What the headline
is really saying.
The ordinance closes the office, business, and industrial loopholes that had let developers build without ever appearing before elected officials.
Chesapeake residents wanted data centers kept out of their neighborhoods; developers had a by-right path that let projects skip council review entirely. The ordinance had to choose between those two realities.
The easy framing is unanimous council vs. angry residents, or pro-industry vs. anti-industry. The actual fight was narrower: which zoning districts count as appropriate, and whether Fentress belongs on the list.
Chesapeake did not ban data centers. It closed the by-right loopholes, forced every future project into a conditional use permit, removed the Fentress Overlay, and prohibited groundwater draw — a middle path between doing nothing and passing a moratorium.
Follow the evidence →Public decisions measured by who pays, who benefits, and what changes for the people living there.
The federal complaint argued the moratorium would knock the project out of Texas's electricity interconnection queue, a state-regulated deadline coun…
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