City staff have drafted the legal justification for a temporary stop on new data center applications in Denton, and the City Council is scheduled to go over it in a work session on Tuesday, Oct. 13, according to meeting materials posted this week.
The 30-minute discussion is not a vote. It gives council members a chance to shape the findings that would be written into a moratorium ordinance before that ordinance gets its first reading on Oct. 27. Staff offered three choices: keep drafting based on the findings as presented, narrow or change the scope, or halt the process.
The three legal grounds
Texas law allows a city to pause development only when it can document specific needs. The staff report leans on three.
Water and sewer. Denton can produce 48 million gallons of drinking water a day and treat 21 million gallons of wastewater. Average daily demand runs about 18.5 million gallons of water and 15.7 million of wastewater, but peak days have reached 42.2 million and 25.7 million. Staff wrote that data centers without rules on how they are cooled could use more than either system can handle.
Electricity. Denton Municipal Electric has roughly 75 megawatts left for new connections, the report says. ERCOT, under a directive from the governor, is restricting new hookups larger than 75 megawatts, but smaller requests still land with the city, and DME has no process to take in, study and batch them so it does not commit more power than it has. DME has asked ERCOT to approve $300 million in transmission projects to relieve regional overloads; the earliest those could be finished is 2031.
Code detail. Proposed code changes would require closed-loop cooling for future high-performance computing and AI data centers, but staff say the code does not yet spell out what that means technically. A pause would give staff time to write enforceable standards into the Denton Criteria Manuals. This ground cannot be applied to land zoned heavy industrial.
Limits on a pause
Applications filed before a moratorium takes effect could not be stopped, because of the state's vested-rights rules. The pause could reach both the city limits and the extraterritorial jurisdiction. It would need the votes of at least three-fourths of the full council, would last 90 days with one possible 90-day extension, and could not be imposed again on the same area for two years.
