Augusta Township, MI Voters Overturn Thor Equities $1B Data Center Rezoning 89.5%-10.4%

Residents of Augusta Township (Washtenaw County, MI) organized a successful referendum petition against the township board’s approval of agricultural-to-industrial rezoning for Thor Equities’ proposed $1B, 800-acre data center near Milan. The Planning Commission had recommended denial; the board overrode it, voting unanimously on July 22, 2025 to approve Ordinance No. 2025-02, rezoning 522.2 acres across seven parcels from Agricultural Residential to General Industrial. The referendum, organized as PACT (Protect Augusta Charter Township), appeared on the August 4 ballot. A moratorium ordinance had its second reading the same day; a full board recall campaign was also active. If the referendum passed, the rezoning would be voided.

This is a rare instance of data-center opposition escalating past moratorium and zoning-hearing tactics to a direct voter referendum on an already-approved rezoning — a stronger and more durable resistance mechanism than the moratorium votes the timeline has tracked at dozens of other jurisdictions in 2026, since a successful referendum voids the approval outright rather than merely pausing future applications.

Update (2026-08-04): referendum passes decisively. Unofficial results show voters rejected the rezoning by a landslide — 2,314 votes (89.5%) against versus 269 (10.4%) in favor. Pending certification, the rezoning is overturned and the parcels revert to Agricultural Residential zoning, blocking Thor Equities’ data-center project as proposed. This is one of the most lopsided outcomes in the 2026 data-center resistance wave this corpus tracks, and confirms the referendum mechanism’s strength relative to the moratorium votes seen elsewhere: rather than pausing new applications, Augusta Township voters directly reversed a board decision the Planning Commission itself had recommended against.