On August 4, 2026, Westlake's Planning & Zoning Commission approved the site plan for the Circle T Data Center Campus — four buildings, more than a million square feet, on roughly 90 acres along U.S. 377, backing directly onto Keller's Marshall Ridge neighborhood. Keller residents get the noise, the traffic, and the view. Westlake gets the tax revenue. This page lays out what is actually known, what is genuinely contested, and where residents still have leverage.
Lakes at Marshall Ridge HOA et al. v. Town of Westlake et al. · Cause No. 342-381199-26 · 342nd District Court, Tarrant County
Where it stood on August 26: Judge Kimberly Fitzpatrick heard arguments on whether to turn the August 17 temporary restraining order into a longer-lasting injunction. She did not rule from the bench. According to CBS Texas, the restraining order was extended through September 8, and the court set a follow-up hearing for 10:00 a.m. that day. Westlake said it "respects the Court's decision to take additional time" and remains confident in its process.
At that hearing the residents' side went further than the original notice argument. They argued the approved site plan leaves out the 150-foot setback and landscaped buffer the zoning rules require next to single-family homes, and that the 2024–25 text amendment that nearly doubled the height limit — from 45 to 80 feet — was noticed without ever mentioning a data center.
We don't yet know what happened on September 8. We have found no news coverage of a ruling, and the court file is not available online for free. Until we can confirm it, this page will not say whether the block is still in place. If you were in the courtroom, have seen an order, or have heard from the HOA or its attorneys, please email us at fightforkeller@gmail.com — a copy of a filed order is the most helpful thing you can send. We'll update this page as soon as it's confirmed.
Be precise about what this is. A restraining order or injunction is a pause, not a ruling on the merits. From the start, this one reached the vote only — the judge struck the broader request to block permits and site work. If the court has let the order lapse, Westlake can put the development agreement back on an agenda with 72 hours' notice. Nothing about the project has been cancelled.
Also new: on August 18, the Keller City Council voted unanimously to authorize legal action against Westlake over the project. As of this update we have not found a report of the city filing a suit. The city has now posted its adopted resolution and a copy of the restraining order on its data center page.
What to do now:
CBS Texas on the Aug 26 hearing · The Aug 17 restraining order (PDF) · Westlake agendas · All dates
Want a one-time heads-up if a new vote date or a court ruling is announced?
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Keller agendas post three business days ahead. This table was checked against the city's official calendar on September 16 — verify before you drive over. The Westlake vote has no date right now. It was blocked by court order on August 17; the order was extended through a September 8 hearing whose outcome we are still confirming.
| Date | Meeting | Time | Data center on the agenda? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wed Aug 12 (done) | Keller City Council | 7:30 p.m. | Resolution passed unanimously |
| Mon Aug 17 (done) | Westlake Town Council — SPECIAL — the vote | 4:00 p.m. | Blocked by court order — vote postponed |
| Tue Aug 18 (done) | Keller City Council | 5:00 p.m. | Unanimously authorized legal action against Westlake |
| Wed Aug 26 (done) | 342nd District Court — temporary injunction hearing | 10:00 a.m. | No ruling that day — restraining order extended through Sept 8 |
| Tue Sep 8 (done) | 342nd District Court — follow-up hearing Lakes at Marshall Ridge HOA et al. v. Town of Westlake · Cause No. 342-381199-26 |
10:00 a.m. | Outcome not yet confirmed — tell us if you know |
| Tue Sep 15 (done) | Westlake Town Council | — | No data center item in the town's meeting recap |
| By December | ERCOT survey of 400+ data centers for the Governor's audit | — | State track — runs regardless of the lawsuit |
| Not yet set | Westlake Town Council — the rescheduled vote | — | Watch the Westlake agenda page — 72 hours' notice |
Sources: Keller meeting calendar · Westlake agendas & minutes (posted 72 hours ahead)
The court date is not the finish line either. Even if the injunction holds, it holds on a notice question about one vote. The TCEQ generator permit, the state interconnection audit, and any county or school-district tax break all come after the vote regardless of how the court rules — and those hearings get no press at all. Work the state track in parallel; do not wait on the courtroom.
