Residents listened to a presentation given at Rolling Hills Elementary School by representatives from Edged Data Centers, hoping to cinch an economic development agreement with Fort Worth for a $1.1 billion data center.
Emily Holshouser
The Fort Worth City Council is expected to vote Tuesday, March 31, on a tax agreement for a company proposing to invest $1.1 billion in a future data center.
Edged Data Centers, a subsidiary of sustainable infrastructure company Endeavor, has plans to develop a data center near Interstate 20 and Chapin School Road, near the Veale Ranch development, owned by Dallas-based PMB Capital.
Fort Worth’s economic development department proposes a 50% break on property taxes for equipment owned by Edge for 10 years. In exchange, the company must invest $1.1 billion for the construction of the data center, and create 50 jobs with an average annual salary of $73,000.
The proposal was reviewed at the council’s March 3 work session.
The deal would cost the city of Fort Worth $18.2 million in taxes, but the city would then net $49.3 million over the course of the agreement.
The proposal also says that the developers would use “best practices for energy and water conservation.”
Edged has also built data centers in Irving, Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix, Kansas City, Des Moines and Columbus. The company advertises a waterless closed-loop cooling system, which it says is more sustainable than cooling systems traditionally used by data centers.
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The proposal has raised concerns from residents in Fort Worth and nearby Benbrook, who met with Edged — as well as representatives from PMB Capital Investments, and Fort Worth District 3 council member Michael Crain — on March 24.
Residents in those cities, particularly in the Markum Ranch, Ventana, and Skyline Ranch developments, have expressed concerns about potential noise, environmental risks, and traffic.
Additionally, residents said at the March 24 meeting that developers and the city did not make enough of an effort to alert them to the data center project.
Some residents formed the 2871 Community Coalition to educate each other about the data center and create a list of eight requests that they would like developers to meet in order for them to throw their support behind the data center.
Those asks include requests for disclosures about water usage by the data center, an independent study on how much noise the data center would create, an environmental assessment, and financial transparency for the project.
At the March 24 meeting, developers went through the list and said that they either had already met them or did not have to meet them.
Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Crain said that he believes this project — and other large-scale commercial developments — will ultimately improve residents’ quality of life as Fort Worth continues to explode in growth.
“And so we need to encourage commercial investment, and the right kind of commercial investment,” Crain told the Star-Telegram. “This commercial investment — once you get past the water resources and the electricity resources — the amount that it brings into the tax base without putting more head beds is a huge net positive.”
The Fort Worth City Council is expected to vote on the economic development package at its meeting at 10 a.m. March 31 at the City Council Chamber, 100 Fort Worth Trail.
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Emily Holshouser is a local news reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.