Updated Sept. 8, 2026: Resolution 395 unanimously approved.

No data-center campus has been proposed in Easton or Talbot County. Resolution 395 was unanimously approved Sept. 8 for a 12-month pause while officials write zoning with Easton — still no campus on a map. The Shore already pays into a regional grid build driven largely by load elsewhere.

Local process: Resolution 395, introduced August 11 and unanimously approved Sept. 8, pauses processing of any future application for 12 months while officials write zoning with Easton. Easton's council had already told its lawyers to draft a one-year town moratorium. Council also awarded a $243,600 contract on August 11 to Vision Planning and Consulting to rewrite the Comprehensive Water and Sewer Plan — the same document that carries Lakeside — so cooling and setback conditions can sit beside sewer map decisions.

Grid costs (OPC / FERC): Maryland sits in PJM. The Office of People's Counsel's May 7, 2026 FERC complaint (docket EL26-63, amended May 22) challenges PJM's hybrid cost-allocation rules — 50 percent load-ratio share, 50 percent power-flow DFAX — for three Regional Transmission Expansion Plan windows totaling about $22 billion (2022 Window 3, 2024 Window 1, 2025 Window 1), overwhelmingly for data-center load. Maryland customers were assigned about $2 billion in capital costs — about $1.6 billion on bills over ten years. That $1.6 billion is mostly BGE and Pepco: about $345 per average residential customer statewide. Shore numbers differ. OPC's Delmarva Power estimate is about $205 over ten years for an average residential customer (~$20 a year); Choptank Electric, the co-op that covers much of Talbot, is about $508 over ten years (~$50 a year). A related OPC explainer also cites almost $12 billion advanced in 2024–25 alone, mostly for Northern Virginia, with about $1.3 billion assigned to Maryland — a narrower window, not a rival total. OPC asks FERC to send those costs to the zone where the halls sit (Dominion's Virginia zone) or charge the large loads directly.

State statutes: The Next Generation Energy Act of 2025 (SB937, Chapter 625) created a "large load customer" class in Public Utilities Article §4-212: more than 100 megawatts of monthly maximum demand and a load factor over 80 percent, plus a special electricity rate so "residential retail electric customers in the State should not bear the financial risks" of those interconnections. The statute does not say "data center." The 2026 Utility RELIEF Act (HB1532) lowered that threshold to 25 megawatts and a 60 percent load factor and added a PSC large-load registry. Hosting a campus here, if one is ever filed, is how Talbot would put those statutes on this side of the Bay instead of only paying for Virginia.

Water, land, peers: A year of zoning with Easton is the chance to require closed-loop or air cooling and setbacks that keep Harris Creek and the Tred Avon oyster sanctuaries off any discharge map. Queen Anne's adopted a 12-month pause. Longer pauses this year are across the Bay (Prince George's two years, Montgomery 18 months, others studying bans) — not a Shore bloc.

Schools and tax base: TCPS’s approved FY27 unrestricted operating budget is supported by about $84.6 million in revenue after a roughly $10.4 million funding gap, per the district’s June budget release. There is no data-center tax base today. A campus would be one of the few commercial taxpayers large enough to grow the local share without another rate fight. A 2026 bill (SB427/HB1595), sponsored by Sen. Karen Lewis Young, would have let counties set a special personal-property subclass for data centers of up to two-and-a-half times the real-property rate; it was not enacted. Maryland's general personal-property cap in §6-302 is not a data-center class. Any tax bargain has to be written in local law, not assumed from a bill that did not pass. Full briefing is on the Data-center page.