Every figure below comes from the developer's own presentation, town documents, or the Town of Westlake's public statements. Sources are linked in Section 3.
| Project name | Circle T Data Center Campus (called "Circle T Data Center" in Westlake town documents) |
| Location | Along U.S. Highway 377 in Westlake, on Circle T Ranch land — part of Hillwood's 27,000-acre AllianceTexas development |
| Developer | American Real Estate Partners (AREP) and PowerHouse Data Centers. Jeff Parsons, SVP of development and construction, presented to the commission. |
| End tenant | Not publicly disclosed. No operator has been named in any public filing or news coverage to date. |
| Size | Roughly 87–90 acres (figures vary by document); four data center buildings totaling more than 1 million square feet |
| Also on site | A private electrical substation / Oncor switchyard, backup generators, a security building at the main entrance, and a pump & water treatment building serving two storage tanks holding 5.5 million gallons |
| Power | Oncor switchyard sized for 350 MW. The data center is to use 300 MW; the remaining 50 MW is described as available for use within Westlake. |
| Water | 54 million gallons per year. Average daily demand 165,000 gallons; peak daily demand 1.5 million gallons. Westlake says the cooling system runs waterless roughly 85% of the year. |
| Employment | About 75 employees on site at any given time, per Westlake's project FAQ |
| Distance to Keller homes | 506 feet from the building footprint to the property line next to homes on Llano Court. Westlake's minimum requirement is 150 feet. The nearest Westlake residence is about 1,200 yards — two-thirds of a mile. |
| Buffers | 220-foot landscape buffer on the south (Keller) side; 75-foot buffer along U.S. 377; a landscaped berm along the highway |
| Claimed benefit to Westlake | Westlake officials have said the project could increase the town's tax revenue by roughly 14% |
This is the single most important thing to understand: the zoning fight already happened, years ago. The land was zoned for commercial-industrial use with a data center among the permitted uses before Westlake updated its development code to address data centers specifically. The August 4 hearing was narrower than most people in the room realized — the commission was only deciding whether the submitted site plan complied with the development standards in Town Ordinance 307.
Whether or not you accept that characterization, it defines the battlefield. Arguments that the project is a bad idea in principle have very little purchase in a site-plan review. Arguments about enforceable conditions, state permits, and public money have a great deal.
Note what is missing. None of these conditions include a numeric noise limit measured at the Keller property line, a monitoring requirement, a reporting requirement, or a remedy if the mitigation does not work. "Complies with the noise ordinance" is a promise about a measurement method, not a promise about what residents will hear. Getting measurable, enforceable, monitored limits into the development agreement is the most winnable fight left. See Section 4.
This section is deliberately honest. Some concerns about data centers are strongly supported by evidence; others are not, and repeating weak claims at a public hearing hands the other side an easy win. Each item below is labeled so you know which arguments will hold up under cross-examination.
Data center noise comes from cooling equipment that runs continuously, 8,760 hours a year. On hyperscale facilities, cooling tower fans produce roughly 70 to 85 decibels at 50 feet depending on fan size and speed. Air-cooled chillers, cooling towers, air handling units and server fans can reach up to 100 dBA at the source. Diesel backup generators — which must be periodically test-run — can hit around 110 dBA.
The critical point is that "complies with the noise ordinance" and "you won't hear it" are different claims. When noise was measured at Northern Virginia data centers that were the subject of resident complaints, levels on residential property came in between 40 and 59 decibels — quiet enough to pass local ordinances, but within the range the EPA associates with reduced ability to sleep, work and concentrate. Residents there reported sleep disruption, headaches, and an inability to escape the sound inside their own homes.
The reason is physics. Data center noise is heavily weighted toward low frequencies, which travel farther than higher-pitched sound and pass through walls, windows and insulation far more easily. Standard A-weighted (dBA) measurement, which most municipal noise ordinances rely on, deliberately discounts low frequencies. A facility can be fully compliant on paper and still produce a constant hum that residents cannot tune out. Ask Westlake directly which metric its ordinance uses, at what location it is measured, and who does the measuring — and get the answer in writing.
The most useful fact in this whole document comes from Westlake's own commission chairman. Before the August 4 vote, P&Z chairman Terry Wilkinson drove 2.3 miles to the Meta data center campus in Fort Worth's Alliance area and walked its perimeter. His words: "there was an obvious noise generated from that campus." He added that berms greatly mitigated the sound where they existed — which is why he asked for more of them. That is the chair of the approving body confirming, on the record, that a comparable facility is audible from outside its fence line.
Three hundred megawatts is not an abstraction. Running continuously for a year, a 300 MW load consumes roughly 2.1 to 2.6 billion kilowatt-hours, depending on utilization. The average Texas home used about 13,152 kWh in 2024, per EIA data. That puts this single campus in the range of 160,000 to 200,000 Texas households. Keller has about 47,500 residents at an average household size of 2.89 — roughly 16,400 households, or about 216 million kWh a year. This single campus will draw on the order of ten times the entire residential electricity consumption of the City of Keller, on ninety acres, for about 75 jobs.
Westlake's FAQ says residents' electricity bills will not increase because the developer paid Oncor to bring infrastructure to the west side of town at no cost to residents. That is a real and meaningful commitment as far as it goes. But it addresses only the local drop — not the regional transmission buildout that serving loads of this size requires.
