SANFORD — The City Council on Tuesday night approved a three-month emergency moratorium on data centers, temporarily stopping a proposal for a 1,000-acre center along the Mousam River.

The council voted unanimously in favor of the 91-day moratorium, which puts a pause on the acceptance, approval or issuance of permits for any large scale data center proposal in the city. The moratorium takes effect immediately and will remain in place until Aug. 12. 

At the meeting, City Manager Steven Buck said there are plans to establish a task force dedicated to reviewing residents’ concerns and making recommendations for ordinance amendments on municipal regulations for data centers.

After Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a temporary statewide ban on data centers, several cities and towns — including Sanford — responded by introducing their own emergency moratoriums.

There have been at least eight data centers proposed across Maine, though some have been withdrawn. One that’s still on the table is the Sanford Woods Industrial and Technical Campus, which would cover about 1,000 acres of land along and near the Mousam River. 

At the council’s prior meeting on May 5, Sanford Mayor Becky Brink criticized Mills’ veto and said the city government would take action on its own. 

“I feel like the state let us down,” she said. “We as a city — and all of us have spoken — we are going to protect Sanford.”

Randy Gibbs, the primary developer behind the project, has been outspoken about the benefits he says the data center would bring to the city. In a phone call before Tuesday night’s vote, Gibbs said he supported the moratorium.

“A moratorium would give us an opportunity to inform the committee and the community as a whole as to what the data center portion of our project is all about,” he said. “We fully welcome the opportunity to speak to whatever committee or task force is created to look into the impact of a data center in Sanford.”

Buck also read a letter from Gibbs at the meeting Tuesday night in which he continued to offer support for the emergency moratorium.

“We intend to develop Sanford Woods responsibly,” it read. “We would rather meet a high bar than operate in an undefined one.”

Developers told Maine lawmakers earlier this year that the project would be part of a larger campus that could be fully isolated from the broader electrical grid and may include industrial agriculture, cold storage and more.

But many Sanford residents have expressed opposition to the proposal, citing concerns over data centers’ significant use of water and energy.

One group, the Sanford Clean Water & Air Coalition, was formed by residents in opposition to a proposed wastewater gasification plant and has also spoken out against the Sanford Woods project.

In a Thursday Facebook post, the group wrote, “Once 1,000+ acres of woods are cleared, we do not get that back. … Once Sanford becomes the testing ground for a massive data center and power generation campus, we cannot simply undo it.”

Jordan Matthews, a member of the coalition, said the moratorium was “a step in the right direction.”

“We definitely need more to protect us, and at the end of the day, many of us are hoping the City Council will eventually establish a total ban,” she said. “We want the moratorium to serve the goal of protecting the people of Sanford, not just finding a means of passage and permitting a data center.”

The group also submitted its own proposal for moratorium language earlier this month. Matthews said she hoped the City Council would consider adopting it in a possible future moratorium.

Buck said at Tuesday night’s meeting that the emergency moratorium would most likely not give a task force enough time to properly review possible regulations. He said the emergency moratorium “was the fastest one the council could enact today,” and that it gave the council the ability to eventually establish a 180-day pause.

“The 91 days would likely not be sufficient, so we’ll have to have a longer period of time,” Buck said. “We would ask the City Council to adopt a full ordinance at a later date.”