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Hood County court directs updates to development rules after data‑center hearings
Summary
After lengthy public testimony on Project Red and Project Yellow, commissioners directed staff to revise Hood County development-permit regulations and the concept-plan checklist to add conditional items, state-adopted fire guidance and infrastructure-protection disclosures for future reviews.
The Hood County Commissioners Court on March 10 directed the development director to update the county's development permit regulations (Article 4) and the concept-plan checklist, citing repeated gaps identified during public hearings on two proposed data‑center projects. The motion, approved 4‑0, asks staff and county counsel to prepare draft changes that would require concept-plan and site-development submittals to include a set of conditional items flagged during third‑party review, to reflect applicable state‑adopted NFPA/fire‑code guidance, and to require developers to disclose infrastructure and component sourcing as relevant to state infrastructure‑protection laws.
Commissioner Samuelson framed the directive as a response to the large scale of proposals now before the county and to the volume of technical questions that exceeded the county's prior, more modest checklist expectations. "These are not typical concept plans," he said, arguing the county should require additional documentation early in the review process. County staff said the intent is to fold commonly requested conditional approvals into the application checklist and to craft enforceable language in consultation with county attorneys and the development commission.
The court discussed but did not adopt a verbatim requirement to hold developers to a single NFPA standard; instead staff were asked to draft regulatory language that references 'applicable state‑adopted NFPA fire codes' where relevant (for example, NFPA 855 if a battery energy storage system is proposed) and to ensure consistency across building, fire and environmental requirements. Commissioners and commenters also asked staff to explore whether affidavit or component‑disclosure forms can be used to document supply‑chain or equipment sourcing that could implicate the Lone Star infrastructure‑protection provisions cited by the court.
Next steps: staff will prepare draft regulatory language and a revised checklist for public posting and hearing. The court expects to receive those materials in time for a follow-up public hearing and to use the revised checklist when evaluating the Project Red and Project Yellow submittals after developers provide the requested engineering reports.
