Katie Nash Fined $1,000 in Frederick Data Center Ethics Ruling

The Frederick City Ethics Commission unanimously ruled on May 11 that City Council Member Katie Nash committed three ethics violations and was fined $1,000, along with a cease-and-desist order preventing her from any further Council activity involving data centers or energy. Commission Chair Maureen Connors signed the 16-page Opinion and Order, which followed a March 24 evidentiary hearing. The Commission found Nash violated city ethics ordinances by participating in matters where she or her spouse had a financial interest, holding outside employment that impaired her impartiality, and using her elected office for private gain. Specifically, Nash submitted a text amendment for data center legislation that was identical to language drafted by counsel for developer Trammell Crow. Simultaneously, she was a paid lobbyist for Vistra Corp., an energy company whose federal filings explicitly link electricity demand to large-scale data centers, directly contradicting Nash's public defense that the industries are unrelated. The Commission found her testimony on this point not credible. Furthermore, Nash failed to disclose her involvement in two other entities, Spires & Light and Connect for Broadband, Inc., which the Commission ordered her to update on her disclosure forms. This marks Nash's second ethics violation in four years, with a prior censure in 2022. The Commission warned that future violations could lead to referrals to the Circuit Court for Frederick County for larger fines. The ethics ruling comes amid a broader data center expansion in Frederick County, which includes Quantum Loophole's gigawatt campus in Adamstown and Amazon Web Services' interest in land. Nash's text amendment would have opened Frederick City itself to data center development for the first time, though the identical Trammell Crow amendment remains under city consideration. The Critical Digital Infrastructure Ordinance in Frederick County already restricts data centers to a designated overlay zone.