UKIAH, CA., 10/6/26 — Mendocino County’s ban on new data centers will run until August 2028, with an exception about the size of a shipping container. The ban was put in place while a committee works with staff on a permanent ordinance that would govern how and whether the county permits data centers in the future.
Supervisors voted 4-1 Tuesday to extend the moratorium they adopted Sept. 1 by 22 months and 15 days, to Aug. 21, 2028, the longest stretch state law allows. They also narrowed the terms. As Supervisor Ted Williams described the change to the board, facilities that draw less than 3 megawatts of electricity are no longer subject to the moratorium. The ad hoc committee of Williams and District 3 supervisor John Haschak met with county staff over lunch, worked out the change, and the board adopted it the same afternoon.
Supervisor Maureen Mulheren voted no, calling the threshold “not fully developed.”
“This idea that we’re having three megawatts coming up during a meeting as a path forward,” she said, was something she would’ve wanted staff and the community to work out first.
The first version of the moratorium, a 45-day urgency ordinance, was set to expire Oct. 16. Deputy County Counsel Matthew Kiedrowski told the board the next meeting would’ve fallen outside the 45-day limit.
Why 3 megawatts
Williams, reporting for the board’s two-supervisor ad hoc committee of Haschak and himself, said 3 megawatts is roughly what PG&E will deliver through standard service before a project needs its own transformers or a substation. “3 megawatts would allow a data center the size of a shipping container,” he said. The point, he said, was to let local businesses use small data projects without tripping over the ordinance while the county spends the next 20 months writing a permanent rule, and still keep out “gigawatt-size facilities.”
Richard Angley, the interim director of Planning and Building Services, said he believed the ordinance his staff has been drafting uses 20 megawatts as a threshold, a figure drawn from other jurisdictions. “The three megawatts came up today,” he said.
Supervisor Madeline Cline said she was “not particularly in love with this arbitrary setting” of a number, but preferred allowances to a blanket ban. Williams, who proposed the figure, said it was “still somewhat arbitrary.”
The board took the item up at 9:33 a.m. and couldn’t finish it before lunch break. Williams and Cline wanted a power threshold so telecommunications facilities wouldn’t be caught by the ban. Mulheren said she wouldn’t vote for any megawatt figure that day. “I do not know what that should be,” she said.
“From a politics standpoint, a ban on data centers is great politics,” Cline said. As actual policy, she said, a flat-out ban is problematic.
A two-year clock
The board also asked whether two years was too long. Interim CEO Sara Pierce said Planning and Building is short-staffed and anything sooner than two years “would be stretched.” Later in the same discussion, senior planner Mark Cliser said the permanent ordinance “is just about done,” and a first draft could reach the Planning Commission in six or seven months. However, in the afternoon, Angley said 10 months was possible “in an absolute perfect world,” but “the likelihood of that is very slim.”
Supervisor John Haschak said these things can take a while, explaining that the county has worked on an ordinance for low-intensity camping, the Hipcamp model, for about five years and still doesn’t have one.
Adam Gaska, executive director of the Mendocino County Farm Bureau, told the board the bureau opposed the blanket ban. “We believe a ban is a knee-jerk reaction stemming from fear and not out of a real and actual present threat,” he said.
Eileen Russell of Mendocino Forest Products, who asked the board in September to leave room for a data center at the Ukiah sawmill, said in the morning that “people have stopped the conversation” about investing here since word of the moratorium got out. In the afternoon, after the 3-megawatt change, she said a data center the size of a storage container is “not really allowing the type of development or innovation that could take Mendocino Forest Products into the next generation.” She described a power plant burning forest residuals next to the sawmill, selling its power to a data center.
Doug Stewart, president of the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association, said he wanted a limit, not a two-year moratorium. After the change, he said it “did address what I came here to discuss.”
Dolly Riley, chair of the Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Council, supported the full extension. “Mendocino County does not have the water to spare,” she said.
What else changed over lunch
The lunch rewrite made two other changes. The ordinance had exempted ordinary office, retail, school, hospital and industrial computer equipment. Williams said that under that wording a large retailer could have built a data center for its own operations. That exemption is gone. Hospitals and healthcare facilities are now exempted as public safety and emergency facilities, and the requirement that those be owned and operated by a public agency was dropped, because the county’s hospitals aren’t.
The ordinance doesn’t name a project. It says the county “anticipates receiving” inquiries and applications.
The moratorium can end sooner than 2028. Kiedrowski said the board can terminate it once it adopts a permanent data center ordinance.
Haschak moved the amended ordinance with two conditions: a report back to the board every four months, and a new ad hoc committee to work with staff on the permanent ordinance. Chair Bernie Norvell named Cline and Williams to it.
Mulheren said she assumed that committee would take up the question she voted no over. “If three megawatts is too small, what isn’t too small?” she asked.