Texas House State Affairs Committee · August 19, 2026
We have testified, packed hearing rooms, and written the Governor. Pressure like that gets answered one project at a time. Legislation gets answered once, for every community in Texas. On Wednesday, August 19, the Texas House State Affairs Committee meets in Austin to take testimony on data centers, and what goes into the record that day becomes the report that becomes the bills filed in 2027.
It is clear that data centers are coming to Texas. What is not settled is what rules come with them. This is the most important meeting to date, and a real chance to shape those rules before they are written.
Read the charge they were handed and you will find the word “streamline.” You will also find, in the same sentence, the phrase “enabling communities to plan and manage growth responsibly.” Which of those two ends up in the final report depends on whose comments are in the file.
You do not have to drive to Austin. The committee accepts written comments electronically, and they go into the record alongside the testimony. Two minutes, from your kitchen table.
Comments submitted before the hearing are the ones members and staff actually read while preparing. Do not wait for the 19th.
Notice of public hearing
Two topics take comment: Data Centers and 765-kV Transmission Lines. In-person testimony may be limited to two minutes per witness, the number of witnesses may be limited by the chair, and registration closes at 10:00 AM on the day of the hearing.
Do this before August 19
Put your name in the record. Two minutes at your kitchen table, no trip to Austin, and it counts the same as testimony.
The builder writes it for you. You add one sentence about your own lake, your own well, or your own street.
Home / August 19 Hearing
In plain English
The Texas Legislature meets only in odd-numbered years. In between, the Speaker hands each committee a subject to study and report back on. State Affairs was handed data centers. Here is the whole path, and the only part of it the public is invited into is happening in two weeks.
The committee sits and listens. Invited experts testify, the public testifies, and written comments go into the same official record. This is the only step where anyone asks ordinary Texans what the law should say.
The committee writes its findings and recommendations, drawn from what is in the record. No public is in the room for this part. Your comment is the only way you are in the room.
Members walk into session carrying that report and file bills out of it. An idea in the report starts the session as a draft. An idea that is not in the report starts at zero and usually dies for lack of time.
What survives becomes statute. It binds water districts, counties, and state agencies, and it does not care who the governor is. Then it is settled for years.
Showing up works, and we intend to keep showing up. But pressure has to be reapplied every single time, in every single county, by neighbors who have to teach themselves water law from scratch while the clock runs. Nothing carries over to the next community.
A statute carries over. This committee is deciding what the rules are for every data center in Texas, including how much water they can take, who has to be told, and whether the people who live on the lake ever get a say before the contract is signed.
That is the fight now: not one project, but a law that keeps data centers from being built in ways that harm the communities around them. Part of that is giving counties real authority over where these facilities go. Henderson County commissioners asked the Legislature for exactly that in May, and counties across Texas have asked for the same. This is the committee that can grant it.
What they were actually asked to study
This is the interim charge as posted in the hearing notice. We have marked the two clauses that matter. Everything else is context.
One thing to be clear about before you read it: it is clear that data centers are coming, and nobody at this hearing is voting on whether to allow them. The open question is what rules come with them, and that is a question the committee has been explicitly told to answer.
Interim charge · Data Centers
House State Affairs Committee, Notice of Public Hearing, August 19, 2026
Study the development of data centers in Texas, including its importance to global competitiveness and national security. Evaluate the direct and indirect economic growth potential fostered by in-state data center development, including growth multiplier effects and economic diversification. Identify existing secondary and post-secondary education and training opportunities and recommend pathways to satisfy increasing labor demands. Review the existing regulatory framework governing data center development and recommend proposals to streamline regulations while enabling communities to plan and manage growth responsibly. Study the implementation of SB 6 and the Large Load Batch Study Process proposed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, as it relates to data centers, and identify how grid-connected data center facilities and co-located resources can support grid resilience and reliability.
Door one · State Affairs
The hearing on August 19. Framed around the economy, the grid, and the workforce.
“…recommend proposals to streamline regulations while enabling communities to plan and manage growth responsibly.”
This is the harder room, and it is the one meeting first. The second half of that sentence is the opening, and a comment that answers it is doing what the committee was asked to do.
Door two · Natural Resources
A separate charge to a separate committee, which held its hearing on June 23.
“Examine the total water usage of data center operations in Texas, including direct and indirect uses. Evaluate regulatory, permitting, and infrastructure considerations for water-efficient data center development, particularly in water-stressed regions.”
Read “indirect uses” again. Water a district sells to a city that then supplies a data center is an indirect use. The pass-through gap is already inside this charge. So is our lake, under “water-stressed regions.”
Already happened · June 23, 2026
Chair Cody Harris invited Diode Ventures and Calypso to testify. Both declined. “They declined to give testimony because they did not want to answer hard questions,” Harris said. The committee also learned that only 17 percent of Texas data centers answered the state’s required annual water use survey, which is a Class C misdemeanor to skip. The state still does not know how much water this industry uses.
