The L.D. 307 veto message is the April 24, 2026 document in which Maine Governor Janet T. Mills (D-Maine) returned L.D. 307 — a bill that would have established a Maine Data Center Coordination Council and imposed a temporary moratorium on large data centers — to the Legislature unsigned. Mills states that she supports the bill's goals and the principle of a moratorium, and will pursue the coordination work by executive order, but rejects the bill as enacted because it does not exempt a $550 million data-center redevelopment of the former Androscoggin Mill site in Jay, Maine. The full text of the bill and its political fight are covered on L.D. 307 — Maine Data Center Coordination Council and Temporary Limitation.
The message is dated April 24, 2026 and is published at https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/official_documents/veto_messages/2026-04-ld-307-act-establish-maine-data-center-coordination.
What L.D. 307 would have done
L.D. 307 would have established a 13-member Maine Data Center Coordination Council to study siting and prepare a report due February 1, 2027, and would have imposed a moratorium on municipal and state permitting of data centers of 20 MW or more until November 1, 2027. The bill stated its purposes as protecting ratepayers, maintaining grid reliability, minimizing environmental impacts, and ensuring "responsible and appropriately sited economic development." Had it become law, Maine would have been the first U.S. state to impose a state-wide data-center moratorium.
Summary of the veto message
Positions Mills supports
Mills expresses support for the council and its goals, stating that she will establish a commission by executive order to pursue the same coordination work the bill envisioned. She endorses the principle of a moratorium, writing that "A moratorium is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates." She also states that the planning work should begin promptly: "I believe this work should commence without delay."
Reasons for rejecting the bill
The central objection is the bill's failure to exempt the Jay project. As amended, L.D. 307 did not carve out the $550 million data-center redevelopment of the former Androscoggin Mill site in Jay, and Mills states that she "would have signed this bill if it had included" the exemption.
Mills frames the local political stakes around the closure of the Androscoggin Mill in 2023, which she says "dealt a devastating blow" to Jay and Franklin County. She notes that the Town of Jay, the Franklin County Commissioners, and the regional Chamber of Commerce all wrote to her supporting the project's exemption. The message cites the project's claimed economic value — expected 800-plus construction jobs, 100-plus permanent jobs, and "substantial property tax revenue" — and its claimed environmental fit as a brownfield site with existing industrial buildings, water, and electrical infrastructure ("to avoid the adverse impacts cited in the bill, including impacts to ratepayers").
Mills also points to an existing regulatory floor, noting that any Maine data center remains subject to federal and state energy interconnection requirements and to Maine's "stringent and comprehensive environmental permitting standards," language that frames the moratorium as partly redundant against those existing requirements.
Next steps in the message
Mills urges the Legislature to sustain the veto, noting that Maine requires two-thirds of both chambers to override. She states that she will issue an executive order establishing a coordination commission to do the council's work without the moratorium. At the time of the veto, the Jay project remained under contract and partially permitted.
Context and reception
The episode is the first state-level data-center moratorium effort in the U.S.; even vetoed, the bill combines a state-wide pause, a study commission, and a contested carve-out for a specific project. The question of whether AI infrastructure can substitute for legacy industrial activity in distressed regions is the decisive political variable in the Jay case. Comparable trade-offs in other jurisdictions — including the Festus, Missouri recall and the Apex, North Carolina moratorium — are discussed in Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics. Mills's stated intent to do most of the bill's work via executive order is an instance of substituting unilateral executive action for failed legislation: a governor can convene a coordination commission without legislative passage, though such a commission carries no moratorium.
As a primary text, the veto message is the authoritative record of the executive's reasoning, and the document is likely to be cited or distinguished in later state-level data-center disputes.
Confidence is high for the contents of the message, which is a primary text, and medium for the political consequences and the likelihood of an override, which depend on legislative composition.
Relationships
- instance-of: Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics — first state-level moratorium episode.
- supports: L.D. 307 — Maine Data Center Coordination Council and Temporary Limitation — primary text for that page.
- related: Janet Mills, AI Environmental Impact, Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics, Nuclear PPAs for AI, Circular Financing in AI.
- contradicts: strong-form pro-data-center economic development framings — Mills's veto is at the same time pro-moratorium-in-principle and pro-individual-project, illustrating the carve-out politics.