The move comes after Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich instituted a six-month moratorium in an executive order in June. In a unanimous vote, the 11-member Montgomery County Council approved an 18-month moratorium on the development of data centers in the county. The move comes after Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich instituted a six-month moratorium in an executive order in June. “The fact that we had already data centers existing in Montgomery County, but had no definition of a data center in our code, was a big problem,” council member Dawn Luedtke told her colleagues. She also said that she felt it was important to acknowledge that there are currently data centers in the county because, “We are not going to do things that shut existing data centers down.”