Home / Westlake
88 acres off U.S. Highway 377 · Town of Westlake, Texas
That item permitted data centers by right, more than doubled the height limit, and deleted the rule that kept tall buildings back from homes. No one spoke at the public hearing. The vote was unanimous.
Nineteen months later, on August 4, 2026, a site plan for a data center on that land was approved. The homes along its southern fence line are in Keller, whose residents do not vote in Westlake. The zoning requires a landscaped buffer between the two. On the approved sheet, the buffer faces the highway.
Every claim on this page is tied to a government document. The documents are the argument.
Each entry below comes from a public record. Everything before January 6, 2025 is background. Everything after it follows from that night.
The Board of Aldermen adopts Ordinance No. 314, rezoning approximately 222.6 acres to Planned Development District 3-8. The Land Use Schedule lists “Data Center” as a use and leaves every column blank. Under the schedule’s own legend, a blank square means the use is not allowed.
Source: Ordinance No. 314Ordinance No. 322 amends uses for one tract. Ordinance No. 438 rezones about 39.6 acres near I-35W. Neither permits a data center.
Sources: Ordinance No. 322, Ordinance No. 438Keller rezones land to residential in 2006 and again in 2015, adding homes along the fence line. At that time, Westlake’s zoning limited buildings on the adjoining land to two stories or 35 feet, capped density at a 0.30:1 floor area ratio, and required taller structures to step back from any single-family lot line on a 5:1 slope.
Sources: Keller Ordinance 1309, Keller Ordinance 1742, Westlake Ordinance No. 314The Commission votes 5-1-1 to recommend approval of text amendments to PD 3-8. One member votes against. One abstains.
Source: staff report for Ordinance No. 1015The Town Council adopts Ordinance No. 1015. The posted agenda item reads:
Hold a public hearing, discuss, consider and act to adopt Ordinance 1015 approving text amendments to PD, Planned Development District No. 3-8 generally located at the southeast corner of U.S. Highway 377 and State Highway 170; providing a penalty; providing a cumulative clause; providing a severability clause; providing a savings clause; and establishing an effective date.
Town of Westlake, Town Council agenda, January 6, 2025. The words “data center” do not appear.The minutes record that no one spoke at the public hearing. The vote was unanimous, with one member absent.
What the ordinance did: permitted data centers by right, more than doubled building height limits, increased permitted density, converted electrical substations and temporary batch plants from permit-required to by-right, and deleted the rule that kept tall buildings back from homes.
Sources: January 6, 2025 agenda; minutes; staff report; Ordinance No. 1015Kimley-Horn submits a site plan application for a data center on 87.96 acres at 13580 Denton Highway on behalf of Circle T Owner LP, a Delaware limited partnership with an address in McLean, Virginia.
Source: site plan applicationThe Commission approves the site plan after a closed session lasting approximately two hours, adding three conditions: an eight-foot berm or sound barrier wall along the southern property line, acoustic treatment of mechanical equipment, and additional trees.
Sources: August 4, 2026 agenda and staff reportA special meeting is called for 4:00 p.m. with one action item: Resolution 26-25, approving a development agreement with Circle T Owner LP. No construction may occur until this agreement is approved.
Source: August 17, 2026 special meeting agendaPD 3-8 as it stood before that meeting, next to the text adopted that night.
| Provision | Before Jan 6, 2025 | After |
|---|---|---|
| Data centers | Not permitted | Permitted by right (Office/Industrial) |
| Max height, Office/Industrial | 2 stories or 35 feet | 80 feet |
| Max height, Office | Lesser of 5 stories or 75 feet | 120 feet |
| Max height, Retail | 2 stories or 35 feet | 120 feet |
| Density, Office/Industrial | 0.30:1 floor area ratio | 70% lot coverage |
| Electrical substations | Specific Use Permit required | Permitted by right |
| Temporary batch plants | Specific Use Permit required | Permitted by right |
| Setback from homes | 5:1 slope from any single-family lot line | Deleted, replaced with a flat 150 feet |
Sources: Ordinance No. 314 as amended, compared with Ordinance No. 1015.
