Governor Janet Mills Vetoes Maine's Data Center Ban

Late last week, Maine’s Democratic Governor Janet Mills vetoed legislation that would have placed a moratorium on the construction of new data centers in the state.

In her letter, the Governor said she supports a temporary moratorium on data center projects, and would have signed LD 307 if it included an exemption for a project now underway at the former Androscoggin Mill in Jay.

“A moratorium is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates. But the final version of this bill fails to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay that enjoys strong local support from its host community and region,” Mills wrote to the Legislature. “The 2023 closure of the Androscoggin Mill dealt a devastating blow to the Town of Jay and its surrounding area. As a long-time resident of Franklin County, I know well how critical the mill was to generations of working families, and how important it is – and how challenging it has been – to promote reinvestment and job-creation at the former mill which is a brownfield site. After prior redevelopment efforts failed, the Town of Jay worked for two years on a $550 million data center redevelopment project to finally bring jobs and investment back to the mill site.”

Ground-breaking on the Androscoggin Mill site is scheduled for July; developers said that if the legislation had been signed into law, the delay would have killed the project.

Mills did not completely reject the arguments of data center opponents; she also signed a bill to prohibit data center projects from Maine’s tax-incentive programs for business development.

Two takeaways from Mills’s decision: First, she is either in agreement with or willing to play along with environmentalists’ concerns that data centers are the root of all evil and must be halted — but not if it will halt a half-billion-dollar development in a small town with a shut-down mill. Still, if Mills really believes that data centers are harmful to the environment and electricity rates, one wonders why she would want to inflict those harms on the residents of Jay.

Second, in a development that is sure to raise a furor, Mills’s defiance of the state’s Democratic state legislative majority may be seen as a de facto surrender to her rival in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, Graham Platner. It’s been a while since Mills led a poll in that primary, a fact that no doubt has Platner thumping his chest and feeling some Schadenfreude, believing he has captured the zeitgeist and proven himself the Übermensch.