Earlier this month, we broke the story that the Washington County Commissioners signed an NDA and met privately with Diversified Capital, the developer connected to the Martin Farm project, in December 2025. We discovered that meeting after Commissioner Jeff Cline returned campaign contributions from people tied to the project roughly ten months after receiving them, shortly before the County was set to vote on its data center moratorium. Now that farm may be annexed into the City of Hagerstown, which would put planning and zoning decisions in the City’s hands and potentially outside the County’s moratorium. And now CBRE is hiring for data center work in Hagerstown. That history is worth keeping in mind as we look at another site where the Commissioners were pushing incentives for development while data center brokers were already asking questions: Mount Aetna Technology Park.
For two years, the Washington County Commissioners supported legislation creating a special sales and use tax exemption for development at Mount Aetna Technology Park, a large technology park off Yale Drive near Hagerstown Community College and Meritus Medical Center. By January 2026, the Commissioners were telling state lawmakers that “several international corporations” had expressed interest in locating significant operations there. A few months later, the public learned that data center brokers had been asking about that same property.
The effort started at least as early as 2025, when the Commissioners unanimously supported Senate Bill 698. The legislation would have exempted certain construction materials and warehousing equipment purchased for development at Mount Aetna from Maryland’s sales and use tax. In a February 13, 2025 letter to the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, the Commissioners wrote that the Board “unanimously supports the passage of SB 698.”
Their letter also explained what they hoped the tax break would accomplish. The Commissioners said Mount Aetna had remained “undeveloped and underutilized” since Yale Road was constructed in 2016 and argued that the exemption could attract a “technology or research focused company.” They dismissed the potential loss of sales tax revenue as relatively insignificant compared with attracting a “major taxpayer who will support the State for decades to come.”
The Maryland Department of Legislative Services’ analysis of SB 698 confirms that the proposal would have provided qualifying purchases at Mount Aetna with a state sales and use tax exemption for 10 years. State Sen. Paul Corderman, who sponsored the legislation, said in his written testimony supporting SB 698 that the legislation was intended to make Mount Aetna “more attractive to potential investors” and help attract “high-tech industries, research centers, and manufacturing operations.”
Senate Bill 698 did not become law in 2025, but the proposal returned during the 2026 legislative session as Senate Bill 193. The Commissioners supported it again, and their 2026 letter contained a detail that looks considerably more interesting now: “Recently, several international corporations have expressed interest in locating significant operations within MATP.” The Commissioners argued that the tax exemption “could be the catalyst” needed to bring those operations to Washington County. The General Assembly’s records for SB 193 list the Washington County Board of County Commissioners in support, along with CHIEF, the Washington County Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Hagerstown Committee.
The Commissioners’ support was also put to a public vote. At their February 3, 2026 meeting, County Administrator Michelle Gordon presented the previously transmitted letter supporting SB 193 for ratification, and the Commissioners voted 4-0 to support it, according to the official February 3 meeting minutes.
This time, they got the tax exemption they wanted. The Senate passed SB 193 by a vote of 45-0, the House passed an amended version 136-0, and Gov. Wes Moore approved the legislation on May 26. It became Chapter 731 and took effect July 1, 2026. The official legislative history for SB 193 and Chapter 731 documents the votes, approval and final law.
The exemption is broader than simply providing a tax break on construction materials. The law formally designates Mount Aetna Technology Park as a “target redevelopment area” and provides a 10-year sales and use tax exemption for qualifying construction materials and warehousing equipment purchased solely for use there. The eligible property is specifically defined as Mount Aetna Technology Park, accessible from Robinwood Drive, Mount Aetna Road and Yale Drive and located within an Office, Research and Industry zoning district. Perhaps most relevant given the data center interest in the property, the equipment covered by the exemption specifically includes computer systems and equipment.
During reporting on Washington County’s data center moratorium, Greg Snook, chairman and CEO of the Hagerstown-Washington County Industrial Foundation (somehow, also known as “CHIEF”), acknowledged that brokers representing potential data centers had contacted him about Mount Aetna Technology Park. According to reporting on the Washington County data center moratorium, those brokers wanted to know how much land was available, how the property was zoned and what utilities were available.
