Red Oak City Council approves 830 acres rezoned for latest data center campus after tense 5-hour meeting

RED OAK — The tension between preserving a slower, quieter way of life and embracing a high-tech future with promises of economic prosperity was on full display Monday night in a City Council meeting about 20 miles south of Dallas. 

For now, the latter preserved. 

Red Oak council members voted 4-1 for rezoning nearly 830 acres from agricultural district to planned development for a “high tech industrial park,” which city officials said would be “conducive to data center uses.” 

The decision was made during a nearly 5-hour long meeting that lasted into the late hours of the night.

“We are not opposed to data centers,” Red Oak resident Cindi Stephenson said to City Council members during public comment. “We’re opposed to the city putting them in our neighborhoods and our homesteads. … None of you have them in your backyard. Why should they be in my backyard?”

“You might as well call it Data Center, Texas,” she added.

Council members Mayor Pro Tem Willie Franklin Jr., Sean Flannery, Ricardo Miller, and Tim Lightfoot voted in favor of the rezoning, and Jeffery Smith voted against. Mayor Mark Stanfill didn’t have a vote.

The request was submitted by the Red Oak Industrial Development Corp., a group that acts as “the sales tax arm of the city” to bring in industry and business. 

The council also voted 4-1 to approve a tax abatement for the project. Smith, again, was the lone opposing vote.

Stanfill, who penned an editorial in The Dallas Morning News last year calling data centers critical to Texas, declined to be interviewed by the newspaper last week, citing pending matters. He responded with an emailed statement, writing that the council “must judge all of our decisions based on the merits of each issue submitted for our consideration.”

“We have always been committed to make well informed decisions to enhance the economic sustainability of our  City and quality of life for our entire community while practicing responsible stewardship of our tax rate,” he wrote. “We believe that we have successfully met this challenge while acting in a fair and ethical manner.”

Dallas-Fort Worth has emerged one of the country’s major data center hubs with about 180 of Texas’ estimated more than 450 data centers.  The city has a few data centers either already operating or being constructed by companies including Google, Dallas-headquartered DataBank and Compass Datacenters. The 830-acre property at the center of Monday’s meeting is under contract with Compass for a proposed second campus within the city. 

More than 130 people packed into the meeting room at the Red Oak Government Center before the fire marshal limited the capacity to one-in-one-out. A few dozen people stood in the hallway watching a livestream of the meeting in hopes they’d eventually make their way in. 

Though the topic was contentious and emotions were high, bringing some to the verge of tears at times and eliciting applause from the crowd, the meeting mostly remained orderly besides a back-and-forth between the mayor and the crowd when someone attempted to defer her remaining public comment time and wasn’t allowed to do so.

Residents were attentive, some taking handwritten notes, as officials explained the difference between city and county regulations and how properties can be zoned. 

They also explained what a data center is — a building that houses IT infrastructure like internet servers and storage systems — and attempted to address common concerns like strains on natural resources and the electric grid. 

For example, City Manager Todd Fuller explained the center will use a closed-looped cooling system, which would require 10 million gallons of water annually, an amount he said is less than an average Walmart Supercenter.  

More than 20 people spoke during the public comment portion, including decadeslong residents and people who had purchased a home as recently as a few weeks ago. All of them opposed the rezoning.

Each person was alloted three minutes to speak, which is typical during council meetings.

Concerns ranged from effects on people’s health living so close to a data center, constant noise, light pollution, increased traffic, disturbances from construction, lower property values, strains on natural resources, and more frequent flooding because of the concrete infrastructure. 

When Ellis County resident Scott Friend stood at the podium to speak for public comment, he asked everyone opposing the data center to stand. Nearly everyone in the room rose to their feet.

“I am not against growth,” Friend said. “I am for the right kind of growth.”

He said despite research, residents have many lingering questions. Among them: What exactly are homeowners getting in return from the data center development?

“Red Oak still has something that is becoming very rare in North Texas: space, identity and community character,” Friend said. “That is exactly what attracts families, investment and long-term residential growth. People with choices and resources are looking for communities that preserve quality of life, not communities surrounded by large industrial expansion.”

Monday’s vote comes just two weeks after the city’s planning and zoning board voted 3-2 to not recommend the rezoning on April 27.  

Several people told The News they did not know about the potential data center nearby some of their homes until that meeting and have since spent hours raising awareness among neighbors. 

Some of the homeowners living in the unincorporated Ellis County said they weren’t notified by the city of the potential rezoning despite their property being hundreds of feet from where the potential new data center could be. 

Lonie Janssen is one of those county residents. He said he learned during the meeting that the data center would be even closer to his home than he originally thought.

“Sometimes what is good for the city is not always good for the people of the city,” Janssen said, adding that the last couple weeks have felt like walking through darkness.

Multiple residents who met at the meeting immediately began organizing a grassroots group, calling for city officials to abandon the data center plans. They kept the name straightforward: Red Oak TX — Say NO MORE Data Centers Committee. 

The group started an online petition that’s garnered more than 1,600 signatures, and they have organized multiple protests, including one just before the City Council meeting. 

The protesters marched in a nearby park and chanted “No more data centers” and “That’s enough data centers.” 

Some held yellow printed signs that read “NO DATA CENTER” with two red Xs. Some of the signs had variations of “Stop 800 acre land grab,” “Our health matters” and “Red Oak has had enough.” 

Elda Jazmin Villegas, a retired U.S. Marine Corps veteran and one of the several residents organizing the group, shares a property line with the 830-acre property. She, her husband and their kids have lived there since 2021. 

“We aren’t against data centers,” Villegas told the crowd ahead of the meeting. “We’re here requesting responsible growth.”  

Villegas said this process has felt like the city chose money over its people.  

“We don’t know what data centers are going to do to our community,” Villegas said. “Once it’s done, it can’t be undone.” 

Lacey Hamel, another community organizer who has lived in Ellis County her whole life, echoed Villegas’ sentiments. Hamel lives across the street from the property. 

“We need some answers about this project,” Hamel said. “We haven’t had enough time to understand this.” 

She called for transparency and more regulations around such projects. 

The women said their work to protect their families and their neighbors is just beginning. 

This reporting is part of the Future of North Texas, a community-funded journalism initiative supported by the Commit Partnership, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Lisa and Charles Siegel, the McCune-Losinger Family Fund, The Meadows Foundation, the Perot Foundation, the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas. The News retains full editorial control of this coverage.