Levy County FL Adopts Ordinance 2026-05, a One-Year Moratorium on Data Centers and Power-Intensive Facilities

The Levy County, Florida Board of County Commissioners voted September 8, 2026 to approve Ordinance 2026-05, a moratorium on new data centers and large-scale power-intensive facilities in unincorporated areas, running October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2027. Staff will study impacts and draft proposed regulations during the pause.

The ordinance’s stated concerns are worth listing in full, because they are the specific externalities a county has to zone for and the generic “economic development” frame does not address: electricity, water, infrastructure, noise, vibration, lighting, heat, and construction traffic. Vibration and heat are the tell — those are not objections to a building, they are objections to what the building does continuously once operating.

Note the structure of the pause. Unlike Dougherty County’s renewable 180-day freeze, Levy’s is a fixed one-year window tied to a deliverable: the moratorium ends September 30, 2027 whether or not regulations exist. That is the weaker instrument for a county that wants leverage and the stronger one for a county that wants rules — it forces the staff work to happen on a schedule, but it also hands developers a date to wait out.

Three other Florida counties are simultaneously advancing one-year data-center moratoriums. Arizona’s legislature passed a three-year pause on tax incentives in July 2026 — a different lever entirely, aimed at the subsidy rather than the permit.

Sourcing note. The September 8 vote, Ordinance 2026-05, the October 1 2026–September 30 2027 term, and the enumerated concerns are carried by WCJB and the Citrus County Chronicle independently. The three-other-counties figure is Florida Politics; those counties are not named here and the claim is “advancing,” not adopted. The characterization that September 2026 marks the first time state legislatures rather than county commissions moved into a restriction posture appeared in the capture ledger sourced to a trade newsletter as analysts’ framing — it is not carried into this entry, since Arizona’s July action already predates it and the claim would need a survey of state sessions to support. The ordinance text was not obtained; whether it contains a megawatt or square-footage threshold defining “large-scale” is unresolved and is the detail that determines what it actually reaches.