Red Oak residents protesting proposed plan for 800-acre data center

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]It is a debate we are seeing play out across North Texas and tonight neighbors are fighting plans for a new data center.

[00:00:07]>> Yeah, and we're going to be there late into the night at DB to see if Red Oak City Council members approve that plan.

[00:00:12]>> There are currently about 300 data centers online in Texas with 100 more in the works.

[00:00:18]>> Tivity Leu has been sitting in on that council meeting all evening and joins us live.

[00:00:24]Yeah, Kristen and Izzy, public comment is still happening right now. And just to give you guys an idea of how packed that meeting is, the maximum capacity in that room is 139 people. We were there about 30 minutes early and we just barely made the cut off. There was overflow as you can see behind me into the hallway. Folks looking on their phones, listening on speakers, and really clapping outside here as well whenever they're hearing from somebody who is speaking as a resident. Now, the residents of Red Oak, they are heated.

[00:00:51]They are passionate about not letting another data center come to their city.

[00:00:54]They even protested in the hours before the meeting started. Right now, there are five data centers in various phases in Red Oak. The Google data center is up and running already and the other four are being developed by Compass, DataBank, Powerhouse, and Diode Investments. Tonight, people are protesting a possible sixth data center by Compass. It would require rezoning more than 800 acres of land from agricultural to industrial land and neighbors who live there say they didn't find out about it until two weeks ago after folks were approached to sell their land. They are worried about water and electricity usage, noise pollution, loss of natural land, among other environmental impacts. Tonight, the city manager showed a presentation that rebutted every one of those points, but residents, they aren't buying it. We don't need another data center. You don't know what the healthy impact is.

[00:01:43]You got them all crunched together.

[00:01:45]You're going to have a mass exit. You're going to ruin this community. You're going to ruin it. Ruin it if you let this Uh we try to tailor each one of these planned developments to the area and to the use as proposed.

[00:01:59]The cooling that they are proposing to use is a closed loop system and that will use far less water. My property has dropped $107,000 in value since the data center on Steinbeck was put in.

[00:02:18]I have that in writing from the tax office.

[00:02:22]It's hurting people's homes, their retirement.

[00:02:29]And tonight the city council is supposed to be voting on whether they can rezone that more than 800 acres of land, but again, they are still in public comment right now. So So it's going to be a while before they get to it. We're going to be following it throughout the night and we'll bring you an update, the latest on Daybreak tomorrow morning.

[00:02:45]Let's send it back to you. All right, could be a long night. Thank you, Tivity. And this issue isn't confined to Red Oak. The city council is expected to review site plans tomorrow for a data center in Fort Worth. According to our partners at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, council members will review plans for 187 acres on a site the zoning commission approved last month.

[00:03:04]Some neighbors are fighting that plan citing environmental concerns and noise.

[00:03:09]We've been reporting on this project for months now. It involves rezoning more than 400 acres south of I-20 near Forest Tail and Lone Stevenson Road.