The Direct Message
Tension: A city cannot regulate the electric grid, which is the single biggest thing residents are worried about. Fort Worth’s answer was to borrow the state’s leverage instead of trying to build its own.
Noise: Coverage of Tuesday’s meeting has centred on the moratorium, which is a resolution to begin a process and pauses nothing yet. The filing ordinance passed the same night is the item with legal force today.
Direct Message: Fort Worth has attached itself to Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide audit. Every data center application filed in the city now has to clear a state bottleneck the city does not control and cannot be lobbied to reopen.
Every DMNews article follows The Direct Message methodology.
Fort Worth’s City Council voted 10-1 on Aug. 11 to amend the city code so that any new data center application must arrive with documentation that state regulators have signed off on the project’s connection to the electric grid. The rule applies to applications the city receives after that meeting. Unlike the 90-day moratorium the council took up the same night, it did not need hearings, findings, or a second vote. It is already in force.
District 10 council member Chris Jamieson cast the lone no vote, according to Community Impact’s account of the meeting.
What the rule actually requires
A developer now has to show the city proof of interconnection approval from the state’s utility regulator, the Public Utility Commission of Texas, and the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The requirement bites at predevelopment conferences, platting, replatting, building permits, and infrastructure plan review, per NBC 5’s breakdown of the ordinance presented to council. That is effectively every point at which a data center project and Fort Worth’s development process make contact.
The practical effect is sequencing. Before Tuesday, a developer could work the city process and the state interconnection queue in parallel and hope they converged. Now the state has to go first. A project that cannot demonstrate grid approval cannot get to the front counter, regardless of how the zoning conversation is going.
Where the rule does not reach
Assistant City Manager Jesica McEachern told council the requirement does not apply to data centers in Fort Worth’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, or to facilities supplied by the city’s municipal water system but sitting outside city limits, per KERA News.
That gap is the same one McEachern raised in arguing against pushing developers away entirely. A project that relocates just past the city line can still draw on the same regional water and the same grid while sitting outside Fort Worth’s authority over setbacks, noise, and lighting. The filing rule tightens the city’s grip on what it can already reach. It does nothing about what it cannot.
The state directive it borrows from
Fort Worth’s ordinance is written to mirror a directive Abbott issued on Aug. 3, ordering PUCT and ERCOT to audit every data center moving through the interconnection process. The governor’s office was explicit about the consequence: any project that fails to meet PUCT and ERCOT requirements is to be denied connection to the Texas grid. The same release put the scale of the queue at roughly 474 gigawatts of pending requests, several times ERCOT’s record peak demand.
The audit is not a formality. It requires each project to disclose what public money it has taken, in the form of state and local tax incentives, grants and abatements, and how much of its power it intends to generate itself rather than pull from the grid.
That is the leverage Fort Worth has now borrowed. The city cannot audit a data center’s water use or force it to build its own generation. The state can, and Fort Worth has made the state’s answer a precondition of its own permits.
Why this moved faster than the moratorium
Council members had already been told the moratorium would be slow. Under Chapter 212 of the Texas Local Government Code, the city has to publish written findings, hold two public hearings, and take two votes before a pause can begin, with the earliest possible adoption falling on Feb. 16, 2027. Projects already in the pipeline keep their place regardless.
City staff had also spent the previous week working out what Abbott’s audit meant for local projects, with McEachern telling council the city was taking a step back because a project that cannot get grid approval has no clear timeline at all. The filing ordinance was the piece of that they could act on immediately.
The fiscal backdrop explains some of the caution about going further. Fort Worth is proposing a property tax rate increase and cuts to close a $94 million shortfall for fiscal 2027. Thirty-five miles north, Denton is building a $2.22 billion budget on a surge in business personal property value its own staff have called a short-term boost. Dallas, meanwhile, is weighing whether to create a distinct data center land use in its development code, having until now allowed the facilities by right across much of the city.
Three cities, three postures, one grid. What Fort Worth did on Tuesday was decline to pick between them and instead hand the first decision to Austin. Every application that lands at the counter between now and February will test whether that was leverage or just a longer line.
