As Company Considers Possible Data Center Development Here, County Leaders Consider What They Can and Can’t Regulate
The Fayette County Commissioners Court discussed possible commercial development regulations at their meeting Thursday, May 28.
“Right now, our development permit is only to regulate the floodplain and not larger scale projects that Fayette County may be seeing in the future,” said Fayette County Floodplain Manager Kelly Blackwell. “I do know there are a lot of legal things that keep the county from regulating. It’s just a discussion item to see if it’s something that y’all think is necessary.”
Blackwell said Fayette County does not have any regulations concerning impervious cover such as parking lots or very large buildings.
“If someone comes in an decides to cover 70 percent of 400 acres, that’s a lot and we don’t have anything (to regulate that),” Blackwell said.
The discussion at last week’s Commissioners Court meeting comes on the heels of a major real estate transaction in the Winchester area. A company named La Grange-Winchester LLC has leased with an option to purchase more than 400 acres north of Winchester from the Jimmy Luecke Family Partnership. Luecke owns several large tracts of real estate in the area, especially in Lee and Bastrop counties, including the famous tract in Bastrop County where he cut his last name out of a three mile-long section of pine forest that can be seen from space .
La Grange-Winchester LLC is a subsidiary of the Austin-based development group PlaceMKR. According to PlaceMKR’s website, the company owns “strategic investments along high-growth Texas corridors, where we identify and capitalize on emerging market opportunities for maximum investor returns.” Some of those investments include data centers.
Last week the Record attempted to contact the person who signed the lease on behalf of PlaceMKR – company cofounder and managing principal Jesse Weber. Weber has not responded at the time of this publication.
At Thursday’s Commissioners Court meeting, Assistant County Attorney Blake Watson said Texas law does not give small counties like Fayette very much authority to regulate development in unincorporated areas.
“The ability to actually regulate quite a bit only comes in when a county reaches 250,000 people or neighbors a county of 250,000 people or more,” Watson said. “So the regulations that we would be able to put in would be extremely limited and essentially tied to our subdivision regulations. We don’t have a fire marshal. We don’t have some of these other things that would allow the county to have more intensive regulations around commercial development.”
Watson said the County may be able to require largescale developers to file a development application.
“It would essentially be an application that they would come in and fill out so the county would be aware of the projects that were coming in,” Watson said.
The Commissioners instructed Watson and the county permitting office to research any available options for regulating large-scale developments. They’ll return with their findings at a future meeting.