Loudoun County is pausing (or studying a pause) primarily because of cumulative impacts after 20+ years of largely unregulated, by-right growth—not solely a Kimley-Horn grid study—and the comparison to Indiantown is selective and incomplete. The piece mixes accurate background facts with omissions, framing that minimizes resident concerns and developer intent in Indiantown, and a narrative that treats opposition as misinformation while presenting proponent talking points as settled reality.
Loudoun County pause: Reasons and context
Fact: In July 2026 the Board of Supervisors directed staff (on a motion by Supervisor Juli Briskman) to return September 15 with analysis of a possible pause on new data-center applications, site plans, and substations while Phase 2 of zoning/comprehensive-plan updates finishes (expected into 2027). County Attorney Leo Rogers has indicated a true blanket moratorium faces legal hurdles under Virginia’s Dillon Rule and prior case law; vested/grandfathered projects limit what can be stopped.
Fact: Loudoun has ~250 operating data centers (roughly 53 million sq ft) plus ~100–117 in the pipeline. Data centers were long treated as “office” uses and allowed by-right in many districts with only administrative approval, no Board vote or public hearing. Residents often learned of projects only when construction started. “Data Center Alley” is a dense concentration (commonly described as under a square mile / ~600 acres in the core). On March 18, 2025 the Board ended by-right approval, requiring special-exception (legislative) review with hearings. A grandfathering resolution allowed certain pre-February 12, 2025 applications that met a 500-foot residential setback to continue under prior rules (roughly 20–24 projects).
Fact: Supervisor Michael (Mike) Turner, vice chair, has repeatedly stated there has not been a single day in roughly the past 15–16 years without data-center construction or expansion underway. Tax revenue is large: projections for FY 2027 put data-center real + personal property taxes at about $1.3 billion, roughly 45% of the county’s ~$2.9 billion local tax revenue. This has supported rate cuts and services.
Narrative capture / incomplete framing: The piece claims the pause is “primarily” due to a Kimley-Horn engineering study showing the grid cannot support continued growth at the current/projected pace. Kimley-Horn did produce a Power Transmission Evaluation (due-diligence report, presented to the Transportation and Land Use Committee around October 2024 and referenced thereafter) projecting high load growth (on the order of 11.59 GW by 2028 in some analyses, far above earlier forecasts). Grid strain, transmission constraints, Dominion/PJM load forecasts, and reliability risks are real and central. But supervisors and public statements also emphasize community impacts (noise, visual, generators, quality of life), over-reliance on one industry, natural-resource demands, and the need to finish performance standards (noise, setbacks, aesthetics, substations, etc.) that Phase 2 is addressing. The pause discussion is a response to both infrastructure limits and the consequences of two decades of by-right sprawl next to neighborhoods. Framing it as “mainly the grid study” downplays the resident-driven political pressure that produced the regulatory shift.
Loudoun is not a pure “cautionary tale of unregulated chaos that Indiantown has already avoided.” It is a mature market that is now trying to impose standards after the industry scaled under weak rules. Florida’s SB 484 (effective largely July 1, 2026) does add statewide guardrails that Virginia lacked for years: large-load customers (≥50 MW peak) must bear their full cost of service (tariffs filed with the PSC; risk of non-payment not shifted to other ratepayers), local governments retain land-use authority, consumptive-use permitting for water is tightened (reclaimed water can be required), and certain foreign-entity restrictions apply. Power studies for large loads are part of utility interconnection processes. That is a meaningful difference.
Indiantown / Martin County claims
Fact: Silver Fox 606 withdrew its application (large data-center proposal on industrial land). Project Growler (Warfield Boulevard, former steel-mill / Superfund site) has been discussed as a pre-application for a more limited footprint; it is on heavy industrial land and has not (as of available reporting) reached full Council site-plan review. Florida requires consumptive-use permits and, under SB 484, stronger large-load and water rules. Closed-loop or air-cooled designs reduce water use relative to older evaporative systems.
Fiction / misleading omission on Beskar: The claim that Beskar’s annexation application (±1,289 acres north of Warfield) contains “no plans for a data center,” that the economic analysis was a cheap ploy without knowing details, and that absence of a power study proves lack of intent is incomplete at best. Public records and reporting document that Sassoon Equities planned a Tier-3 hyperscale data center on roughly 400 acres under contract with Beskar Investment, LLC; a Fishkind Consulting “Economic Impact Analysis for the Hyperscale Data Center in Indiantown” (April 2025, prepared for the applicants’ attorneys) explicitly models first-phase ~1 million sq ft cloud/AI space, construction and permanent jobs, and spending. The study was commissioned by the Beskar side. Annexation + Future Land Use change to Light Industrial is the threshold step that enables the use; a full power study and site plan typically come later. Treating the economic study as evidence of non-intent while ignoring its content is selective. The April 2025 multi-parcel deed cluster transferring land from Tesoro Groves Ltd Partnership entities is part of a documented succession pattern after the larger Tesoro Groves PUD. Council must still act on annexation and Comp Plan changes, but the “no data-center plans / cart-before-horse” framing does not match the applicant-side economic modeling that exists.
