: the litigation pressure on municipal data-center restrictions does not depend on a defect in local zoning authority. See research-new-jersey-datacenter-ban-wave-cran-and-developer-litigation-2026-08 for the state pattern and the counting method.