From my deck, I look out over a farm that has fed this corner of Harford County for generations. By next year, if a Massachusetts-based solar developer gets its way, I will be looking at forty-five acres of fenced-in industrial photovoltaic panels; built on land currently zoned agricultural, approved by a state commission in Baltimore, with Harford County government and my neighbors cut out of the decision.
I am not alone, and "Chrome Hill Solar" is not an isolated case. Harford County is under attack on two fronts at once, and both fronts have the same target: our farmland, our rural character, and our right as a community to decide what gets built next to our homes.
THE SOLAR FRONT: ANNAPOLIS TOOK OUR ZONING
In the last eighteen months, the Maryland Public Service Commission has been working through five community solar applications stacked up in Harford County alone; projects like Skipper Solar in Churchville, Harford Calvary in Bel Air, Solar Star Dorothy Avenue, Bonneville in Jarrettsville, and Chrome Hill Solar near my home. Together they would convert roughly a hundred acres of farmland into utility-scale generating stations.
One may ask: how can outside developers do this on land that the County zoned for agriculture? Because Annapolis took that decision away from Harford County.
In May 2025, Governor Moore signed the so-called Renewable Energy Certainty Act (HB 1036 / SB 931). The law, which took effect July 1, 2025, preempts local zoning for solar projects as small as one megawatt. Counties can no longer impose siting standards more protective than the state's. The Farmers Alliance for Rural Maryland put it bluntly: the Act was "rushed through the legislature, putting solar developers ahead of local communities and stripping counties of their zoning authority over large-scale energy projects."
This is not "renewable energy." It is a transfer of land-use authority, and of land itself, from the people who live here to corporations who do not. The economics make the trade obvious: a farmer can rent their ground for around two hundred dollars an acre to grow corn, or accept seven thousand dollars an acre from a solar developer to grow nothing at all. Multiplied across the state, that is how you lose a county's agricultural heritage in a decade.
THE DATA CENTER FRONT: CORPORATIONS WANT OUR ZONING REWRITTEN
While Annapolis was busy stripping our zoning protections from solar, a second wave hit us from a different direction. In April, residents of Joppa learned that the owners of the Mountain Branch Golf Course were exploring the sale of more than 260 acres to data center developers. The proposal reportedly includes seven industrial buildings, an on-site natural gas-fired power plant, and a bank of backup diesel generators, sited next to homes and farms, projected to consume up to five million gallons of water a day, for the grand total of fifty to a hundred permanent jobs.
Data centers are not currently permitted anywhere in the Harford County Code. To build at Mountain Branch, the County would have to rewrite its own zoning law, at the request of out-of-county corporations, to let the project in.
To his credit, County Executive Bob Cassilly has gone further than a pause. He has proposed legislation to permanently prohibit data centers in Harford County, citing the impact on energy, water, noise, and community character. Councilman Jacob Bennett's Bill 26-005 would impose a 90-day moratorium while permanent rules are written. The public hearing is May 19. More than nine hundred residents have already signed a petition. A new grassroots group: Our Land, Our Home, Our Harford, has formed almost overnight.
Brian Tawney, one of the Mountain Branch neighbors, said it as plainly as anyone has: "We didn't move out here to be in an industrial park." That is the line, and it is the same line the families along Chrome Hill Road, Rigdon Road, Federal Hill Road, and Dorothy Avenue have been drawing.
TWO FRONTS, ONE FIGHT
These are not separate stories. They are the same story told twice. In both cases, a corporation with no roots in this county looked at our agricultural land, ran the numbers, and decided it could be turned into something more profitable to them; whether that is megawatts sold into the PJM grid or compute cycles sold to a tech company in Virginia. In both cases, the people who actually live here were expected to absorb the costs: lost farms, lost views, lost groundwater, lost quiet, lost roads, lost property values.
The difference is that on the data center front, the law still gives us a voice. On the solar front, the General Assembly took it away.
That is what makes this moment decisive for Harford. We need to do three things, and we need to do them now:
1. Show up on May 19 and support the Cassilly–Bennett legislation banning data centers and pausing approvals. Fill the chamber.
2. Tell our state delegation, Senators and Delegates from Districts 7, 34, and 35, that the Renewable Energy Certainty Act must be amended next session to restore meaningful local zoning authority over solar siting on agricultural land.
3. Support farmland preservation. The County's program has already protected more than 64,000 acres toward a 75,000-acre goal. Every acre placed under permanent easement is one acre that a developer cannot rezone, cannot petition the PSC over, and cannot fence off behind chain-link.
Harford County has been one of Maryland's farming heartlands since before there was a Maryland. The people running for the gate, solar developers, data center promoters, and the legislators who wrote them a green light, are betting that we will not notice until the bulldozers arrive.
They are wrong. We have noticed. And from Joppa to Jarrettsville, we are pushing back together.