Snook’s role here is also worth noting. He isn’t simply someone who happened to receive inquiries from data center brokers. Snook is a former President of the Board of County Commissioners of Washington County, and is the current chairman and CEO of CHIEF, which has been involved in the development of Mount Aetna for years, including the Yale Drive extension project that helped open the property for development. He also has a longstanding business relationship with Commissioners President John Barr. Hagerstown City Council records identify Barr, Snook, and local developer Paul Crampton together as representatives of Hager 5, LLC during the company’s development of property on West Washington Street. Snook also told the Herald-Mail that approximately two years earlier he had commissioned a power study to determine what electrical upgrades Mount Aetna would need for various potential uses, including a data center.
There is another wrinkle here that makes Mount Aetna particularly interesting. Washington County’s data center moratorium says the County’s zoning ordinance does not currently address “data centers.” But Mount Aetna is zoned Office, Research and Industry, or ORI, and that district already lists “Computer and data processing services” as a principal permitted use. The same district separately permits “structures and equipment that are required to support international and domestic telecommunications and technology.” Meanwhile, the moratorium defines a data center as a facility used primarily for the “storage, management, processing, and transmission of large amounts of digital data.”
That creates an obvious question about how those existing permitted uses interact with the County’s new definition of a data center. It is especially relevant at Mount Aetna because SB 193 applies specifically to qualifying development in this ORI-zoned technology park and expressly includes “computer systems and equipment” among the equipment eligible for the tax exemption. The words “data center” never appear in the law, but the combination of the existing zoning language, the computer equipment tax exemption and the confirmed interest from data center brokers makes Mount Aetna considerably more relevant to the County’s data center debate than the Commissioners’ public discussion of the moratorium might suggest.
The tax exemption itself does not establish that Mount Aetna was specifically designated for data centers. Jamison Door Company and its parent company BMP Group have already announced a major manufacturing project at the park involving approximately 58 acres and a planned 355,000-square-foot facility. The Commissioners also approved a separate $2 million County tax incentive over five years for that project, according to the announcement detailing Jamison and BMP Group’s Mount Aetna development.
But the timing is certainly peculiar. By January 2026, the Commissioners knew that several international corporations were interested in significant operations at Mount Aetna, and they were actively asking the General Assembly to approve a tax break that they believed could help attract those projects. We also know that brokers representing potential data centers were asking about Mount Aetna’s available acreage, zoning and utilities before the Commissioners voted on June 30 to pause new data centers while Washington County studied their impacts.
What we don’t know is whether those two groups overlap. The Commissioners never identified the “several international corporations” referenced in their letter. We don’t know when the data center brokers first approached CHIEF, which companies they represented, whether County officials knew about those conversations, or whether data centers were among the potential Mount Aetna projects officials were discussing while lobbying for the tax exemption.
That matters because the Commissioners have presented the June 30 moratorium as an opportunity for Washington County to study data centers before deciding how they should be handled. But if brokers representing potential data centers were already evaluating Mount Aetna while the Commissioners were lobbying for special tax treatment intended to attract major development there, there is an obvious question about how much the Commissioners already knew about data center interest in Washington County before they voted for that moratorium.
Washington County residents deserve more than vague assurances after decisions have already been made and important details have been kept from them. The Commissioners spent two years supporting special tax treatment for Mount Aetna, told state lawmakers that several international corporations were interested in the property, and then voted for a data center moratorium after brokers representing potential data centers had already been asking about the site. Given this Board’s record of shutting residents out of the ICE detention center discussion and signing NDAs with developers, the unanswered questions here matter. The public deserves to know who was interested in Mount Aetna, when the Commissioners learned about that interest, and exactly what they knew about the data center industry’s interest in Washington County before they began telling residents they needed a moratorium to study it.
Oh what a tangled web they weave! They are playing the residents of the county for suckers. They seem to think everyone will be fine with what they do.
God, they’re all so fucking crooked. It literally makes me sick.