DeSoto County Voted No on a Data Center Twice in Two Days. Its Own Moratorium Still Doesn't Reach It.

Asha Stalnaker got her five minutes at the microphone in Arcadia, Florida, on the evening of October 27th, and she used them to say the thing that actually mattered: that she and her neighbors shouldn't have to take a company's word on water as a substitute for a permit. Six hours into a hearing that had started that afternoon, the DeSoto County Board of County Commissioners agreed with her, in the only way a four-member board can agree on something this contested. The vote on a rezoning request for roughly 238 acres came back 2-2. A tie fails. The request died.

It didn't stay dead for long, not as a project. The next evening, the same board took up a second rezoning request from the same developer, this one for close to 554 acres a few miles away, and got the same result: a 2-2 tie, after the county's own planning commission had already recommended denying it, 4-1. Two votes, two days, two ties, same outcome both times. DeSoto County's commissioners did not approve a data center this week. They also did not kill one.

The company behind both applications is DCIP Group, led by founder Wilson Trilha, and its plan for a stretch of farmland and a retired power plant east of Arcadia has been growing for most of a year. It started small and specific: in March, commissioners approved rezoning 34 acres on Roan Street, the site of a decommissioned 340-megawatt natural gas plant, to let DCIP build its first data center there, running on gas drawn from the Florida Gas Transmission pipeline, with a 55-decibel noise limit set 200 feet from the property line. That approval is the one piece of this project nobody voted on this week, because nobody needed to. It already happened.

Since March, the ambition attached to those first 34 acres has gotten much bigger. DCIP has told reporters its full build-out could eventually cover about 1,300 acres, more than two square miles, in facilities scattered across the county. The two applications that tied this week, covering the 3F Ranch and Swisher tracts, were the next bites of that larger plan, not the whole thing. A planning commission that recommended denying the larger one, 4-1, made clear it isn't inclined to approve the rest of it on the company's say-so either.

One of the five county commissioners wasn't in the room to vote at all. The Florida Commission on Ethics had already ordered Commissioner Steve Hickox to sit out, after he disclosed that a step-family member was involved in a possible land deal with DCIP. Hickox used his last turn at the dais before the recusal took effect to say, on the record, that he opposed the project anyway. That left four commissioners to decide something a fifth clearly had an opinion about, and it meant any 2-2 split would do exactly what it did: nothing passes without three votes, and three was never on the table either night.

A moratorium with a hole cut exactly where this project sits

DeSoto County does have a data center moratorium. Commissioners approved a one-year pause on new data center applications on July 29th, after months of public pressure that included residents packing meeting after meeting and the planning commission itself recommending the pause run two years instead of one. It doesn't cover DCIP's project. The moratorium was written to exempt rezoning applications already tied to this specific proposal, the one that grew out of the March approval, which means the single project that generated the most public pressure for a pause is also the one piece of land in the county the pause was never going to touch.

I think that's the part of this story worth sitting with longer than the vote counts. A moratorium that exempts the project everyone was actually worried about when they asked for it isn't a loophole that snuck in by accident. Someone drafted that carve-out on purpose, almost certainly because the March rezoning had already happened and unwinding it would have invited the kind of lawsuit that's hit data center moratoriums in a dozen other counties this year. Memphis hit the same wall from a different angle when its own proposed pause on new data center permits left xAI's already-running Colossus facility completely untouched. A pause that only reaches projects that haven't started yet will always look, to the people living next to the one that already has, like it was built around them rather than for them.

A promise about water isn't the same thing as a permit

The loudest objection in Arcadia isn't about zoning maps. It's about water, in a county sitting through a real drought with river levels reported at historic lows. DCIP says its data centers will lean on reclaimed wastewater, stormwater collection, and closed-loop cooling rather than drawing down the aquifer the way a conventional facility might. Those are real engineering choices, and they're the right ones to be making if the company intends to follow through on them. But Stalnaker's line from the dais gets at exactly why residents aren't taking the company's description of its own future water use as settled fact: "Residents should not be asked to accept unknown water impacts based on future promises." Another resident, Wendy Midgett, has said publicly she wants an outright ban rather than the current patchwork of conditions. Neither of them is arguing against the engineering. They're arguing against being asked to trust an engineering plan that hasn't been locked into anything binding yet.

Florida actually wrote a law this year that bears directly on this fight. SB 484, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in May and mostly in effect since July 1st, bars utilities from shifting data center infrastructure costs onto residential ratepayers, restricts when water management districts can issue new consumptive-use permits to large-scale data centers, and, the part that matters most in Arcadia this week, explicitly preserves local government authority over zoning, permitting, and land use. The state legislature didn't take this decision away from DeSoto County's commissioners. It left the decision with them on purpose. Two tied votes in two days is what that authority looks like when a board is genuinely split rather than rubber-stamping.

That's the same evidence-ladder question we ask on every site we evaluate, just playing out in a public meeting instead of a diligence memo: is a developer's description of its own water plan a verified commitment, or a claim sitting at the bottom of the Kill Test until something, a permit, a consent order, a signed agreement with real enforcement behind it, moves it up. Right now, DCIP's reclaimed-water pitch is a company's own characterization of a plan for land it doesn't yet have fully rezoned. That's not nothing, and it's also not a permit. TECfusions made a similar pitch in Pennsylvania about the gas-fired campus it says it isn't fully building yet, and that distinction, between what a company says it will do and what a government has actually made it agree to do, is the one that ends up mattering most once the first phase is already running and the rest of the build-out is still just a plan on a map.

What happens next in DeSoto County isn't really about this week's two tie votes, even though those are the headline. It's about whether DCIP comes back with a third application that two commissioners can live with, and whether the conditions attached to it, on water, on noise, on whatever comes after the 55-decibel limit set back in March, are specific enough to survive contact with an actual operating facility instead of a hearing-room promise. The 34 acres on Roan Street are already built on. Everything after that is still just a plan two commissioners weren't ready to sign off on twice in a row, and a county moratorium that was never going to reach any of it either way.