On a Monday night in early August, Whitewood's city commissioners did something the much larger county next door had refused to do just months earlier. The Whitewood City Commission passed a resolution imposing a temporary moratorium on data centers, a move first reported by the Black Hills Pioneer. No developer had filed an application. No proposal was on the table. The commissioners acted anyway, and that timing is the part worth understanding if you live here.
It would be easy to read the headline and move on, filing it under the kind of city business that never touches daily life. That would miss the more interesting fact underneath it: Whitewood, a city whose population sat at 879 at the 2020 census and has only recently approached 1,000, now holds exactly the same legal authority over this question as Rapid City. And Pennington County, home to Rapid City and the region's largest concentration of people and development pressure, looked at a similar request from its own planning staff and turned it down.
Why A Town This Size Gets To Decide At All
The reason Whitewood could act on its own comes down to a single piece of state legislation. Earlier this year, South Dakota lawmakers considered a statewide moratorium on data center construction. That version stalled. What passed instead was Senate Bill 135, which prohibits the state from limiting local governments' authority to regulate or ban data centers, effectively handing the entire decision down to city halls and county courthouses.
That detail matters more than it sounds. It means the debate over whether a data center belongs somewhere in the Black Hills isn't being settled in Pierre. It's being settled meeting by meeting, commission by commission, in whichever town's elected board is willing to raise its hand first. Whitewood's commissioners used that authority before anyone asked them to. Pennington County's commissioners, sitting on the same authority, chose not to.
What The Pause Actually Covers
A moratorium is a narrower tool than it sounds. Based on how similar pauses have worked elsewhere in South Dakota this year, including Yankton County's six-month freeze passed in July, the mechanism is consistent: a temporary halt on accepting or processing new applications tied to a specific use, paired with direction to planning staff to draft permanent rules while the clock runs.
Here's the general shape of what that kind of pause covers, and what it leaves alone:
| Typically paused | Typically unaffected |
|---|---|
| New data center permit applications | Existing homes, garages, and additions |
| Site plan reviews tied to data center development | Agricultural buildings and outbuildings |
| Rezoning requests for data center use | Ordinary residential and small business permits |
| Data center construction starts | Road, utility, and infrastructure work already underway |
The point of a moratorium isn't to shut a door forever. It's to freeze one narrow category of activity long enough for a small planning staff to write rules before, rather than after, a developer shows up with a site plan. Yankton County paired its pause with a direct order to its planning and zoning commission to begin drafting an ordinance immediately. Whether Whitewood follows that same template will become clearer as the city works through whatever comes next.
The County That Said No
The contrast with Pennington County is worth sitting with. According to the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, a regional group that has been tracking data center proposals across the area, Pennington County's own Planning and Zoning officials requested a moratorium there, and the county commission turned it down. At the time, the group counted at least two active proposals moving through Rapid City's development pipeline.
That is the inversion that makes Whitewood's move worth explaining rather than just reporting. The place with visible projects and staff-level concern chose to keep processing applications. The place with no known projects and a population under 1,000 chose to pause first and ask questions later. Neither decision is right or wrong on its face. They're just genuinely different bets about timing, made by neighbors under the same state law.
Part Of A Pattern That Reached Here Fast
Whitewood's decision didn't happen in isolation. Nationally, the number of data center moratoriums passed in 2026 is already four times higher than the total recorded across all of 2025, according to a tracker maintained by Programs.com. A separate industry tracker put the national count at 321 moratoriums recorded across 32 states, with 261 still in force as of September 1.
A recurring pattern shows up inside that count: towns moving before any developer has expressed interest at all. Mead, Colorado and Harpersville, Alabama both adopted pauses this year with no project proposed anywhere nearby, choosing to have rules ready rather than write them under pressure once a company arrives. Whitewood's resolution fits that same pattern. Its commissioners looked at what was happening in the county next door and decided to get ahead of a conversation before it started here.
That instinct isn't unique to small-town South Dakota. It's showing up in places built entirely differently. Data centers use enough electricity and water that even communities with far more planning capacity than Whitewood's have chosen to pause first and study second.
What To Watch For Next
If Whitewood follows the pattern set by other South Dakota communities this year, the next visible step will be planning staff drafting a permanent ordinance defining what counts as a data center, what size triggers review, and what conditions a future application would need to meet. That process is where the real decisions get made. A moratorium buys time. The ordinance that follows it decides what happens when the time runs out.
For residents, the practical takeaway is simple: this is a city hall story worth following past the headline, not a zoning footnote. Whitewood's commission just used state authority that didn't exist in this form a year ago, and it used it in a way its much larger neighbor chose not to. Whatever ordinance eventually comes out of this pause will say a lot about how this small city wants to grow, long before any specific project ever puts that question to a real test.
None of this is legal advice, and if you're weighing how a future zoning decision might touch a specific property, the city's planning office is the right place to ask. But understanding why your town acted, and why the county next door didn't, is the kind of local context that's easy to miss in a one-line news brief and worth having anyway.
If you're keeping an eye on how Whitewood, Spearfish, or any of the surrounding Black Hills towns are handling growth and land use questions like this one, I'm always glad to talk through what it might mean for your own corner of the county. Reach out to Sandra Donahue any time.
