Martino di Bartolomeo
Saint Benedict Presenting his Rule to Benedictine and Cistercian Monks
in a Historiated Initial “O” from a Choirbook
(1394/95)

"…Moritoria are not regulatory achievements and do not deserve to be mistaken for them."

The Washington State Democratic Party approved a platform plank at their recent state convention that calls for a one-year moratorium on all data center construction in the state. I considered this plank extremely self-contradictory and a clear threat to Prosperity, especially since the party didn’t also immediately declare itself Internet Free and revert to operating as it did in the nineteen-sixties, before the intertubes connected everyone and everything. Apparently, some political consulting firm, trolling around for hot issues Democratic candidates could coalesce voters on, advised that an anti-data center perspective could attract otherwise indifferent voters to the cause, whatever that was. Data centers have become the favorite whipping boys of pretty nearly everybody, even though reliable sources suggest that most of the economic activity in the nation over the past few years has stemmed in some way from data center development. Those who insist that we must mature by despising our family of origin might easily explain this data center revulsion as a normal stage of emotional development, roughly akin to turning fifteen years old. It feels as contentious.

Prominent among the proposals for what to do about data centers stands the idea that they might be discouraged by municipalities simply declaring Moratoria on their development. And many have. The activists who have swarmed around this issue like proverbial flies have taken to standing before their county commissions and asking for what they clearly believe to be a reasonable give. “Just” delay development for a year so that the governing rules might be made clear. This ask begs the notion that those regulations aren’t already clear, as if the state, which grants permission for data centers to operate, doesn’t already have mature regulatory processes honed by time and informed iteration. The self-proclaimed activists, by which I mean passive-aggressivists, don’t seem to acknowledge the existence of what anyone might call mature regulations, and insist upon reinventing wheels. They accuse rather than inquire, and attempt to indict by innuendo. They ask when did that data center developer stop trying to destroy every aquifer they ever encountered, when no data center developer was ever permitted to threaten an aquifer here, and never could be.

The municipalities exhorted to declare these Moratoria don’t necessarily hold the authority to declare them and make them stick without incurring legal challenges and costs. There are established rules for legally permitting data center activity. If the property in question was legally purchased, the state holds the authority to permit the proposed economic activity, working in concert with the affected county development authority. The county cannot be capricious in its administration of permitting activity. If normal and customary operations are proposed, the county cannot respond by enforcing especially onerous conditions on the proposing company. Prejudicial administration can create costly legal challenges. In practice, the proposing company and the county collaborate (not collude) to successfully navigate the permitting process. This relationship is critical to the viability of the resulting working relationship, which both intend to be long and mutually lucrative. Prosperity depends upon cooperation more than confrontation. The county should expect straightforward answers to their hard questions without presupposing nefarious intentions.

Moritoria shortcut the regular ‘due’ process. They seem to presuppose nefarious intentions. Further, they propose the most unlikely outcome, that regulation might be meaningfully improved through mere delay. In practice, regulatory changes require more than a year’s gestation period and also expend significant funding and political capital to be successfully implemented. In our valley, a year’s Moritorium in developing our proposed data center might well ultimately result in our state, county, schools, and others forfeiting more than seventy million dollars in much-needed tax revenues. The most likely effect of declaring a one-year moratorium on developing our data center would be to render our local regulatory environment toxic, unpredictable, and politically volatile, not the signal a county needs in the state ranked 45th in state tax competitiveness, due to our onerous gross receipts-based Business and Occupation Tax and other regressive targeted tax burdens on business inputs. Worst case scenario, the data center would decide to just go build twenty miles down the road where that county won’t try to impose an illegal moratorium on their compliant operation.

The opponents dress themselves up as saviors of the Earth, though they more closely resemble environmental ignoramuses. It’s more effective to stand aghast over a proposed million-gallon water use if you don’t acknowledge that the irrigation system the data center replaces used three to five times more, and much less responsibly. Heu and cry about excessive electrical demand more easily outrages those who don’t know how our electrical infrastructure was originally developed and might be affordably and renewably improved for our future. To protest, one must emphasize the worst from the past, regardless of context or extenuating circumstances, or later advancements in the science and practice, and propose a simple-seeming solution, to simply declare to do nothing, to not approve the proposal for no particular reason, just vague innuendos that the present insurmountable difficulties might be easily resolved after a year’s cooling-off period. This proposal amounts to a fantasy. Moratoria are, quite literally, nothings. They threaten Prosperity by proposing that fantasy replace serious consideration. They deny that we have already proven ourselves capable of successfully regulating data center operations, and that we might be capable of continuing to learn better in practice rather than idle theory.

I have not so far infected my largely philosophical consideration of Prosperity with too many real-world examples, but I will later this morning stand before our County Commission and contend that the Moritorium proposers are perhaps well-intended, but delusional threats to our future Prosperity and deserve to be respectfully ignored. They have been heard, whether or not they believe they have been heard, and their proposal was wanting and well worthy of rejecting. That’s not politically nothing, but Moratoria are not regulatory achievements and do not deserve to be mistaken for them.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz