Janet Mills is the Democratic Governor of Maine and a candidate in the 2026 U.S. Senate primary. On April 24, 2026 she vetoed L.D. 307, legislation that would have made Maine the first U.S. state to impose a state-wide moratorium on data-center construction, citing the bill's failure to exempt a planned project in a former mill town.
Roles
Governor of Maine (Democratic). Candidate in the 2026 U.S. Senate primary.
Data-center moratorium veto (L.D. 307)
Mills vetoed L.D. 307 on April 24, 2026. The bill would have made Maine the first U.S. state to impose a state-wide moratorium on data-center permitting (for projects of 20 MW or more) until November 2027, and would have established a 13-member coordination council. Her stated reason for the veto was the bill's failure to exempt a planned $550M project on the former Androscoggin Mill site in Jay, Maine.
In her veto message (L.D. 307 Veto Message — Gov. Janet T. Mills (Maine)), Mills stated that she supports the principle of a moratorium and the coordination council, and that she intended to pursue both through executive order. The message states: "I supported the exemption and would have signed this bill if it had included it." (Source: nytimes.com)
The veto was the first instance of a U.S. governor weighing a state-wide data-center moratorium against AI-driven economic-development arguments. It is connected to the politics of data-center siting, grid impact, and water use (AI Environmental Impact). The dispute over data-center siting policy coincided with reported financial strain on hyperscale data-center finance: in the same week, the Wall Street Journal reported that JPMorgan and other banks had struggled to syndicate billions of dollars in loans tied to Oracle data-center leases in Texas and Wisconsin (Source: wsj.com).