League City residents will now have a say before any data center can be built in the city.

The City Council voted Oct. 27 to amend League City's unified development code, or UDC, to require developers to secure a Special Use Permit before building a data center, Community Impact reported. Each permit must be approved by the full council.

The council first voted unanimously to approve the UDC amendment. Members then voted 7-1 to adopt the ordinance on first and final reading, meaning the council would not need to vote a second time at a Nov. 17 meeting.

Council member Tom Crews cast the lone dissenting vote on the first-and-final reading. Crews said he wanted the city to add clearer regulatory language addressing a potential data center's impact on the community, such as water use or noise impact, before the second reading, according to Community Impact.

The vote skipped that step.

Other council members disagreed with Crews' suggestion. They argued that setting overly specific standards would amount to a "checklist" developers could satisfy to move a project forward.

"There is a high potential for change in what a data center is and how it operates," Council member Chad Tressler said at the meeting, according to Community Impact. "Trying to preplan around that change would be problematic."

What changes for League City

Until the vote, League City's development code did not specifically identify data centers as a distinct use category. That meant a developer could potentially build one by right on certain properties without council review.

Mayor Nick Long said the city had researched its own standards and realized nothing would prevent someone from building a data center by right on certain properties, according to Community Impact. The change allows the city to review data center proposals on a case-by-case basis in a public setting, Long said.

The city's Planning and Zoning Commission had voted unanimously Oct. 19 to recommend the council adopt the changes, according to city documents cited by Community Impact.

Statewide scrutiny

Data centers face growing scrutiny across Texas. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, shut down its electronic filing portal for certain environmental permit applications, an agency spokesperson confirmed Oct. 22, Community Impact previously reported. That shutdown followed claims by watchdog groups that the agency had processed nearly three dozen permit applications for data center projects in violation of an order from Gov. Greg Abbott.