That is worth putting in your August 19 comment. One committee already asked these companies to account for their water and got silence. Voluntary disclosure has been tested. It failed.
The part almost nobody is regulating
This is the gap that matters most to us now, and it is the one least likely to come up at the hearing unless somebody puts it in the record. Every safeguard anyone has proposed so far is written at the facility. Setbacks, noise limits, county votes, zoning. All of those assume the data center and the water are in the same place. Move the water through a pipeline and a wholesale contract, and none of them apply.
Your lake is the district’s supply source. The district holds the water rights and the pipelines, and it decides where that water goes.
Ten miles away, or a hundred. Through an integrated pipeline the water leaves your county entirely. Nothing about that transfer happens where the lake is.
The district sells to a member city. The city supplies a data center. Now the water is two contracts removed from the reservoir, and no disclosure rule written at the facility ever reaches back to it.
The definition we are asking the committee to use
“District-source water” means raw or treated water originating from any reservoir, water right, wellfield, or supply source owned, operated, controlled, or contracted for by a wholesale water provider, including water conveyed through an integrated pipeline. It includes water the district delivers directly to an end user, and water the district delivers to a customer, wholesale purchaser, member city, water district, river authority, or water supply corporation that in turn supplies the end user.
Plainly: water sold by the district to a city, and then supplied by that city to a data center, is still the reservoir’s water. If a disclosure rule cannot follow water through that second contract, it does not protect the lake it came from. This is the definition our coalition is using in its own public records request, and it is the language we are asking the committee to write into statute.
Why this matters for the community that owns the reservoir
The people who live on a reservoir have no standing at all in a transaction like this. There is no hearing in their county. No commissioners court vote. No zoning question, because the facility is somewhere else entirely. The lake goes down and the process happens a hundred miles away, in front of a board that answers to ratepayers in another metro area.
That is not a hypothetical for us, and it is not a Cedar Creek problem. Any community sitting on a wholesale provider’s supply reservoir is in exactly the same position.
Everything here happened after the charge was written
This matters for what you write. The committee is working from a March assignment, and part of the job on August 19 is telling them what has happened since.
The Speaker assigns data centers to State Affairs, framed around the economy, the grid, and the workforce, and separately assigns data center water use to Natural Resources.
Abbott directs the PUCT and ERCOT to make data centers fully fund their own electric infrastructure and adopt water-efficient cooling, and calls on lawmakers to phase out what he calls outdated tax incentives.
House Natural Resources takes testimony on data center water use. Diode Ventures and Calypso are invited and decline. Agencies testify that most data centers are not reporting their water use at all.
PUCT Chair Thomas Gleeson writes back to the Governor and calls on the Legislature to grant the agencies more authority to regulate the industry. The state's own utility regulator says it does not have enough power to do this job.
Every data center in the interconnection queue must be audited before it moves forward, including projected water use, water sources, and cooling method. No completion date has been announced.
What this means for your comment
You are not asking the committee for something new and unprecedented. You are agreeing with the state's own regulator. The July letter asked the Legislature for authority. Your comment says what that authority should cover.
Two things are worth saying plainly on the 19th. First, every action taken since March runs through a grid connection, so a facility that builds its own gas generation and buys public water is outside all of it. Second, a directive can be narrowed, paused, or reinterpreted by the office that wrote it, without notice or hearing. A statute cannot. That is the difference between what happened in August and what this committee can do.
What to ask the committee for
Pick the ones you care about. The builder below will put them in your own comment. You do not need to include all of them, and a comment about one thing you actually understand beats a comment about six things you don’t.
A large load should trigger disclosure and review based on where its water comes from, not only where the building sits. If a wholesale provider commits reservoir water to a data center, that should be disclosed and reviewed whether the facility is next door or a hundred miles away, and the requirement has to follow the water through wholesale resale to a member city. Otherwise the community where the reservoir lives has no say in the process at all.
On May 12, 2026, the Henderson County Commissioners Court adopted a resolution and sent it to the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, and five legislators including Rep. Cody Harris. Counties across Texas have adopted similar ones. Its legislative request is one sentence:
“Enact legislation providing counties and municipalities meaningful participation and authority in land use, infrastructure planning, and resource impact review related to large-scale data center developments.”
The same resolution asks for public reporting of anticipated electricity demand, water use, and infrastructure impacts before final approval, independent impact analysis, and opposes open-loop evaporative cooling in water-constrained regions. An elected commissioners court has put the ask on the record. This committee can write it into law.
SB 6, the batch study process, and the August 3 audit all attach to a grid connection. A data center with on-site gas generation avoids every one of them and still draws public water. Any large-load statute has to reach a facility by its water and land footprint, not only by its interconnection request.
