# T004 — Did the Pulaski County Data-Center Moratorium Pass? Two Tier-1 Pulaski County records, produced together in the 2026-05-29 Clerk production (#26-341), make opposite factual claims about whether emergency ordinance **26-I-37A** — the twelve-month data-center moratorium — was adopted at the 2026-05-26 Quorum Court meeting. ## Statement A — The ordinance was adopted County Attorney [[Hamilton Kemp]]'s **2026-05-27 Memorandum to File** (Re: 26-I-37A) states: *"The Pulaski County Quorum Court **adopted** the above referenced ordinance by vote at its regular meeting on May 26, 2026. In doing so, the Quorum Court elected to ignore my counsel ..."* and that, because in his view it is unlawful, *"the ordinance does not bear my signature"* ([[County Attorney Memo and AG Opinion 2023-060 on the Moratorium]], `0307_001.pdf`). ## Statement B — The ordinance did not pass Clerk [[Terri Hollingsworth]]'s **2026-05-28 statement** (the day after Kemp's memo) states: *"Clerk Terri Hollingsworth, serving as the Quorum Court Secretary, recorded the votes of the Justices of the Peace incorrectly. Due to this unintentional error, the amended Ordinance 26-I-37 ... was **marked as adopted when it should not have passed.** Emergency ordinances require at least 10 'yes' votes to be adopted, and that threshold was not met upon review"* ([[Pulaski County Clerk Statement on the Corrected Moratorium Vote]]). Tier-3 reporting attributes the corrected tally (9 ayes / 4 nays / 2 present) to Parliamentarian [[Justin Blagg]]'s review of the roll call and the meeting recording. ## Why it matters Whether Pulaski County enacted a data-center moratorium is the single most consequential factual question in the county's data-center-governance record. It determines whether [[AVAIO Digital Partners|AVAIO Project Leo]] and any future unincorporated-county data center face a development pause, and it is the premise of every downstream characterization of the county's posture. A wiki that recorded "the moratorium passed" — relying on the County Attorney's memo or the initial press report — would be asserting as fact something the records custodian formally retracted. ## Resolution status **Resolved in favor of Statement B: the moratorium did not pass.** The two records are not a live dispute but a **temporal artifact of a single counting error.** The Clerk, in her statutory role as Quorum Court Secretary and records custodian, initially mis-recorded the vote as adopted; County Attorney Kemp wrote his memo on 2026-05-27 on the basis of that initial (erroneous) record; the Clerk corrected the count on 2026-05-28. Statement A is therefore explained and superseded by Statement B: it reflects the pre-correction miscount, not an independent factual disagreement. The later-in-time correction comes from the office with custodial authority over the vote record and is corroborated by the [[Arkansas Quorum Court Ordinance Procedure|two-thirds (10-of-15) emergency threshold]] that 9 ayes cannot meet. **Residual gap (does not reopen the tension):** the *corrected per-JP roll-call* is not independently verifiable from the production — the [[Certified Quorum Court Voting Worksheets 2026-05-26|certified worksheets]] are handwritten, not machine-legible, and embody the disavowed miscount; the authoritative per-member breakdown would require the 2026-05-26 meeting video. This affects who voted how, not whether the ordinance passed. **Note on Kemp's surviving objection:** the resolution of *passage* does not touch the County Attorney's *substantive* objection (that the moratorium would violate the Arkansas Data Centers Act of 2023). That objection is independent of the vote count and remains a live legal constraint on any re-vote — but it is a legal question, not this factual tension. ## Discovery Surfaced during the 2026-05-29 ingest of the Clerk production (#26-341), when the County Attorney's "adopted" memo (`0307_001.pdf`) was read against the Clerk's "did not pass" statement (`05.28.26 ...docx`) in the same production. Flagged with a `> [!contradiction]` callout on [[2026-05 Pulaski County Quorum Court Vote on Data Center Moratorium]]. ## Notes No dialectic is warranted: the contradiction is resolved by the later-in-time correction from the custodial office, not by competing interpretations of an open evidentiary base. Should the County Attorney's office or the Quorum Court later assert the ordinance *did* take effect (e.g., a dispute over whether the miscount can be cured or the vote re-taken), this tension would reopen as a live `factual`/`temporal` dispute.