Anne Arundel County Pauses New Data Centers and Repeals Their Tax Break

Anne Arundel County’s bill page records that Bill 63-26 was introduced on July 20, 2026, amended on September 21 and passed on October 5, with all seven councilmembers voting yes. The bill began as something else. As introduced by Councilmember Nathan Volke, it would have removed data storage centers from every zoning district that allows them. The amended bill the county posted strikes that text line by line and replaces it with three things: the repeal of county code section 4-3-104, a temporary stop on new applications, and a work group. The stop runs for what the bill calls the Effective Period, from the bill’s effective date to the earlier of January 31, 2028 or the effective date of legislation, based on the work group’s recommendations, that comprehensively regulates data storage centers.

During that period, Section 3 says the county shall not accept any new applications of any type for any proposed development of a data storage center. Three groups may proceed: preliminary plan, site development plan, sketch plan, modification and final plan applications filed before the period begins; applications associated with those plans; and future phases of any existing data storage center on adjacent or adjoining properties. Section 4 binds the council itself: it shall not introduce, consider, hear or pass data center legislation during the period, except for an acute emergency, to form the work group, or to act on the work group’s recommendations. The work group has one appointee per councilmember, four appointed by the County Executive and confirmed by the council, and designees from five county offices and agencies. By PSV’s count that computes to 11 appointed members and five ex officio. Its report is due no later than ten months after the effective date. The bill takes effect 45 days from the date it becomes law.

Section 1 is one sentence: section 4-3-104 of the county code is repealed. The county’s Bill 13-22, passed February 22, 2022, shows what that section does. Qualified data center personal property, in a qualified data center with at least $10 million of total investment and at least 10 qualified positions, may receive a 15-year reduction in assessment for county personal property tax: 100 percent for the first five taxable years and 50 percent for years six through 15. The section takes its definitions of a qualified data center and of qualified data center personal property from the state tax code, which PSV did not read for this brief. The section requires an application or a renewal by April 15 before each taxable year. Bill 63-26 repeals it outright. The text has no clause for a center already inside its 15 years, and whether a repealed section can still be renewed is a question for tax counsel and the county Office of Finance. PSV does not know whether any center has received the reduction. The 2022 law requires an annual report naming recipients, and PSV did not locate it.

The pause is narrower than the word moratorium suggests, and the timing is the reason. It does not begin on October 5. It begins when the bill takes effect, 45 days after it becomes law, and the county’s page gives a passage date but no date for the County Executive’s action. If the bill had become law the day it passed, 45 days computes to November 19, 2026, so the real date is that or later. Until then the existing zoning stands, because the amendment struck every zoning change. The introduced text shows what existing law allows: data storage centers as a permitted use in the W1, W2 and W3 industrial districts, the MXD-S mixed use district and one Odenton Town Center district, and as a conditional use in two commercial districts inside the BWI and Fort Meade growth area. The amendment also struck the proposed new definition, so the pause applies to the definition already in the code: a facility used primarily for the storage, management, processing and transmission of digital data.

The work is one page per site or operating campus in the county. The inputs are the amended bill and the county’s bill page; the date the bill became law and the effective date, confirmed with the council’s administrative officer; the project’s application log from the Office of Planning and Zoning, with each filing’s type and date; the parcel map, to test whether an expansion sits on adjacent or adjoining property; and the personal property tax lines in the underwriting model. The output answers four questions with a citation beside each: was a plan application of a type the bill names filed before the Effective Period, is this a future phase of an existing center on adjoining land, does the model carry the assessment reduction, and what does the tax line look like without it.

The reviewer is land use counsel for the filing questions and tax counsel or the controller for the assessment question, with the development lead signing the sheet. The approval gate: no letter of intent, deposit or budget for an Anne Arundel data center goes forward until the sheet shows the effective date in writing from the county and a tax case with the reduction removed. An assistant helps with the reading. The amended bill is eight pages in which struck text and new text sit side by side, and plain text extraction drops the strike marks, so the first pass has to be checked against the page images. Lining up the application log against the bill’s list of application types is work to hand off. Deciding whether a parcel is adjoining is not. PSV ran no model on any Anne Arundel site, tested no product, and promises no approval, tax outcome or saving.