In serene Fort Worth garden, residents rally against data center development
Weston Gardens is a rare oasis of green in southeast Fort Worth: Tall trees cast a canopy of shade over a gathering area adorned with an array of plants and flowers, each meticulously labeled.
Lotuses and lily pads float on a gurgling pond. Birds chirp, and the breeze rustles the leaves.
On Saturday, though, the gardens played host to a different kind of gathering: a community rally against proposed artificial-intelligence data centers in the city.
Fort Worth-based energy consortium Black Mountain has proposed building a $10 billion data center on land adjacent to the Weston Gardens property and has most recently asked the Fort Worth city council to consider rezoning 80 more acres of that land to accommodate the project, the Star-Telegram previously reported.
Sue Weston, who opened the gardens with her late husband about 42 years ago, views the proposed data center as a threat to those decades of cultivation, she said at the rally on Saturday.
In part, Weston is concerned about noise, light and air pollution from the center, and said she also worries about how vibrations in the ground will impact structures on the property, many of which were built in the 1930s and 1940s.
“We have a historic designation on this place from the city of Fort Worth back in 2004,” Weston said. “It was really developed as an outdoor place to enjoy nature and have parties and things, and we’re wanting to preserve that.”
City council members last Tuesday heard a long-awaited report from the city manager’s office on the state of data center development in the area. Currently, four existing data centers occupy a total of 3 million square feet in Fort Worth, with another under construction and four more proposed.
Data centers are coming to the region so quickly, assistant city manager Jessica McEachern said, because of Texas’ business-friendly environment and speedier permitting processes. Allowing centers to be built inside city limits, she said, allows for local government to have more control over the development.
To address concerns from residents, city staff are proposing a list of restrictions, including a ban on cryptocurrency mining as a primary use, noise restrictions and wastewater regulations.
The city could choose to enact a temporary moratorium on the projects, but not until late October due to new state guidelines that lengthened the process of doing so, McEachern said.
Letitia Wilbourne, a longtime resident of Fort Worth’s Echo Heights neighborhood, said Saturday that she didn’t think the city’s proposed regulations would be enough to mitigate the impact of data centers. Wilbourne has lived in the Echo Heights neighborhood long enough to remember a time before the area became heavily industrialized.
Her home backs up to a property owned by a trucking company, which she said “keeps up noise 24 hours a day” without repercussions from the city. Several trucking companies operate in that area, and often flout regulations on where their vehicles are allowed to drive, Wilbourne said.
“When they say they can enforce data centers, you can’t believe anything they say, because they cannot enforce trucks,” Wilbourne said. “They can’t enforce the things that are going on in Echo Heights, and those companies do whatever they want to do.”
Wilbourne’s also concerned about the health impacts of data centers: Prior to the arrival of trucking and industry in her neighborhood, she had never been sick, she said. At Saturday’s rally, she produced a 5-inch-thick binder of medical records from a near-fatal brain illness she says occurred after companies began operating in her backyard.
Illnesses and deaths piled up in her neighborhood after that, to the point where Wilbourne could take you on a ‘toxic tour’ of who on her street has suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other illnesses, she said. If data centers continue to proliferate in the area, Wilbourne’s concerned that more people could get sick.
“It’s a manufactured need, it’s not artificial,” Liz Mendoza, a speaker at the rally, said of AI technology. “It’s human. It’s collective intelligence. They pull it, and they’re selling it back to us. ... It’s just creating an even bigger gap between the wealthy class and the working class.”
