College Station council rejects proposed sale of Midtown land to Priority Power after hours of public opposition

The College Station City Council on Sept. 11 voted to deny a proposed real-estate contract to sell about 200 acres in Midtown Business Park to Priority Power Management LLC for a potential data center, after an evening that stretched past midnight and featured extensive presentations by city staff and the developer and more than 70 public speakers.

The proposal, as presented by Michael Ostrovsky, the city’s chief development officer, would have put approximately 200 acres under an option at $150,000 per acre and allowed Priority Power to undertake a lengthy feasibility and due-diligence period to determine whether sufficient power and water could be brought to the site. Ostrovsky told the council that the sale would have included feasibility protections, requirements for separate power and water agreements, a sound-study requirement and a city repurchase right if development did not commence within 365 days of closing.

Brandon Schwertner, Priority Power’s CEO, said his company planned a high-performance computing/data-center development and asked the council to remove any reference to cryptocurrency mining from the option language. “That is not the desired tenant of this site,” Schwertner told the council, adding that the company would strike references to Bitcoin mining from the contract language and that many of the technical…