The deleted rule said no non-single-family structure could rise above a line drawn at a 5-to-1 slope from any single-family lot line. At 35 feet, that required about 175 feet of separation. At the newly permitted 80 feet, it would have required about 400 feet.
The same ordinance that raised the height limit removed the rule governing distance from homes.
80 feet is the maximum height permitted in the Office/Industrial sub-area under Ordinance 1015. It is not established that the proposed buildings are 80 feet tall.
Both of these were posted the same night, by the same secretary. Presented for comparison only.
An amendment to the Westlake Ranch planned development regarding minimum first-floor square footage. The item names the property and the change.
An amendment to the Entrada planned development regarding permitted roofing materials. The item names the property and the change.
Town of Westlake, Town Council agenda, January 6, 2025.On the approved sheet, the buffer faces the highway.
Section 9 of PD 3-8, as adopted in January 2025, says:
Section 9.1 Non-Compatible Use Setback. A Minimum 150 foot setback required between a single family, detached residential use and non-commercial uses.
Section 9.2 Landscape Buffer. A landscaped buffer yard required between single family, detached residential use and non-commercial uses. A buffer yard shall consist of berming, trees, shrubs, landscaping, fencing or any combination of these as approved by the Town Council with the site plan approval.
Ordinance No. 1015, PD 3-8, Section 9, adopted January 6, 2025.The homes are to the south. Marshall Ridge, The Lakes at Marshall Ridge, and the lots on Llano Court all adjoin that property line.
The site plan exhibit runs twenty pages. Only one is the site plan. It is titled “SITE PLAN” and marked, in the applicant’s own title block, “1 OF 1.”
The other nineteen pages are building elevations, landscape cover sheets and general notes, a planting chart, planting details, and eleven marketing renderings captioned “Trees During Installation” and “Trees After Estimated (5 Years).”
This matters because the approved site plan is what gets built and what the Town enforces at the permit counter. Renderings are not enforceable. Notes are not enforceable.
The 75-foot landscape buffer, the landscape berm, the retaining wall, and the building setback are all drawn along the western frontage on U.S. Highway 377. Along the southern boundary, facing the homes, the sheet shows a secure perimeter fence. The staff report describes the purpose in the same terms:
Installing a heavily landscaped berm parallel to United States Highway 377 to visually screen the data center from view along the highway.
Town of Westlake staff report, Planning and Zoning Commission, August 4, 2026.Sheet LP 1.01 is the applicant’s Planting Code Chart. It works through every landscape requirement in two columns, Required and Provided: site trees, town edge open space, roadway landscape zones, parking lot landscaping, screening of loading areas, dumpsters, open space, tree replacement.
There is no line for Section 9. No entry for the setback. No entry for the buffer yard. Every requirement analyzed comes from Chapter 98 of the Town Code, not from the zoning district that governs this property. At the foot of the chart:
**75′ landscape buffer to be designed by others.
Sheet LP 1.01, Planting Code Chart, submitted July 2026.Shows a fence on the southern boundary, and the landscape buffer, berm, and retaining wall along the highway.
Lists eight things the plan was reviewed against. Section 9 is not among them.
Omits Section 9 entirely and says the buffer will be designed later, by someone else.
PD 3-8 requires the buffer to be drawn on the plan, reviewed by the Commission, and approved by the Town Council, in that order. None of those three steps has occurred.
On the record · August 12, 2026
Ashley Cook, a Texas attorney representing no party in this matter, submitted a letter for the record of the August 17 special meeting. It makes the narrow argument this page makes, in the form the Council has to answer: the approved site plan does not show the buffer PD 3-8 requires, the applicant’s own landscape sheet says the buffer has not been designed, and nothing on Monday’s agenda lets the Council make the Section 9.2 approval.
A condition stating that a berm or a wall shall be built does not establish its width, its location relative to the property line, its length, its height at any point, its slope, the species and spacing of plantings, or how the berm and wall interact with the perimeter fence. Those are the things a buffer yard consists of, and Section 9.2 says the Town Council approves them.
Letter to Mayor Greaves and the Town Council, August 12, 2026.What the letter asks the Council to do
assets/westlake-buffer-letter.pdf. The button above already points there.The site is not on its own well. Its water is treated municipal supply, and the supply chain ends at two reservoirs in East Texas.
