Lowell MA Markley data center diesel generator injunction (2026)

City of Lowell, Mass. (Middlesex County) — Middlesex Superior Court action by resident plaintiffs challenging a MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AIR QUALITY PERMIT issued for expansion of the MARKLEY GROUP data center, a 352,000-square-foot facility. HEARING: July 29, 2026. INJUNCTIVE RELIEF GRANTED: on Monday, AUGUST 10, 2026, SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE C. WILLIAM BARRETT granted the residents' request to PAUSE INSTALLATION OF FOUR NEW DIESEL GENERATORS not yet installed, for the duration of the legal challenge. SCOPE OF THE ORDER — stated precisely: it reaches the four uninstalled generators, not the expansion as a whole. LEGAL THEORY: procedural, not substantive — that MassDEP signed off on the permit in 2025 WITHOUT CONSIDERING THE COMMUNITY'S OBJECTIONS, denying plaintiffs a hearing the law entitles them to. Counsel: 'The problem here is that our clients never got the hearing that the law entitles them to.' FACTUAL POSTURE: plaintiffs live adjacent to the facility and report regularly smelling the exhaust of its diesel generators; the matter is framed as an ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE claim and the Conservation Law Foundation is engaged on it. THE PRIOR MUNICIPAL CHAPTER IS THE INSTRUCTIVE PART: in MARCH 2026 the LOWELL CITY COUNCIL ADOPTED A ONE-YEAR MORATORIUM on new data center construction AND EXPANSION pending a study. MARKLEY SUED and the parties reached an AGREEMENT PERMITTING THE COMPANY TO PROCEED with expansion plans PRE-DATING the moratorium. That is the same pre-existing-rights limit recorded on Rockford IL six-month data center moratorium (2026) (annexation agreement) and Salem OR 120-day data center moratorium (Res. 2026-40) (pre-filed application): a municipal moratorium routinely fails to reach the project that motivated it, and here the effective constraint came instead from an AIR PERMIT CHALLENGE IN COURT. For practitioners the transferable point is that where land-use authority is foreclosed by vested rights, the environmental permitting record may still be open. THE LOWELL ONE-YEAR MORATORIUM ITSELF IS NOT INDEXED in this dataset and is a lead.