Commissioners Vote to Oppose Data Centers in Fayette County

The Fayette County Commissioners Court voted 4-1 to pass a resolution opposing data centers in Fayette County at their meeting last Thursday, Feb. 26.

Pct. 2 Commissioner Clint Sternadel first proposed the resolution two weeks ago after a wave of public opposition to a data center project in nearby Washington County.

The resolution does not give the county government any authority to regulate data centers or prevent them from being built in Fayette County. But it does express the official opinion of county leaders.

In part, it states that the commissioners court “desires to ensure that any commercial projects implemented in Fayette County benefit and cause no harm to the community, economy, and environment of Fayette County.” It calls on the State Legislature to “enact common sense legislation that grants counties in Texas the ability to protect their communities and environments from implementation of harmful commercial development.” Furthermore, the resolution says the State should not subsidize data center development or their decommissioning.

Sternadel said he’s concerned about the amount of water that data centers use for cooling and the amount of electricity they use to power the growing global demand for artificial intelligence services.

“The main highlights that we talked about at the previous meeting were that the data centers, these standalone commercial data centers, they use a ton of resources, mainly water and electricity, and don’t necessarily have a big beneficial impact to the County,” Sternadel said last Thursday.

At the prior meeting, Pct. 3 Commissioner Harvey Berckenhoff and Commissioner McBroom raised a number of concerns about the resolution. Berckenhoff said he’d like to see language addressing other industries that consume large amounts of groundwater, such as the oil and gas industry. McBroom said he thought the resolution’s definition of data centers was too vague and could be interpreted to include communications equipment used by the local telephone cooperative.

At last week’s meeting, Sternadel said he consulted with the County Attorney’s office and the Texas Association of Counties (TAC). He said they advised that if the County wants to address other industries, it should do so in separate resolutions.

“Don’t try to lump too much together,” Sternadel said.

Assistant County Attorney Blake Watson said the definition for data centers used in the resolution is the same definition used in the Texas Tax Code.

“We’re just reusing the same language that they are using to identify what they consider a data center,” Watson said. “That’s not a definition that we made up on our own.”

Pct. 4 Commissioner Drew Brossmann addressed concerns about whether the resolution infringes on private property rights, “There’s nothing in here in the (resolution) … saying that you cannot sell your property to any of these industries,” Brossmann said. “There’s nothing in here about that whatsoever. So we’re not violating anybody’s private property rights. We’re just saying if landowners do decide to sell to these industries, we’re just asking that you give us a little bit of authority to make sure that they’re following a rule of law, and that we can make sure that they don’t impact other owners that are near our communities. So I don’t think we’re violating private property rights.”

The resolution passed with Pct. 1 Commissioner Jason McBroom casting the lone dissenting vote.