Bulloch County GA Rejects a Permanent Data-Center Ban 4-3 on the Chairman's Tiebreaker, Keeping the Moratorium and Seating a 21-Person Citizen Group

The Bulloch County, Georgia Board of Commissioners voted 4-3 on September 1, 2026 against a text amendment that would have permanently banned data centers in unincorporated areas. The board split 3-3 and Chairman David Bennett cast the deciding vote. Commissioners Conner, Newkirk, and Simmons voted for the ban; Davis, Mosely, and Rushing against.

The county’s existing moratorium on new data center applications remains in place through December 31, 2026 while regulations are developed. Bennett then proposed, and the commissioners unanimously approved, a 21-person citizen working group to examine how data centers might be permitted and regulated.

This is the distinction the moratorium stories tend to blur. A pause and a ban are different decisions, and Bulloch County made both in one meeting — refusing to foreclose the use permanently while continuing to refuse it provisionally. The same commission that would not adopt a ban also did not let anything through. What it declined was the permanence, not the restriction.

That matters because a permanent ban and a moratorium fail differently. A ban is a single durable decision that a later commission can repeal and a developer can litigate. A moratorium plus a working group is slower, reversible, and harder to attack — but it also requires the county to keep choosing, meeting after meeting, and the Dougherty County case in this timeline shows what that looks like when officials say there is no ceiling on extensions.

The 21-person working group is the substantive outcome. It is the mechanism this corpus has repeatedly seen counties lack: a way to develop siting rules with residents in the room before an application is pending, rather than negotiating under a deadline with a developer’s proposal already on the table. Whether it produces an ordinance or absorbs opposition into process is exactly what the December 31 date will test.

Georgia now has four counties in this timeline handling the same question four ways: Walker (moratorium plus study committee), Hall (dual moratorium covering detention too), Dougherty (indefinitely renewable freeze), and Bulloch (moratorium, ban rejected, citizen group). Read beside Pinal County, Arizona, which rejected a specific project outright days earlier, the range runs from “no to this project” through “not yet” to “never” — and only one county in the set chose never.

Sourcing note. The September 1 vote, the 4-3 result with Bennett’s tiebreaker after a 3-3 split, all six commissioners’ names and positions, the moratorium’s December 31 expiry, and the unanimous approval of the 21-person working group are carried independently by the Statesboro Herald and The Georgia Virtue, both local tier-2 outlets; no tier-1 source covers this. The two accounts are consistent. The text amendment itself and the working group’s charter were not read, so what the proposed ban would have covered in detail, how the 21 members are to be selected, and whether the group has any formal authority are unresolved. The capture ledger notes an earlier August 4 tabling on a 3-2 vote, which is not carried here — it was not independently verified in this pass and is a separate procedural step.