The township now prohibits them in every commercial, business and industrial zone. No data center was ever proposed here — but two neighboring towns have already had the fight.
On Aug. 24, the East Brunswick Township Council voted 4–0 to ban data centers.
The vote took about ninety seconds. Nobody from the public spoke at the hearing. If you were watching, you might reasonably have wondered what had just happened, and why a town with no data center proposal was banning something nobody had asked to build.
Here’s the plain-English version.
What the township actually banned
Ordinance 26-21 does two things. It adds a definition of “data center” to East Brunswick’s zoning code, and it lists data centers as a prohibited use in twenty separate zoning districts — effectively every commercial, business and industrial zone in town.
The definition is deliberately wide. It covers what most people picture — a warehouse full of servers — but the ordinance says it should be “construed broadly,” and specifically names hyperscale facilities, colocation facilities, cloud computing infrastructure, cryptocurrency mining operations and artificial intelligence processing facilities, “regardless of how such facility is labeled or described.”
It applies to buildings “characterized by large-scale or small-scale building footprints.” There is no minimum size, no server count, no electricity threshold. That breadth became the main point of disagreement on the council, and we’ll come back to it.
The ordinance takes effect 20 days after publication.
Why a town with no proposal is banning them
East Brunswick has no data center application, no pending inquiry, and — as council members noted in July — very little vacant land. Any data center here would have to replace something else.
But look one town over in either direction.
In New Brunswick, a 27,000-square-foot data center was proposed at 100 Jersey Avenue. The City Council rejected it unanimously on Feb. 18 after sustained public opposition.
In South Brunswick, a data center was approved in May 2025 on a 143-acre segment of the former Princeton Nurseries site. Residents later circulated a petition trying to stop it.
East Brunswick is now roughly the 36th New Jersey municipality to adopt a prohibition, according to the Climate Revolution Action Network. North Brunswick and Stafford Township passed bans the same night.
Council President Dana Zimbicki framed it in July as a holding action: “What we’re looking to do with this ordinance is to sort of put a pause on this until state regulations and legislation catches up.”
The part that shows up on your electric bill
This is why data centers became a New Jersey political issue rather than a zoning curiosity.
Electricity across the regional grid is bought through an annual auction. The price of guaranteeing future power supply has gone nearly vertical — from about $29 per megawatt-day two years ago to $329 for the year beginning this June. Analysts have attributed roughly 63% of one of those jumps to demand from data centers.
You already felt it. New Jersey electric rates rose about 20% on June 1, 2025 — roughly $20 a month on a typical bill. Rates are up about 55% since 2020. The state already hosts about 100 data centers.
Trenton has moved on this. Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced a statewide data center plan in May and signed an energy package in July that includes a law requiring large data centers to pay for their own power and grid infrastructure rather than spreading it across everyone’s bills. East Brunswick’s ordinance cites that work — and notes pointedly that the promised state help for municipalities “will take time to be implemented.”
That’s the argument for acting locally now rather than waiting.
What changed between July and August
Ordinance 26-21 was introduced on July 27. According to TAPinto East Brunswick, which covered that meeting, it passed introduction 4–1, with Councilman James Wendell voting no.
Wendell’s objection, as reported, wasn’t that data centers should be welcome. It was that the definition was too loose. He asked whether an office building, a computer company or an alarm-monitoring business with a lot of servers could get caught by it, and warned the wording “could expose the township to legal challenges.” He asked for a specialist to review it.
His words at the time: “I’m not saying not to do it. I’m saying that it needs to be much more tightly defined.”
Then something happened that’s easy to miss.
Before the final vote on Aug. 24, Zimbicki moved to amend the ordinance from the floor. The definition had described a facility used “primarily” for storing and processing data. The amendment changed that to “principal use,” to match the township’s land use code.
That sounds like housekeeping. It isn’t quite. “Principal use” is a defined term in New Jersey zoning — it has settled meaning, and it’s the standard tool for distinguishing what a building is for from what merely happens inside it. It is, fairly directly, an answer to the concern Wendell raised: an office building with a server room has a principal use of offices.
Zimbicki said the wording had also been addressed at the Planning Board, and called the packet version “a mistake when it got printed on the agenda.”
Wendell voted yes on the amendment, and yes on the ordinance. He did not comment either way.
We’re not going to characterize that as a reversal. The official minutes from July 27 exist only as scanned images with no searchable text, so the only account of that vote and his reasoning is a contemporaneous news report. What the primary record shows is this: a council member raised a specific objection about definitional breadth, the ordinance was amended on precisely that point, and he then voted for it. That reading is at least as well supported as any other — and worth asking him about directly.
