Grant County, NM Commission Notices a September 24 Vote on a Year-Long Data Center Moratorium After an Undisclosed 300 MW Gas-Fired Proposal

The Grant County, New Mexico Commission is scheduled to vote September 24, 2026 on a one-year moratorium on data center development, proposed by Commissioner Nancy Stephens and modeled on the ordinance Socorro County adopted earlier in 2026. The proposal followed a 300 MW natural-gas-fired data center project that came to the county without public disclosure. If it passes, Grant County becomes New Mexico’s second county-level moratorium.

This entry is dated to the September 18 reporting that the vote was noticed, not to the vote itself, and carries status: reported for that reason. The September 24 meeting had not occurred as of this writing (2026-09-20); what the record establishes is that the moratorium was on the agenda, not its outcome. It needs a follow-up pass after the meeting to record the result and convert the status. Dating it to the vote date would have put the entry ahead of every source that reports it — the publication-date-as-event-date failure running in reverse.

New Mexico is where the county-by-county pattern is currently most legible: Santa Fe County and Socorro County have moratoriums in place, Clovis rejected one on September 16, and state legislators have announced a statewide moratorium bill for the 2027 session — so the same question is being answered differently in adjacent jurisdictions within the same month, with the state-level answer still two legislative sessions out. The recurring local trigger is not the electricity or the water in the abstract but the disclosure failure: a 300 MW gas-fired load arriving without public notice is the specific thing the ordinance is written against, which is the same structural complaint as the BLM right-of-way amendment that skipped its comment period (2026-09-01–interior-judge-stays-first-blm-public-land-data-center-townsite-boulder-city).