Before a water district or river authority signs a large-load raw water contract, require public disclosure of projected peak daily consumption and the cooling method, plus a written finding that the volume does not impair supply for existing customers under drought-of-record conditions.
Most Texas counties have no zoning authority, so a hyperscale facility can be built at a property line with no local recourse. Set minimum setbacks and a nighttime decibel limit at the property line for large facilities in unincorporated areas, and give counties standing to enforce them.
Peak water and its source, cooling design, setbacks, noise, lighting, traffic, abatements, and controlling ownership. The Governor already wrote the list. Codify it, require it to be posted publicly and sorted by county, and it stops depending on who holds the office.
Ask the committee plainly not to recommend anything that removes a county commissioners court, a water district board, or a municipal utility from a decision about local water. In a county with no zoning, those votes are the only process residents have.
The second topic takes comment separately. If new 765-kV lines would cross your land or your county, say so, and say who the load is for. Landowners facing condemnation for transmission built to serve private data centers deserve to be named in this record too.
The two-minute action
Committee staff read and log written comments, and they are part of the official record of the hearing. Identical form letters get counted once and set aside. A comment that names a real place and a real person is the one that gets quoted. Make a few choices, add a sentence in your own words, and this builds it for you.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. The comment is assembled right here on this page, and you can edit every word before you submit it.
Which topic are you commenting on?
The notice takes comments on two separate subjects. If both affect you, submit twice, once under each topic. Most people want the first one.
Are you writing about a specific project?
Pick the first one if your worry is that your reservoir’s water gets sold to a facility somewhere else. Pick the second if there is a named project in your county. All three are worth filing.
The water, and who decides where it goes
Name the reservoir and the district or authority that owns the supply. This is what makes your comment specific even when there is no project to point at.
The project, and the water at stake
If it has no public name yet, describe it (“the data center proposed off FM 316”). Naming the water body is the single most effective thing you can do here.
How does it plan to get its power?
This is the question the whole charge turns on. A project that generates its own power sits outside SB 6, outside the batch process, and outside the audit. If nobody will tell you, that is itself worth putting on the record.
What should the committee recommend?
Check the ones you actually care about. Two or three focused asks land better than all five. Comments are capped at 3,000 characters, so if you pick a lot we will keep the strongest ones and drop the rest.
0 selected
In your own words (this matters most)
One or two honest sentences. How long have you been there? What do you stand to lose? Staff weigh personal comments far more heavily, and these are the lines that get read aloud.
Your details
The comment portal asks for your name and where you live. Your state representative’s district is optional, and helpful if you know it.
Nothing you type leaves your browser, the comment is built right here.
Your comment, click to edit, then submit
On the portal, choose the 88th/89th Legislature interim hearing list, select State Affairs and the August 19, 2026 hearing, then pick the topic you chose in step 1 and paste your comment.
Or email the committee directly
Rep. Ken King, Chair
House Committee on State Affairs
P.O. Box 2910
Austin, TX 78768-2910
If the portal gives you trouble, a printed letter mailed to the committee clerk is still entered into the record. Sign it by hand and put your town under your name. If you want it to count twice, submit online as well.
If you can get to Austin
In-person testimony carries more weight than anything else on this page, and it is also the biggest ask. If even three or four people from one lake show up together, the committee notices. Here is exactly how it works.
Witness registration is done at the kiosks in the Capitol on the day of the hearing. The notice says registration closes at 10:00 AM, and the hearing gavels in at 8:00 AM, so arrive early rather than mid-morning.
Public testimony may be limited to two minutes, and the chair can limit how many witnesses are heard. Write for 90 seconds, not two minutes. Practice it out loud once. If you get cut off mid-sentence, the point is lost.
Whatever you plan to say, file it electronically as well. That way the full version is in the record even if the chair limits witnesses or you never get called. Do both.
Build your written commentWritten to be read aloud in about 90 seconds. Change the highlighted parts to your own.
Read it out loud once before you go. Cut a sentence if it runs past 100 seconds.
For landowners along a proposed route. Submit this under the second topic.
Submit under 765-kV Transmission Lines, which is logged separately from the data center topic.
Why we know this works
Eleven weeks of packed hearings. Neighbors, business owners, and families reading county filings and water district agendas nobody expected them to read. No state rule protected this lake, because there wasn’t one.
The decision followed “the perspectives shared by residents, local leaders and stakeholders” and the site’s proximity to a rural residential community.Developer’s withdrawal letter to the Henderson County Commissioners Court · July 2026
That is what it currently takes: a year of volunteer labor, one community at a time. August 19 is the chance to make it a matter of law instead of a matter of how much energy a community can spare. A comment takes two minutes.
The more of us there are, the harder we are to ignore.