What local government is doing this week

Cary's town council holds a public hearing Thursday on an ordinance for an 18-month moratorium on new data-center and cryptocurrency-mining development applications, the same night it takes up an annexation hearing for 4312 Jacobs Creek Lane tied to a companion rezoning for up to 16 homes -- council plans to defer the annexation vote until it can act on both at once. Durham County commissioners opened their own hearing Monday on a nine-month version, timed to run through May 2027 to match a hold already in place in the City of Durham, with a carve-out for facilities under 100,000 square feet so Research Triangle Park and Treyburn Industrial Park projects already underway aren't caught up in it.

Both towns are behind the curve, not ahead of it. A staff briefing to Morrisville's council, the same Thursday as Cary's hearing, lays out just how far this has spread: moratoriums already adopted in Chatham County, Orange County, Hillsborough, the City of Durham, Apex, Wendell and Holly Springs, with Durham County and Lee County rewriting their ordinances outright. Morrisville itself isn't proposing to join them yet -- the item is a fact-finding briefing, not a vote -- but the subject has gone from a handful of towns in the spring to most of the region's local governments by the end of August.

The week's other land-use story is in Apex, where Tuesday's council meeting carries five annexation hearings and two rezonings, including a paired case at 3305 Olive Chapel Road heard together, plus a batch of Unified Development Ordinance text amendments. One scheduled rezoning, Case 26CZ06 for Apex Light Industrial Phase III, was pulled before the meeting; the town says a new hearing date will be advertised, usually a sign the applicant needed more time. The meeting opens with an Annual Raksha Bandhan ceremony hosted with the local Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh chapter.

The two data-center hearings, in Cary and Durham County, are the ones worth attending if you can only make one: both take public comment on rules that would freeze new applications while staff writes standards from scratch.

22 boards meet across 14 governments, with 133 agenda items on file.