WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY: Good afternoon and happy October, readers! 🍁🎃 Fat Bear Week might be over, but fall animal fun has just begun. The National Park Service is holding what it has called “Chunky Puppy Day”
Page F4From§Eachthe early bird edition — 1 October 2026
Trump says Americans should want a data center nearby; his own county voted 6-0 to freeze one.
As it ran on the front
The chief laid the parts on the table the way a county always could: a zoning ordinance, a vote count, a calendar page most commissions leave stacked on a shelf. Palm Beach County, home to the president's own Mar-a-Lago, voted 6-0 last Thursday to freeze new large-scale data centers — the kind that draw at least 50 megawatts of power — for one year. The president has said every American should want a data center in their town. Six commissioners in his own backyard decided they did not want one more before anyone wrote down the rules.
The planner studied the assembly piece by piece. Nothing here was new. A moratorium is the oldest brake in the drawer, sitting in the same code book every county already owns, right next to building permits and setback lines. Palm Beach didn't ask Tallahassee for permission. It didn't wait for Congress. It pulled the tool out, turned it once, and the construction stopped.…
…(cont) The tinkerer took the mechanism apart to see why it had already been tried elsewhere. On September 28, The Hill reported the backlash to data centers has grown large enough that more Americans now oppose them than fear artificial intelligence itself — even though the industry has a real defense ready, that these buildings use less water than the nation's golf courses. The defense is true. It answers water.
The muscle wrecked the bad structure first: the idea that a county has to wait on a statehouse or on Congress for a new law before it can slow a construction crew down. It doesn't. The authority was already poured into the foundation years before anyone broke ground on a server farm.
The pilot flew it home. A Washington Examiner energy newsletter spent September 15 previewing a clean-energy conference and October 1 previewing a national park puppy livestream — a full accounting of what the industry's friendliest press corps had to say about a county stopping the bulldozers. That accounting is empty. The silence is the receipt. Every other town still has the same tool sitting in the same drawer, waiting for a commission with the nerve to open it.
“This is the oldest con in the book: tell every town it needs one of these, then watch the one town that actually matters to the guy in charge vote it down 6-0 without so much as a phone call to Tallahassee. The tool was sitting in every county's drawer this whole time — it just took Mar-a-Lago's own backyard to finally pick it up.”
“Data centers use less water than golf courses — that's not spin, that's in the paper — and there's little evidence yet they're driving anybody's bill up. A one-year pause isn't a ban, it's just a year without building in a market that moves by the quarter — did I say that? That doesn't sound like me.”
The receipts
President Donald Trump has said every American should want a data center in their town. But his home county in Florida just voted to block them. In a 6-0 vote, commissioners in Palm Beach County—home to the president's luxurious private club and second residence, Mar-a-Lago— voted to enact a one-year moratorium on the construction of new…
The data center backlash is intensifying. In fact, more Americans now oppose data centers than fear AI. This is true even though tech companies have plausible defenses to much of the backlash.
· How data centers may use forever chemicals from the morgue, 18 Sep 2026
· Daily on Energy: Duke Energy CEO talks data center costs from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.