A Fort Wayne City Council member plans to introduce an ordinance Tuesday that would block approval of any new data center projects inside the city for 365 days, according to WPTA’s reporting on the filing. The proposal would halt council sign-off on new sites while the Department of Planning Services drafts a comprehensive development standard for the industry.
The moratorium would not touch the Google data center already under construction in southeast Fort Wayne. It would apply to everything that comes after.
What the ordinance actually does
The one-year window is a pause on approvals, not a ban on the industry. The ordinance directs Planning Services to build a data center development standard from scratch and asks other city bodies to hold off on new approvals until that framework exists. The Google project underway in southeast Fort Wayne is explicitly carved out, which matters because vested projects are usually the flashpoint in these fights.
In the WPTA account, the mechanism is straightforward: council stops saying yes to new sites for a year while staff writes rules the city does not currently have. That is the entire move…