Colfax Township has drawn a clear line in the sand on data center development — at least for the next twelve months. The township’s Board of Trustees adopted a resolution on March 18th establishing a one-year moratorium on data centers, effectively pausing all permitting, consideration, approval, location, erection, construction, review, and installation of data center facilities within the township while officials work to develop regulations specifically governing that type of development.
The moratorium is not a permanent ban. It is a deliberate pause — a recognition that the township does not yet have the regulatory framework in place to make informed, defensible decisions about data center development, and that committing to specific projects before those rules exist would put the community in a difficult position down the road.
Copies of the moratorium resolution are available for public review at the Colfax Township Hall at 177 North Barrie Road in Bad Axe during regular business hours. The township can also be reached by phone at 989-269-2271 or through its website at www.colfaxtwp-huron.com.
Why the Moratorium Was Necessary
Data center development has been moving fast across Michigan’s Thumb region, and the pace of that movement has consistently outrun the regulatory capacity of the small townships where developers are showing the most interest. Large parcels of available agricultural land, proximity to transmission infrastructure, and relatively low land costs have made rural Huron County an attractive target for utility-scale technology infrastructure projects — and townships that have not updated their zoning ordinances to address data centers specifically find themselves in a difficult position when applications arrive.
Without regulations that define where data centers can be located, what size they can be, what infrastructure demands they can place on local utilities and roads, and what environmental protections apply, a township essentially has no basis for denying a permit application that meets general commercial or industrial zoning requirements. A moratorium closes that gap temporarily — it creates a legal hold that protects the township from being locked into approvals it made without adequate regulatory guidance while giving officials the time to do the policy work properly.
The situation at Colfax Township is not isolated. Colfax Township was already in the news earlier this year when the Huron County Sheriff responded to a crash directly in front of Thumb Broadcasting on Van Dyke Road — located in Colfax Township — a reminder that this is a community where real people live and work and where the physical and regulatory environment of the township affects daily life in concrete ways. What gets built here, and under what rules, matters to the people who are already here.
The Sherman Township board made a similar decision earlier this month, voting to halt data center permit issuance following advice from their legal counsel while their zoning commission works to complete updated guidelines. Colfax Township’s formal moratorium resolution takes that same protective posture one step further by adopting it through an official board resolution — a more formal and legally durable mechanism than an administrative hold.
The Master Plan Work Running in Parallel
Alongside the moratorium, the township’s planning commission received a presentation from the Spicer Group on the master plan currently being developed for Colfax Township. The timing of that presentation alongside the moratorium adoption is not coincidental — the two efforts are directly connected.
A master plan is the foundational document that guides a community’s land use and development decisions over the long term. It is an official vision for what the township should look like in the future — where different types of development belong, how growth should be managed, what the community’s priorities are, and what the regulatory framework should be designed to protect. Zoning ordinances flow from master plans, and the regulations that will eventually govern data center development in Colfax Township will be grounded in whatever the updated master plan establishes as the township’s vision for its land use future.
The Spicer Group’s involvement brings professional planning expertise to a process that a small township board does not have the internal capacity to conduct alone. Developing a master plan that adequately addresses the scale and complexity of utility-scale data center development — including infrastructure demands, environmental considerations, and community character impacts — requires the kind of specialized knowledge that planning consultants provide. The township’s decision to engage the Spicer Group for this work reflects a seriousness about getting the regulatory framework right rather than rushing something together that will not hold up under scrutiny.
The Bigger Picture Across Michigan
What Colfax Township is doing is part of a statewide pattern that has been building momentum throughout early 2026. Communities at every level of Michigan government are wrestling with the question of how to manage large-scale technology infrastructure development that is moving faster than local regulatory capacity can keep up with.
At the state level, Michigan lawmakers introduced a package of bills proposing a one-year pause on new data center construction statewide — a legislative response to the same pressures that Colfax Township is addressing at the local level through its moratorium resolution. The argument in both cases is essentially identical: the pace of development has outrun the frameworks designed to manage it, and a temporary pause is necessary to give communities and lawmakers the time to catch up.
The business community has pushed back on both the state-level bills and local moratoriums, arguing that Michigan risks losing major investment to competing states if it signals that data center development is unwelcome. That tension — between the economic opportunity that large-scale technology infrastructure represents and the community protection concerns that rapid, unregulated development generates — is one that Michigan townships, county boards, and state legislators will be navigating for the foreseeable future.
For Colfax Township residents who want to review the moratorium resolution or participate in the master plan development process, the township hall at 177 North Barrie Road in Bad Axe is the starting point for both. The planning commission meetings where master plan work is being discussed are public, and community input during that process will shape the regulations that eventually govern what gets built in the township for years to come.
For Michigan residents following data center development and local zoning moratoriums across the state, the Michigan Township Association provides guidance on moratorium procedures, master plan development, and the legal framework governing township land use decisions. And for those wanting to understand the technical and environmental considerations that should inform data center zoning regulations, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy offers resources on the environmental review processes that apply to large-scale commercial and industrial development statewide.
