Plano residents urge data center moratorium, zoning changes

Residents used the public comment portion of Monday’s Plano City Council meeting to push for a pause on new data centers and tougher zoning rules before more projects move closer to neighborhoods. Kyle McGinn urged city officials to explore a moratorium and create a special zoning category for data centers in Plano’s Unified Development Code, while Shirley Lawson pressed council members to place the issue on a future agenda and said residents were ready to organize politically.

The clash is quickly becoming a neighborhood-versus-growth fight in a city already under pressure from development. Plano’s regular council meetings are held on the second and fourth Mondays of each month at 7 p.m. at the Plano Municipal Center, after an executive session and preliminary open meeting, and the planning department says zoning requests move through the city’s development process as the zoning ordinance, active cases and related land-development materials are continually updated.

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A moratorium would not freeze every kind of building in Plano, but it would give the city time to slow or stop new data-center approvals while leaders decide whether the current code is enough. That approach has already been used elsewhere in North Texas. In May, Hill County, southwest of Dallas, approved a one-year moratorium on data center and power plant construction in unincorporated areas in a 3-2 vote by the Hill County Commissioners Court.

The pressure on Plano comes as ERCOT says Texas is facing an enormous wave of demand from large-load projects. In April 2026, the grid operator told lawmakers it was tracking about 410 gigawatts of large-load interconnection requests, and about 87% of those were identified as data centers. ERCOT also pointed to Senate Bill 6, passed in June 2025, as giving regulators stronger tools to manage certain large electricity users of 75 megawatts or more that seek specific co-location or net-metering arrangements.

Water use is another reason the issue has drawn attention in Collin County. A University of Texas at Austin white paper published in May 2026 said data centers could account for 3% to 9% of Texas water use by 2040, up from less than 1% now, depending on growth and cooling methods. The study said more than 400 data centers are operating or under construction in Texas and called for greater transparency and coordination.

Plano is already in the middle of a broader zoning rewrite because of state land-use changes under Senate Bills 840 and 15. The city says those laws apply to 19 Texas cities with populations over 150,000 and counties with more than 300,000 residents, including Plano. SB 840 took effect Sept. 1, 2025, and allows multifamily housing in commercial areas while limiting some local control over density, parking, height, lot coverage and setbacks.

That larger overhaul means the data-center debate is landing at a moment when Plano is already reworking how it manages growth. For residents who spoke Monday, the question was whether the city should set new protections now, before another wave of industrial-scale development reshapes the edges of their neighborhoods.