Under ERCOT's structure, equipment connecting a specific customer is typically charged to that customer, but larger transmission upgrades that strengthen the regional grid go into a systemwide pool recovered from all electricity customers. In CenterPoint's territory, residential consumers used 33% of the electricity but paid 49% of transmission costs. Texas Senate Bill 6 (2025) directed the PUCT to examine whether the four-coincident-peak methodology fairly distributes those costs.
The counter-evidence: a May 2026 independent report by the consulting firm E3 found no historical evidence that data centers have driven increases in residential electricity costs under existing rate structures. Be aware that opponents of your position will cite it. The honest framing is forward-looking: PUCT's own transmission cost review concluded that rapidly growing computational loads are driving infrastructure investment that could raise residential and small-business bills under current policy — which is precisely why Abbott directed the PUC to require data centers to fully fund the infrastructure needed to serve them, and why cost-allocation rules are being rewritten right now.
Westlake says the campus will use less water than an average golf course and less than 1,000 homes. Run the arithmetic and that is roughly defensible: 54 million gallons a year works out to somewhere under 500 typical North Texas households on an annual basis. If you argue at the podium that this project will drain the water supply, you will be corrected, publicly, with the town's own numbers.
The stronger version of the argument is about timing, not volume.
The ask: a binding commitment that the data center's water use is curtailed on the same schedule, and by a comparable proportion, as residential customers when drought stages are triggered. If Keller families can be told they may not water their lawns, a 300 MW campus can be told to lean on dry cooling. Ask for this in writing in the development agreement.
This is the argument residents reach for first and it is the weakest one in the file. The formal research does not currently support it:
If you lead with property values at a public hearing, expect the developer's consultant to read the GMU conclusion back to you and move on. The defensible version: the research base is thin, drawn almost entirely from a region where data centers arrived alongside enormous job growth, and it measures sale prices rather than time on market, buyer pool, or disclosure obligations. A seller on Llano Court in 2029 will have to answer questions about the hum. That is a real cost to a real family even if it never shows up in a regression.
Here is the part that gets lost in the noise-and-water argument, and it is the cleanest case Keller residents have.
The costs land in Keller. The revenue lands in Westlake.
The nearest Keller home is 506 feet from the building line. The nearest Westlake home is two-thirds of a mile. Westlake officials project the project could raise Westlake's tax revenue by roughly 14%. Not one dollar of that flows to Keller's budget, Keller's roads, or Keller's residents. Keller has no vote, no zoning authority over the site, and no share of the proceeds. This is the entire argument in two sentences, and it does not depend on any contested study.
Even for the host jurisdiction, the economics are far worse than the headline investment numbers suggest. Data centers are the most capital-intensive and least labor-intensive major development a town can host. Good Jobs First has documented the pattern across states:
| Deal | Public subsidy | Permanent jobs | Cost per job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple — North Carolina | $321 million | 50 | $6.4 million |
| Google — Columbus, Ohio | $54.3 million property tax abatement | 20 | $2.7 million |
| Illinois statewide (since mid-2019) | $468 million in sales tax exemptions and credits | 339 | ~$1.4 million |
Good Jobs First further reports that in 10 of the 20 states that disclose annual costs, data center subsidy programs exceed $100 million a year, and that Georgia localities alone are projected to lose an estimated $1.1 billion in 2026 and $1.4 billion in 2027. In Oregon, data centers owned by Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Meta collected $616 million in property tax abatements between 2016 and 2025, with annual program costs rising 762%.
What this means for you, concretely. No tax abatement has been publicly reported for the Circle T project. That is not the same as none existing. Watch for three separate approvals, each with its own hearing and its own vote:
If any public money is on the table, the ROI conversation changes completely — and unlike the Westlake site plan, Tarrant County and the school district are bodies Keller residents actually vote for. That is real leverage. Abbott's August 3 audit directive also requires PUCT and ERCOT to verify each project's public financial assistance, which means this information is going to have to surface.
Westlake says operational traffic impact will be minimal, with about 75 employees on site at a time. That is probably accurate for the operating phase. The real traffic burden is the multi-year construction period — heavy equipment, concrete, transformers and generator deliveries on U.S. 377 — which is rarely addressed in site plan review and should be addressed in the development agreement (hours, routes, staging, dust control, road repair bonding).
On air quality: the campus includes backup generators. Statewide, at least 38 Texas data centers have received minor-source air permits since 2024, covering more than 2,100 diesel backup generators. Generators emit nitrogen oxides and particulate matter during testing and outages. The permitting path matters enormously for your rights — see Step 3.
Everything cited above, plus the official channels you will need. Verified as of September 16, 2026.
Start with an honest premise: stopping this project outright at the Westlake Town Council is unlikely.