The figure in the record for this project is approximately 54 million gallons per year, or about 165,000 gallons per day.
Open question
The maximum water allocation the Town will permit has not been published. The development agreement on the August 17 agenda is the document that would ordinarily address service capacity. Until it is public, the ceiling is unknown.
Texas Senate Bill 6, passed in 2025, established disclosure, cost-causation, and curtailment rules for large electric loads of 75 megawatts and above. Large water users have no equivalent framework: no comparable disclosure requirement, no cost-causation standard, no curtailment structure in state law.
The state wrote a rulebook for the electricity these facilities use. It has not written one for the water.
Why Cedar Creek is Tarrant County’s water → · The hearing that writes the 2027 rules →
Marshall Ridge, The Lakes at Marshall Ridge, and the lots on Llano Court adjoin the southern property line. That does not leave you without options.
State law requires written notice to property owners within 200 feet of a property before a zoning change hearing.
Open question
Whether that notice was sent before the January 6, 2025 hearing, and to whom, is the subject of a pending public records request. The response will be posted here whichever way it comes back.
Pass a resolution. A formal statement from the Keller City Council carries weight in the record and with neighboring jurisdictions.
Enforce its own noise ordinance. Sound received inside Keller is measured in Keller, under Keller’s rules, regardless of where it originates.
Evaluate its standing. Whether Keller qualifies as an affected municipality is a legal question its own attorneys can answer.
Keep it short and specific. A version to adapt:
I live in Marshall Ridge, on the Keller side of the Westlake town line. My back fence is the southern boundary of the property where a data center site plan was approved on August 4, 2026.
The zoning district that governs that property requires a landscaped buffer yard and a 150-foot setback between a data center and detached single-family homes. On the approved site plan, the landscape buffer and berm are drawn along U.S. Highway 377. Along my property line, the sheet shows a fence. The applicant’s own planting chart says the 75-foot landscape buffer is “to be designed by others.”
I am asking the City of Keller to review this, to state its position on the record, and to be prepared to enforce Keller’s noise ordinance for sound received in Keller.
A starting point, not a form letter. Change it so it sounds like you and says where you live.Governor Abbott has repeated five requirements for any data center built in Texas. If you live in Keller and are told you have no standing in a Westlake meeting, this is the argument that does not depend on which side of the line your house sits on.
Bring their own money, bring their own power, reuse their own water.
Governor Greg Abbott, Canton, June 29, 2026. On August 3, 2026 he ordered the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to audit every data center in the grid connection queue.The site is not on its own well. It takes treated municipal supply, and that chain runs back through Fort Worth and the Tarrant Regional Water District to Cedar Creek and Richland-Chambers.
Nothing in the site plan set, the staff report, or the August 17 agenda item shows closed-loop cooling or any reuse commitment. The Governor said reuse their own water. This project’s water is a public reservoir, delivered through a pipe.
This is the standard Monday’s vote actually turns on. PD 3-8 requires a buffer between an eighty-foot industrial facility and single-family homes. The approved sheet draws the screening along the highway frontage and shows a fence on the side facing Marshall Ridge. The applicant’s own landscape chart says the buffer is “to be designed by others.”
Said plainly: the Governor’s phrasing on this point has been about rural neighborhoods, and Westlake is not rural. The part that carries here is the rest of the sentence. The people who absorb the noise, the light, and the truck traffic are in Keller, and they do not vote in Westlake.
The January 6, 2025 amendments that made this project possible passed with no one speaking at the public hearing. Whether written notice went to property owners within 200 feet is still an open records request.
The August 17 special meeting has one action item and no site plan item on it, which means the buffer approval Section 9.2 assigns to the Town Council has nowhere on that agenda to happen.
We do not claim this one. The development agreement text has not been published and we hold no abatement documents. If Resolution 26-25 carries incentives, this becomes a direct failure of the Governor’s first requirement, and the Council will have granted them two weeks after a site plan approval that skipped the buffer.