The Planning Board’s quiet but decisive role
The public hearing was originally scheduled for Aug. 10. It didn’t happen — the ordinance wasn’t on that agenda at all.
The reason is a state law requirement: a zoning ordinance has to go to the Planning Board for a written report on whether it fits the township’s master plan before the council can hold its hearing. The Planning Board took it up on Aug. 12 — two days after the original hearing date.
That’s why the vote moved to Aug. 24. It wasn’t a delay; it was the process working.
The Planning Board’s report itself isn’t public yet — minutes for that meeting hadn’t been posted as of this week. It’s worth reading when it appears, because it’s the township’s own planning judgment on whether the ordinance holds together.
Where the ban may not reach
Here is the question we went looking for, and the honest answer turned out to be more reassuring than we expected.
New Jersey law lets a town designate a redevelopment area and then adopt a redevelopment plan that overrides the ordinary zoning code. Environmental groups have flagged that statewide as a route around local bans, and it isn’t hypothetical — the New Brunswick data center rejected in February was proposed inside a redevelopment area.
East Brunswick has active redevelopment along Route 18. So does the ban reach it?
Mostly, yes. When East Brunswick set up those projects, it did it by creating actual zoning districts on the zoning map — MXD, MXD-2, MXD-3, MSMXD and others. Ordinance 26-21 lists every one of them. The mixed-use zones where Vermella, Legacy Place and the Brunswick Square area sit are inside the prohibition, not outside it.
What remains open is narrower. If the township adopts or amends a redevelopment plan in the future, state law requires that plan to state whether it overrides zoning or simply layers on top of it. Whether a future plan would carry the data center prohibition forward is a live question — but it’s a question about future decisions, not a hole in what was passed.
There’s a notable wrinkle. The chairman of the East Brunswick Redevelopment Agency is Councilman James Wendell — the same member who pressed hardest on the ordinance’s legal durability. Mayor Brad Cohen and Councilwoman Dana Winston also sit on the Agency. The people best positioned to answer this question are the people who wrote the ordinance.
Worth watching: the Agency’s Aug. 17 agenda — one week before the council vote — included a presentation on something called “Area 1A” by an outside planning firm. Minutes aren’t posted yet.
The lawsuits, and why East Brunswick’s position looks different
Data center developers are suing New Jersey towns over these bans. Monroe Township faces a $300 million complaint that argues, among other things, that banning data centers violates the First Amendment — because “data centers are a medium of expression.” Montgomery Township was sued for a similar amount by a developer that says the town acted on “public hysteria” rather than sound planning. Andover Township was sued in July. No court has ruled yet.
East Brunswick’s exposure looks lower. Each of those towns was sued by a developer with a specific property in play — in Montgomery’s case, a site plan declared complete days before the ban passed. East Brunswick has no such applicant. And the township did the procedural work: that Planning Board consistency review is exactly the “sound land use planning” record those lawsuits claim is missing elsewhere.
One more piece of context
This council has pulled an ordinance before when the legal ground looked shaky.
In October 2025 it passed a sweeping drone ordinance on first reading, 5–0, without discussion. After Eyes on EB reported that federal and state law largely reserve airspace regulation to the FAA, and drone-policy advocates brought lawyers into the conversation, Mayor Cohen announced there would be no second reading. He said the ordinance “as it was written was a little bit too broad.”
We raise it because it’s the closest local precedent for what Wendell was arguing about in July — and because it shows this council does revisit ordinances when the objection is substantive. Zimbicki noted in July that the council can amend or repeal this one as state policy develops.
What to watch
- The Planning Board’s Aug. 12 minutes, when posted — the consistency report is the township’s own assessment of the ordinance
- The Redevelopment Agency, and whether any future plan carries the prohibition forward
- The three lawsuits. A ruling against any of those towns is a signal for every town that has passed one of these
- Your electric bill. The capacity price for the year beginning this June is already locked in
Sources: East Brunswick Township Council agenda packets, July 27 and Aug. 24, 2026; Township Council meeting video, Aug. 24, 2026 (EBTV); East Brunswick Planning Board agenda, Aug. 12, 2026; East Brunswick Redevelopment Agency agenda and minutes, 2026; East Brunswick Code Chapter 228; Office of the Governor, May 27 and July 7, 2026; New Jersey Monitor; TAPinto East Brunswick; Climate Revolution Action Network NJ; PJM capacity auction data as compiled by Pashman Stein Walder Hayden.
