Denton City Council members will spend part of Tuesday afternoon deciding whether the city has made its case for a temporary halt on new data centers.
A 2 p.m. work session on Oct. 13 is set aside for the written findings a moratorium ordinance would need under state law. Development Services staff are asking the council to endorse those findings, change them or stop the process.
If the council moves ahead, the second required public hearing and a first reading are scheduled for Oct. 27, with a final vote on Dec. 1.
What staff are pointing to
The staff report lists three legal grounds. On water, the city can produce up to 48 million gallons a day and treat 21 million gallons of wastewater, and peak days have reached 42.2 million and 25.7 million gallons. Staff say data centers that rely on evaporative cooling could exceed what those systems can handle.
On electricity, the report says Denton Municipal Electric has roughly 75 megawatts available for new connections and no process for taking in, studying and batching data center requests. A state directive is limiting new interconnections above 75 megawatts, but the city still handles requests below that size.
The utility has proposed $300 million in transmission projects to the state grid operator, ERCOT, that would not be finished before 2031 at the earliest, according to the report.
The third ground is time to write detailed technical standards, which staff say the code currently lacks.
A moratorium cannot block applications already on file, could cover the city and its extraterritorial jurisdiction, and would need votes from three-fourths of the council. It could last 90 days, with one 90-day extension, and could not be reimposed on the same area for two years. A staff timeline shows it ending May 31.
The two existing projects
Denton already has two large data centers on city land: Core Scientific, which leases about 78 acres with a power agreement for up to 391 megawatts and uses closed-loop cooling, and WAHA/Qumulus AI, which leases 4 acres with up to 20 megawatts and air cooling.
Staff say both pay all of their power and transmission costs, and together they have generated more than $3.1 million in property taxes, $475,000 in sales tax and $8.8 million in electric return and franchise fees.
