Data center dismay: 800 residents back petition to remove Granbury city officials
Citizens of Granbury presented a petition with over 800 signatures to Granbury City Council members Tuesday night, calling for a vote of confidence to remove the city manager and city attorney.
The petition came on the heels of a controversy regarding the rezoning of the Knox Ranch land to industrial for a data center.
City Manager Chris Coffman and City Attorney Jeremy SoRelle were unaware of the petition until it was presented at the meeting.
Jacob Herbold, a resident of Granbury and organizer of the petition said it does not only call for the removal of Coffman and SoRelle but also of all council members but Angela Parker.
They are requesting the removal because of the City Council members’ choice to vote yes on the rezoning of the Knox Ranch land.
Herbold said that they knew that Coffman wasn’t being transparent about what the land would be used for, and they still voted yes.
Daniel Piatt, the first of the citizens presenting the petition to speak, noted some of the concerns in the petition regarding “documented contradictions” about the Knox Ranch annexation and Project Patriot.
In January the city annexed Knox Ranch, which straddles Meadow Road.
Piatt said that when the land was originally annexed in January the city acted like it didn’t know what it would be used for, but then documents showed that Coffman had been working with the Project Patriot.
The Project Patriot is a power plant/data center project from the Dallas-based Bilateral Energy LLC. In July, Bilateral Energy received a permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to build the power plant, according to previous Star-Telegeram reporting.
Piatt said that the trust in city leadership had been fundamentally broken.
“The trust essential to effective public service has been broken, and I urge the council to replace them with leaders who will uphold transparency, accountability, and faithfully serve the citizens of Granbury,” Piatt said.
Herbold raised concerns about the city not being transparent about Project Patriot, and he asked the Mayor if he could give an update on the project.
Mayor Jim Jarratt responded, saying that they cannot respond to public comment during city hall meetings.
The last resident to speak during the public comment period, Hamlet Peguero, said the most common response they get from city officials is that there is no official data center application for the city of Granbury at this time.
He said that while this is true, the way that the city has been “promoting and educating” residents about data centers leads him to believe that they are headed in that direction.
“When citizens raise concerns about water, noise, infrastructure, transparency, or quality of life, they are told there is no project to discuss,” Peruergo said. “If there is truly no mission for data center development in Granbury, why the effort to educate, normalize, and promote it?”
The mayor responded to all the public comments saying that he thanks all the speakers for their “decorum and professionalism” and said that they are there to have dialogue but in the context of city hall, they cannot.
Jeff Newpher, the communication manager for the city of Granbury said that he is wondering why no one was talking about the ordinances Granbury has in place regarding data centers.
Granbury City Council passed this set of ordinances in April that established standards for data centers and power-generation facilities.
The standards include “noise mitigation, extensive landscaping and visual buffers, water-conservation measures, annual third-party inspections, lighting controls, construction management plans, and emergency-response coordination,” according to a Granbury news release.
Newpher said that there is no “mechanism” in the city’s constitution to create any action from this method of a petition.
He said the petition will be received, but he has “no idea what will happen with it.”
Newpher added that he thinks it would have been appropriate for residents to try and sit down with Coffman and SoRelle to talk about their concerns.
Although he said that the ongoing lawsuit between residents of Granbury and city officials would make that discussion difficult.
The lawsuit was filed in April against Coffman, Jarratt, Mayor Pro Tem Bruce Wadley, and the Granbury City Council members.
The lawsuit claims that the city violated the Texas Open Meetings Act after Granbury leaders took a tour of a data center in Dallas days before a contentious meeting where the city council approved the annexation of nearly 2,000 acres that straddle Meadow Wood Road, south of U.S. 377 and north of Paluxy Highway, according to previous Star-Telegram reporting.
“If you take steps to bring litigation against the city manager and other city people. They’re probably not advised to have discussions with you from then on until that’s all resolved,” he said on behalf of Coffman.
