Warren Township, NJ Adopts a Data-Center Ban That Reproduces Roughly Half the County-Counsel Model Ordinance Verbatim

Warren Township, Somerset County, adopted Ordinance 26-19 in late June 2026, defining data centers, designating them a prohibited use, and adding supplementary standards. It is the clearest documented instance of a New Jersey municipality adopting circulated model ordinance language, and the measurement is unambiguous: Ordinance 26-19 reproduces 47.3% of the model ordinance’s 8-gram word sequences (651 shared sequences, Jaccard 0.2009), with a longest contiguous shared run exceeding 115 words. By comparison, Jackson’s and Pemberton’s ordinances each reproduce 0.1% of the same model — boilerplate only.

The model was drafted by Joseph J. Bell IV, Assistant Warren County Counsel, in February 2026, and circulated to municipal governing bodies by Warren County Commissioner James R. Kern III (2026-02-26–warren-county-counsel-model-data-center-ban-ordinance-circulated-nj). The model’s distinctive factual recitals all appear in Warren Township’s adopted text — the “3 to 5 million gallons” of daily water use, the “300 MW” comparison, the “twenty percent” energy-cost increase, the “subterranean aquifers” language. Warren Township is in Somerset County, not Warren County, which is worth stating plainly because the name collision invites error: the ordinance’s textual parent originated with Warren County’s counsel, but the municipality that adopted it most faithfully is Warren Township in a different county. The template traveled beyond the county whose lawyer wrote it.

Warren did not copy passively. It made three substantive additions the model does not contain:

• A threshold. “Any use with a power density of 2 to 4W or more per acre shall be considered a data center.” The units are apparently garbled as printed — watts per acre is not a meaningful density for a facility drawing hundreds of megawatts — and this looks like a drafting error worth flagging rather than quoting as a functional standard. The model has no threshold of any kind.
• A warehouse exclusion. “A data center is not a warehouse.” This is the third New Jersey municipality documented drawing that line in its own code, alongside Jackson’s definitional exclusion and Pemberton’s carve-out of data centers from its warehouse permissions — three towns, three independent drafting lineages, the same distinction.
• Supplementary performance standards, plus a provision treating transformers, electrical substations, and utility infrastructure as separate uses rather than as accessory components.

Structurally, Warren folds the prohibition into an existing prohibited-uses list at §16-5.25 — alongside drive-throughs, adult bookstores, and cannabis establishments — and separately strikes data centers from the permitted uses of the GI General Industrial district.

What this case establishes and what it does not. It establishes that model ordinance text originating in a county counsel’s office is being adopted, at scale, into binding municipal code — a supply-side coordination channel the corpus had not previously documented in the 2026 moratorium wave, and one running through local-government legal infrastructure rather than activist drafting. It does not establish that the wave is template-driven: three of the four New Jersey ordinances text-compared in this pass share nothing but boilerplate with the model, and the wave contains at least three drafting lineages and five distinct mechanisms. The accurate reading is partial template diffusion inside a broader convergent wave. See research-new-jersey-datacenter-ban-wave-cran-and-developer-litigation-2026-08.