Jeffersonville IN Council Votes 8-0 for 1-Year Data Center Moratorium; Meta's Near-Complete Facility Exempted

The Jeffersonville (Clark County, IN) City Council voted unanimously 8-0 on August 4 to impose a one-year moratorium on new data center permits, giving the city time to write permanent data-center zoning into its Unified Development Ordinance. Meta’s nearly-complete facility at the River Ridge Commerce Center was explicitly carved out of the moratorium — the fight is over future capacity, not the investment already sunk. Residents cited utility disclosures about the project’s grid load in pushing for the freeze, which blocks all new data center applicants until at least August 2027.

Indiana has become one of the most moratorium-dense states in this corpus, with at least 17 counties documented as of Indianapolis’s own committee vote in July (2026-07-13–indianapolis-committee-advances-data-center-moratorium). Jeffersonville’s Meta carve-out is the now-familiar “resisting after the fact” pattern: cities acting only once an initial hyperscaler facility is already built or nearly so, with permanent zoning rules arriving too late to touch the first mover. River Ridge Commerce Center’s existing enterprise-zone tax incentives — parallel to the abatement fights in Bell County, TX over another Meta facility (2026-07-07–bell-county-tx-residents-demand-end-meta-data-center-abatements) — remain undisturbed by this vote.