Ask for it: request the full text of Resolution 26-25 and the development agreement, plus any Chapter 380 agreement or tax abatement tied to this site.
Unknown, and it matters more than it looks. If the campus generates its own electricity, it may never enter the ERCOT queue, which means the Governor’s August 3 audit never reaches it. If it takes a grid connection, that audit should already have it paused, and the Council would be signing a development agreement for a project the state has frozen.
Ask for it: request the project’s ERCOT interconnection status and any air permit application for on-site generation.
Three failures on the public record. Two questions no one has answered. The Governor told developers to reuse their own water and to leave neighborhoods alone. On the applicant’s own paperwork, this project does neither.
One action item: Resolution 26-25, the development agreement with Circle T Owner LP. No construction may occur until it is approved, which makes this the meeting where conditions can still be attached.
Special meeting notice
Speaker request forms are submitted at Town Hall before the meeting is called to order. Check the posted agenda for the location and the current procedure.
These are public officials doing a difficult job. Be factual, be brief, and be civil. Anything else undermines the case.
My name is ______ and I live at ______.
Section 9 of PD 3-8 requires a landscaped buffer yard and a 150-foot setback between a data center and detached single-family homes. On the site plan approved August 4, 2026, the 75-foot landscape buffer, the berm, and the retaining wall are drawn along U.S. Highway 377. Along the southern boundary, where the homes are, the sheet shows a perimeter fence. Sheet LP 1.01 says the 75-foot landscape buffer is “to be designed by others.”
Before the development agreement is approved, I am asking the Council to require the Section 9 buffer yard to be drawn on the site plan, reviewed by the Commission, and approved by this Council, in that order.
A starting point to adapt. One specific sentence about your own street is worth more than three general ones.Every document here is a public record obtained from the Town of Westlake or another government body. Nothing on this page is claimed without a document behind it.
Ordinance No. 314: the district is created
An ordinance rezoning approximately 222.6 acres to Planned Development District 3-8
OrdinanceSeptember 14, 1998Town of Westlake
Ordinance No. 322: first amendment
An ordinance amending permitted uses within a tract of PD 3-8
OrdinanceDecember 14, 1998Town of Westlake
Ordinance No. 438: second amendment
An ordinance rezoning approximately 39.6 acres near I-35W
OrdinanceJune 9, 2003Town of Westlake
Ordinance No. 1015: the 2025 text amendments
An ordinance approving text amendments to PD, Planned Development District No. 3-8
OrdinanceJanuary 6, 2025Town of Westlake
Town Council agenda and minutes
Notice of meeting, agenda, and minutes recording that no one spoke at the public hearing
Agenda & minutesJanuary 6, 2025Town of Westlake
Staff report, text amendments
Planning and Zoning Commission staff report for Ordinance No. 1015
Staff reportDecember 10, 2024Town of Westlake
Site plan application and 20-page exhibit
Application by Kimley-Horn for Circle T Owner LP; site plan, elevations, landscape sheets, planting chart, renderings
Site planMay to July 2026Town of Westlake
Sheet LP 1.01, Planting Code Chart
Landscape code compliance chart, Required and Provided columns, with the “designed by others” footnote
Site planJuly 2026Town of Westlake
Staff report, site plan review
Planning and Zoning Commission staff report, Circle T data center site plan
Staff reportAugust 4, 2026Town of Westlake
Letter to the Town Council on the Section 9 buffer
Ashley Cook, submitted for the record of the August 17, 2026 special meeting
LetterAugust 12, 2026Read the PDF
Special meeting agenda
Notice of special meeting: Resolution 26-25, development agreement with Circle T Owner LP
AgendaAugust 17, 2026Town of Westlake
Keller Ordinances 1309 and 1742
Zoning changes to residential adjoining the PD 3-8 boundary
Ordinance2006 and 2015City of Keller
Public information request: 200-foot notice
Request for records of written notice to property owners before the January 6, 2025 hearing
Records requestAugust 2026Pending
This page is about a process and a set of documents. It is not opposed to data centers as such, to any company, or to any individual. If anything here is inaccurate, tell us and we will correct it and note the change. Nothing on this page is legal advice.
Last updated August 12, 2026.