Residents press Cibolo council for rules, transparency after Bolton Road data center moves forward

Dozens of residents and council members pressed city staff on July 28 over a proposed data center on Bolton Road that, staff said, was administratively authorized under the Unified Development Code. At the meeting’s citizens-to-be-heard segment, Lauren Torres told the council the project “is being built for 50 megawatts today, but it has the potential to expand significantly with future approvals,” and urged the city to require conditional use permits for future data centers.

Planning staff and the city manager laid out the procedural and technical background: the planning director said the UDC’s provision for new or unlisted uses (UDC §4.4.07) allows a director-level land-use determination and that the site passed a multi-department site-plan review. Staff also described utilities and mitigations: the Green Valley Special Utility District (GVSUD) will provide water, staff said, and an engineering review and a planned noise analysis by Colliers will benchmark ambient levels and model post-construction noise.

Councilmember Patterson said the episode revealed communication gaps with council and residents and asked staff to accelerate ordinance changes. The city manager announced a public town hall for Aug. 17 (6:30 p.m., location TBD) where the developer will be invited to present and residents may ask questions. Mayor Carol Latimer and council members directed staff to work with the ordinance subcommittee and Planning & Zoning to draft a regulatory framework—potentially a hybrid that would require council-level review (for larger centers) and objective criteria (for smaller ones).

Staff emphasized that, according to their review, the project uses closed-loop cooling and that initial water fills would be on the order of tens of thousands of gallons (staff cited a one-time fill between ~75,000–120,000 gallons and routine makeup of a few hundred gallons per day), and that the developer reported advanced noise mitigation. Council agreed to pursue a public education town hall and to begin UDC changes but did not retroactively change the administrative site-plan approval.

What’s next: the city will publish town-hall details, commission a noise study around the Bolton Road tract, and Planning & Zoning will begin reviewing potential ordinance amendments to define and regulate data centers; councilmembers said they will get monthly economic-development updates going forward. The city manager and planning director said they will offer staff-led briefings and invite the developer to meet the council to explore voluntary mitigations.

Quote attribution: "The site is being built for 50 megawatts today, but it has the potential to expand significantly with future approvals," resident Lauren Torres said. "We should require a conditional use permit or CUP for data centers so each proposal is reviewed individually and requires City Council approval through a public process," she added.

Timeline: Council and staff discussed the project at length beginning in the citizens-to-be-heard portion and continuing through an extended council agenda item dedicated to data-center regulations. A town hall was announced for Aug. 17, 2026.