New York Already Has a Statewide Data Center Moratorium. Buffalo Just Voted for a Longer One of Its Own.

New York has had a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers since July 14th — the first of its kind in the country. On September 30th, Buffalo's Common Council decided that wasn't enough for Buffalo specifically, and voted to adopt its own moratorium on top of it: two years, not one, covering new projects and any expansion of the data centers already there. Six of the council's nine members signed on as sponsors before the vote even happened, a margin that clears most veto-override thresholds if Mayor Sean Ryan decides not to sign it. This is what a state-level pause actually looks like once it reaches the ground: it doesn't resolve the fight in any one city, it just adds a floor under it.

What the state's own pause has done since July

Governor Kathy Hochul's Executive Order 62 pauses discretionary permitting by the state Department of Environmental Conservation for any data center that consumes, or could consume, 50 megawatts or more — new applications and anything already filed but not yet deemed complete. Data centers supporting manufacturing, research, education, or medical care are carved out; everything else in that size class is stuck until the state Department of Public Service finishes a Generic Environmental Impact Statement on the whole sector, a process the administration has said could take up to a year. That's the mechanism: not a ban, a freeze on one category of state permit until a study nobody has started yet gets finished.

The GEIS took its first real step on September 17th, when the Public Service Commission issued a positive declaration and adopted a draft scope for the review. The scope lists what the study will actually measure — air quality, water and groundwater, human health, impacts on disadvantaged communities, agricultural resources — which is a reasonable list and also a long one for a single environmental review to carry. Public comment on that draft scope runs through October 20th. Two and a half months into a moratorium billed as lasting up to a year, the state has a scope. It doesn't have findings, a draft statement, or anything close to a number a developer could plan around.

Then Hochul reached for the tax code

A day after the PSC adopted its scope, Hochul announced she's pursuing legislation to repeal the state sales tax exemption that data centers have used for years — companion bills A10216 and S9288, which would strike the specific tax law provisions exempting equipment purchased for internet data centers from state and local sales tax. The bills had been sitting in committee since introduction; Hochul's endorsement, folded into what her office called a community investment framework, is what gave them momentum. It also gave the industry a second front to fight on the same week the GEIS scope was still fresh. The Data Center Coalition's response leaned on the same numbers it always leans on — its members' facilities supported more than 227,000 jobs, $49 billion in state GDP, and $5.1 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2024 — and argued a moratorium paired with a tax repeal amounts to New York telling that investment to go somewhere else. Mike Elmendorf of the Associated General Contractors of New York State was blunter about it: the moratorium, he said, "effectively slams the door on those projects, and that sends a hell of a message to people looking to make huge investments in New York that maybe they should look twice." Carlo Scissura of the New York Building Congress made the same argument from the construction side, warning the pause would damage the state's workforce and its standing in what he called the industries of tomorrow.

Buffalo didn't wait to see how any of that resolves

The resolution the Common Council adopted, sponsored by North District member Joseph Golombek Jr., bars new data center projects in the city and blocks expansion of the ones already operating, for two years — long enough, in the resolution's own framing, for the city to actually rewrite its zoning and property tax code around a use its rules were never written to anticipate, rather than negotiate each project's terms from scratch. An amendment added the day of the vote requires a nine-member task force to do that rewriting during the pause, so the two years produces a rulebook rather than just running out. "I wouldn't be surprised if it passes nine to nothing," Golombek said ahead of the vote, "but that's the easy part." Mayor Ryan had floated his own one-year local moratorium earlier this year and set it aside once the state's EO 62 landed in July, on the reasonable assumption that a statewide pause covered the ground a city-level one would have. He's now reviewing a council resolution that runs a year longer than the one he'd shelved.

Why the state pause didn't cover the ground

The overlap looks redundant until you look at what each pause actually reaches. EO 62 freezes a specific category of state permit — the discretionary environmental approvals DEC issues, things like air and water permits for on-site generation or discharge. It says nothing about the local approvals a data center in Buffalo would still need regardless: zoning compliance, site plan review, a building permit. Those run through the city, and until Tuesday nothing at the city level stopped them. A project that couldn't get its DEC permit was frozen at the state's rung on the ladder; a project that didn't need one — or one whose developer wanted to bank a site-plan approval while the state process sat idle — could still work its way through Buffalo's own approval chain uninterrupted. The council closed that gap the direct way, by freezing its own permits too, and it did the state's math for it: two years is longer than the one the state's GEIS is supposed to take, which means Buffalo's pause will still be running even if New York finishes its study and lifts EO 62 on schedule.

The diligence angle

We've written before about Texas's own state-ordered permit freeze, which paused environmental permits statewide while regulators ran a data audit on an interconnection queue nobody fully trusted. The mechanism there was different — an audit with a compliance date, not an open-ended environmental study — but the underlying lesson is the same one Buffalo just demonstrated with its own vote: a state-level permitting pause and a municipality's separate approval chain are two different evidentiary rungs, and clearing one tells you nothing about the other. In a Kill Test, we treat state and local entitlement status as separate line items for exactly this reason — a site that's fully clear of a state-level freeze can still be dead on arrival if the specific city or county it sits in has adopted, or is about to adopt, its own building-level moratorium, and the reverse is just as true. Buffalo is only the latest city to prove the second half of that: Oakland's council takes up its own moratorium proposal on October 6th, Chicago pulled data centers out of its energy-benchmarking exemption this month while a separate moratorium bill sits parked in committee, and city-level pauses are now common enough across the Bay Area and the Northeast that assuming a state's posture describes a specific parcel's posture is no longer a safe shortcut anywhere.

GridPermit works Colorado, not New York, and nothing in Xcel Energy's territory looks like EO 62 or Buffalo's resolution today. But the direction of travel is the point, not the geography. As more states adopt their own version of a GEIS-style pause, the question a diligence process has to keep asking isn't just whether the state has acted — it's whether the specific municipality underneath that state has acted separately, on its own clock, for reasons the state process never touched. Buffalo just gave every developer with a New York site a very concrete answer: yes, and the local clock can run longer than the state's.