Jackson Township, NJ Adopts Ordinance 2026-25, Writing a Data-Center Prohibition That Expressly Excludes Warehouses From the Definition

The Jackson Township Council adopted Ordinance No. 2026-25 on second reading August 25, 2026 by a vote of 4-1, Councilman Ken Bressi dissenting. It was introduced August 11. The ordinance amends Chapter 244 of the township code, “The Land Use and Development Regulations,” and it is a permanent zoning prohibition, not a moratorium: Section 2 establishes §244-176.2 “Prohibited Use,” providing that “Data Centers shall not be listed as a permitted or conditional use in any zoning district within the Township of Jackson.” It contains a severability clause and takes effect on final passage and publication. It contains no grandfather or vesting provision of any kind.

The textually load-bearing part is Section 1, which writes two new definitions into §244-6A and draws an explicit line between them:

DATA CENTER — A facility, building, or portion thereof primarily used for the storage, processing, management, or transmission of digital data, including server farms, cloud computing facilities, artificial intelligence processing centers, and cryptocurrency mining operations, typically characterized by high electrical demand, intensive cooling systems, and backup power generation. The term data center shall not include warehouse.

WAREHOUSE — A building or group of buildings, structures or facilities primarily involved in the receipt of goods, products, or materials and their indoor storage, separation, transfer, or wholesale distribution, including order fulfillment, accessory transshipment facilitation, and related “last mile” activities. Such facility may include an accessory truck terminal and accessory office use. The term warehouse shall include distribution facilities, fulfillment centers, logistics facilities and similar uses, including e-commerce activities.

The findings recite the reason. Among the council’s enumerated findings about high-intensity digital infrastructure uses is that they “Should be clearly differentiated from other uses, such as warehouses, due to the negative impacts set forth above.” The other findings are the standard inventory — substantial electrical demand straining local and regional power infrastructure, significant water usage for cooling affecting groundwater supply, continuous noise from mechanical equipment and backup generation, limited on-site employment relative to land use intensity, disproportionate demands on police, fire, and emergency response, and conflict with existing land use patterns and environmental constraints “including those applicable within the Pinelands Area, where development intensity, infrastructure expansion, and environmental impacts are strictly regulated under the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan.”

This is a municipality writing the warehouse/data-center distinction into its own code, and it is primary-source confirmation that the two are separate land-use instruments rather than one fight. The corpus’s position — that data-center opposition and warehouse-conversion opposition do not transfer, because a data-center opponent faces a private developer subject to municipal zoning while a warehouse-conversion opponent faces the federal government, against which municipal zoning is preempted — now has a town’s ordinance text saying the uses “should be clearly differentiated.” The exclusionary clause is doing real work in the other direction too: because a data center is defined to exclude a warehouse, prohibiting data centers leaves Jackson’s warehouse zoning entirely untouched.

Two qualifications belong on the record. First, the ordinance did not create the prohibition so much as make it explicit. Under Jackson’s permissive-zoning scheme a use not enumerated is not permitted, and a township legal memo discussed in June 2026 had already concluded that “data centers are not listed in any zoning in the district and are therefore not permitted anywhere in the township” (Jersey Shore Online, 2026-06-19). Bressi’s lone dissent tracks exactly that reading — “If it is not permitted, it is not permitted and I think we have to stick to that.” What 2026-25 adds is a codified definition, an affirmative prohibition that a future council must repeal rather than merely reinterpret, and findings that build a land-use record. Councilman Chris Pollak drove the ordinance. Second, no data-center application was pending. Jackson acted before a proposal arrived, which forecloses any grandfather-rush and is what the Climate Revolution Action Network’s executive director Ben Dziobek praised in the press release announcing the vote: “Jackson didn’t wait for a data center proposal to protect itself and pass a ban.”

Jackson’s ordinance is also a documented negative on the model-ordinance question. A fill-in-the-blank template drafted by an Assistant Warren County Counsel and promoted by both the Pinelands Preservation Alliance and CRAN was in circulation six months before this vote, and Jackson sits partly inside the Pinelands Area the Alliance organizes. Ordinance 2026-25 shares essentially nothing with it — 2 common 8-gram sequences out of 744, a Jaccard similarity of 0.0009, and both shared strings are generic enacting boilerplate. Jackson’s municipal attorneys drafted their own text, and made different choices doing so: the model designates data centers a “non-permitted use” with no threshold and no warehouse definition, while Jackson creates an affirmative Prohibited Use section and writes the warehouse exclusion quoted above. See 2026-02-26–warren-county-counsel-model-data-center-ban-ordinance-circulated-nj.

CRAN counted Jackson as the 38th New Jersey municipality to ban data centers. That ordinal is the organization’s own running tally, published through its press releases, and is the origin of the “38 towns” figure in circulation; it is not a state registry count. See research-new-jersey-datacenter-ban-wave-cran-and-developer-litigation-2026-08 for how that number was reconstructed and what it does and does not support.