Maine's Governor Vetoed a Data Center Ban to Save One Mill Town's Project. Seven Weeks Later, the Project Was Dead Anyway.

The Androscoggin Mill in Jay, Maine ran paper through its machines for generations before it finally shut down for good in 2023. By one local accounting, the mill's long decline cost the area more than a thousand jobs over the years leading up to that closure, in a town that had built much of its identity and its tax base around one employer nobody expected to leave. For two years, the question hanging over Jay was what, if anything, would ever fill a paper mill that size again. The answer that showed up was a data center.

The pitch came from a Portland real estate company, Boulos Co., working through an entity called JGT2 Redevelopment: a $550 million campus built around a data center operator, Sentinel Data Centers, and an existing 82-megawatt power agreement with Central Maine Power left over from the mill's own enormous appetite for electricity. The jobs numbers depended on who was doing the counting. Gov. Janet Mills would later cite more than 800 construction jobs and at least 100 permanent, high-paying ones; the developer's own account put the permanent figure closer to 125 to 150. Either way, in a town that had just lost its biggest employer, it was the kind of number that changes how a public meeting goes.

It also landed in the middle of a fight that had nothing to do with Jay specifically. Maine's Legislature was moving a bill, LD 307, that would have made the state the first in the country with a statewide data center moratorium: an 18-month pause on any new facility over 20 megawatts, driven by the same concerns about electricity rates and water use showing up in statehouses nationwide. On April 14th, lawmakers passed it with bipartisan support and no exemption for Jay. The developer didn't wait to see what that meant for the project. The next day, according to emails the Bangor Daily News later obtained, the developer's team emailed a draft letter of support for a veto to local and union contacts -- groundwork reporters say had been underway for weeks before the governor said anything publicly.

A veto built with the developer's help

Mills vetoed the bill on April 24th, and her message leaned almost entirely on Jay. The mill's 2023 closure, she wrote, had been devastating for the local economy, and she wasn't willing to sign a bill that blocked its replacement. She wasn't rejecting the idea of a pause outright -- she said a moratorium made sense given what hyperscale data centers were doing to electricity rates and the environment elsewhere -- just not one written broadly enough to stop this specific deal. Lawmakers tried to override her five days later and came up five votes short, 72-65. She followed up with an executive order creating a data center advisory council and signed a separate bill barring data centers from the state's business tax incentive programs. That's worth saying plainly, because it cuts against the easy version of this story: this wasn't a governor waving the entire industry through. It was a governor who decided one project, by name, was worth protecting, with a developer's own outreach helping make that case to her.

Not everyone who might have overridden her agreed. Troy Jackson, the former Senate president now running for governor, called the jobs argument hollow at a candidate forum. "It's a false narrative what she's telling us about jobs," he said, arguing he would have signed the moratorium and found Jay a different path forward. "She's concerned more about big business than she is about workers." It's a fair question to ask of any exemption built this specifically around one deal: whose protection is it actually buying, and for how long?

Seven weeks after the veto held, on June 12th, Sentinel Data Centers told Jay officials it no longer intended to move forward. JGT2 said it was now talking to other potential partners, with nothing new settled. A spokesperson for Mills said the governor was disappointed that "the project in Jay, with all the jobs and significant tax benefits it would provide the community, is on hold." I think that sentence is where this whole fight actually lands. The governor spent real political capital, vetoed a bipartisan bill, and absorbed a public fight over a jobs number that evaporated two months later regardless. The project the veto was written to save is, as of this writing, not happening, and the 82 megawatts of power it was supposed to use are sitting unclaimed.

Without one rule, Maine got two dozen

While Augusta argued over Jay, the rest of Maine wasn't waiting for Augusta to finish. Bangor's city council fast-tracked a six-month freeze on new data center development in mid-April, before the statewide bill had even reached the governor's desk. Brunswick and Scarborough adopted their own moratoriums in June. By late October, an analysis by The Maine Monitor, cited by the Bangor Daily News, counted at least 21 Maine municipalities that had already passed some version of a data center ordinance -- most of them, by the paper's own account, aimed at projects that don't exist yet and may never materialize at all.

Election Day added more. Peru's voters approved a 180-day moratorium, 578 to 182. Wiscasset passed a six-month pause, 1,363 to 713. Wells approved its own 180-day moratorium on facilities of 100,000 square feet or larger, written to apply retroactively to anything proposed since mid-June, by roughly 82% of the vote. Eliot and Sabattus passed moratoriums of their own, Sabattus's running until May 2027. North Berwick's measure -- an outright ban on any data center of 25,000 square feet or more -- is reported by most outlets and ballot trackers as passing by a wide margin, though one wire account has it failing by a similar margin in the other direction. I couldn't fully reconcile the two before publishing, so I'm flagging the disagreement rather than picking whichever number reads better. None of this happened in isolation. It was part of a nationwide sweep GridPermit has already covered in depth, where Ballotpedia counted 41 local data center measures across ten states on the same day, nearly all of them tightening the rules.

Here's the diligence problem sitting underneath all of it. Maine's Legislature tried to hand developers one statewide answer: one threshold, one timeline, one set of rules to clear before building anywhere in the state. That attempt died over a single carve-out fight, and in its place Maine now has more than two dozen separate local answers, each with its own square-footage or megawatt threshold, its own effective date -- some retroactive, some not -- and its own expiration, if it expires at all. A site that clears Jay's rules tells a developer nothing about whether it clears Wells's, or Wiscasset's, or whatever North Berwick's actually turns out to be. That's exactly the layer GridPermit's own evidence ladder is built to catch before real money goes into a site: a statewide law, or the absence of one, is a single data point, not the answer, and the town-level ordinance is very often the one that actually governs. Mills vetoed a bill specifically to spare one project the kind of blanket rule she worried would kill it. What Maine got instead is two dozen different versions of exactly that risk, spread across the map, and the one project the veto was built to save isn't even standing anymore.