The land was already zoned for it, staff found the site plan compliant, and the town has said publicly there was
no legal basis to deny it. A strategy built on "get them to vote no" is a strategy built to fail.
The August 17 restraining order does not change that premise — it buys time on a procedural question, and the
judge pointedly declined to touch permits or site work. What it does add is a fifth place where
residents can change outcomes: a live court challenge to how the town noticed this. Work all five at once, and
do not let the lawsuit become an excuse to stand down on the other four — three of them are outside Westlake's
control entirely and none of them pause while a judge deliberates.
The development agreement is a contract. Unlike the site plan, its terms are negotiable, and the council has broad latitude over what goes in it. Every hour spent asking the council to reject the project is an hour not spent getting binding protections written into a document that will govern this facility for thirty years.
The court order changed the schedule, not the substance. Westlake cannot vote on Resolution 26-25 while the restraining order stands, and no new date has been posted. That is the most useful thing that has happened to this list all month: the asks below were written to be delivered under a three-minute speaker clock, and they can now go in as written correspondence, to every council member, with time for staff to actually draft language. Send them now. When the vote is reset, the town owes 72 hours' notice — that is not enough time to start.
Use Keller's resolution as your script. On August 12 the Keller City Council unanimously passed a resolution naming these same categories — noise, health and quality of life, infrastructure, water, drainage and flooding, development standards, transparency, and proximity — and sent it to Westlake. Your city has already put the concerns on the record for you. The most effective thing you can do is take one item from that resolution and ask for the specific contract language that would satisfy it. "Keller's resolution raises drainage; here is the clause I want in the agreement" is much harder to gavel past than a general objection.
With the vote paused, write it instead of saying it. A three-minute speaker slot forces you to pick one ask; a letter does not. Send the whole list to every Westlake council member now, and ask for a written answer to each item — then bring the non-answers to the microphone when the vote is reset.
On August 3, five days before this project's site plan was approved, the Governor ordered a comprehensive verification and audit of every data center moving through ERCOT's interconnection process — effectively pausing approvals. Projects that fail the transparency requirements or state law will be denied connection to the grid.
A 300 MW campus cannot operate without an interconnection. This is the one venue where the answer can be no.
The audit is required to verify each project's:
Two of those five — public financial assistance and community protections — are exactly what Keller residents have been asking about and not getting answers on. Put your questions into that record.
This is the most commonly missed opportunity, and timing is everything. Whether you get any public rights depends entirely on which permitting path the developer chooses:
At least 38 Texas data centers have received minor-source permits since 2024, covering more than 2,100 diesel backup generators statewide. Do not wait to find out which path this project takes.
Keller residents have no vote on Westlake's council. You do have a vote on Tarrant County Commissioners Court and on your school board. Any tax incentive requires a separate approval, with its own public hearing, from bodies that answer to you.
Set up agenda alerts for all of these bodies. Public Citizen's Texas guide (linked in Section 3) walks through each mechanism and how to intervene. If public money is involved, the entire ROI conversation reopens on terms far more favorable to you — and Abbott's audit now requires that public financial assistance be disclosed and verified regardless.
There is a documented factual dispute between two cities about who knew what and when, a former commissioner testifying she was removed from the P&Z the night before a key session, and a project PowerPoint that the town reportedly "could not find." Records requests are cheap, fast, and they generate exactly the kind of material that keeps reporters engaged.
Keller's political interest is aligned with residents here, so its records are likely to come back faster and more completely. Under the Texas Public Information Act, a governmental body generally must produce records promptly or seek an Attorney General ruling within ten business days.
On August 12 the council did the thing this section had been asking for: it passed a formal resolution, unanimously, listing residents' specific concerns and calling for more time and information, and transmitted it to Westlake. That is on the record now — which is what makes it useful to the state audit, to permit proceedings, and to any legal action that follows. Councilmembers credited resident turnout with shaping it.
A resolution is a starting position, not a remedy. Keller is not a party to the residents' lawsuit — that case was brought by the Lakes at Marshall Ridge HOA and two residents, not by the city — so the restraining order did not answer the question of what Keller itself would do. On August 18 the council answered part of it: it unanimously authorized legal action against Westlake. We have not yet seen a report of a filed suit. Check the council calendar for the next meeting. These are the items worth asking for by name:
If you only do three things while the court case plays out:
And watch the Westlake agenda page for the rescheduled vote; you get 72 hours' notice. If you know what happened at the September 8 hearing, email us.
The court case paused one vote; it did not cancel it, and no new date has been posted. After that: the TCEQ air permit for the backup generators, the state interconnection audit, and any tax incentive from the county or the school district — each one a separate hearing with its own deadline. This is not a newsletter and you should not expect regular emails. If you leave an address, we'll use it only for a major development — a new vote date or a court ruling. Otherwise, check this page for the latest.
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