Narrative capture: The piece correctly notes that a pre-application is not a final approval and that land-use classification matters. It then pivots to accusing opponents of “misinformation—or dis-information” by omission, while itself omitting the Fishkind study’s explicit hyperscale framing, the scale of the Tesoro/Beskar land assembly and annexation pathway, and the cumulative rural-character, water, noise, heat-island, and infrastructure questions that residents have raised for months. “Fear clouds thinking” is classic rhetorical capture: it reframes legitimate process and impact questions as irrational while presenting the developer-friendly timeline and regulatory differences as sufficient protection. Florida’s property-rights environment is stronger than Virginia’s in some respects (vested rights, Bert Harris, etc.), which cuts both ways—local governments face constraints, but so do attempts at rapid industrial conversion of agricultural fringe land.
Broader comparison and implications
Loudoun’s tax windfall is real and large relative to county size. That does not automatically transfer to Indiantown/Martin County at comparable scale or without comparable externalities (transmission, substations, water, noise, visual, emergency-response, and fiscal risk if the industry later contracts or seeks further incentives). SB 484 improves cost allocation and local control relative to the early Loudoun model, but it does not eliminate local infrastructure strain, aquifer impacts, or the political dynamics of large-load projects seeking annexation and rezoning. Growler’s industrial/Superfund location is a different land-use starting point than agricultural-to-light-industrial conversion of the scale seen in Tesoro/Beskar.
The piece is strongest on Loudoun history (by-right era, numbers, tax figures, regulatory timeline) and weakest when it treats absence of a completed power study as dispositive proof of no data-center intent, minimizes the documented economic study for Beskar, and frames community pushback as primarily fear-driven misinformation rather than response to rapid entitlement of industrial uses on the rural fringe. Loudoun’s experience shows what happens when standards lag growth; Indiantown’s situation is earlier in the sequence, with fewer operating facilities but active annexation and land-use changes that enable the same uses. Accurate policy requires the full record—grid studies, tax projections, and the applicant documents, cumulative-impact analyses, and process timelines—not selective excerpts that favor one side’s narrative.
Here is the article in question. It must be difficult not to include something because it changes your narrative. She is good at it though. Here is her half truth rant.
Yes, Loudoun County, Virginia, the “data center capital of the world,” is considering a “pause” in new data center construction. Their Board of Supervisors (equivalent to the Indiantown Village Council) asked their county attorney last month to research the legalities. https://loudoun.granicus.com/player/clip/8216?view_id=92…
He will report his findings to them on Sept. 15; although it’s already clear it will not be a blanket moratorium due to the vested rights of some project developers, according to the July 22 Board of Supervisors meeting video. (Their attorney gives similar arguments as Indiantown’s attorney during the Village Council’s last two meetings, and Florida has far stricter property-rights laws than Virginia.)
Loudoun County’s experience can serve as a cautionary tale as to what to avoid when constructing data centers. It also can show Indiantown the benefits from windfall tax revenues (estimated for 2027 to be $1.3 billion from data center real and personal property tax revenue with the county’s total tax revenue projected to be $2.9 billion) for a county the size of Martin County.
What are Loudoun County’s reasons for contemplating a pause? It’s not what Indiantown is being led to believe in social media postings. It’s primarily due to concerns raised by a Kimley-Horn engineering study showing their electrical grid cannot support continued data-center growth at their current or projected pace.
Loudoun County’s elected officials began instituting data-center regulations 16 months ago and anticipate completing that exercise within the next year to address all the issues raised by residents, as well as the critical grid issue raised by Kimley-Horn; however, Indiantown’s situation is not even close to Loudoun County’s. Take a closer look:
With about the same land area as Martin County, Loudoun County has welcomed data centers for the past 20 years — 250 are in operation with another 117 in the pipeline, according to the Honorable Michael Turner, vice chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.
“There has not been a single day in the past 16 years,” says Turner in numerous quoted articles, “when a data center was not under some type of initial construction or expansion in Loudoun County.”
With a land-use classification at first as “offices”, data centers were allowed to locate nearly anywhere in Loudoun County with only administrative approvals. No public hearings, and no votes by the Board of Supervisors.
Residents were unaware that a data center would be built on their neighborhood street until construction actually began. No wonder they complained.
As a result, many of Loudoun County’s AI data centers, including Vantage, are the subject of countless social media memes illustrating the ugly side of locating unregulated data centers next to residential areas. Loudoun County’s most famous area, “data center alley,” is less than one square mile, around 600 acres, with 199 operating data centers within it.
Today, thanks to those memes, Indiantown is intimately familiar with the noise, the pollution, the electric bills, and water issues in Loudoun County (and other towns with old or unregulated construction of data centers). The complaints seem universal to any and all data centers, but they are not. Not all data centers are the same, and none are all bad or all good, according to Turner.
Loudoun County supervisors ended the “by right” location of data centers on March 18, 2025, ushering in required board approvals of new data centers for the first time ever; however, they also “grandfathered in” 22 data centers already slated for construction since they met the county’s new rule for setbacks — a minimum of 500 feet from a residential home — in order to keep them in Loudoun County.
So, let’s compare Loudoun County’s situation to Indiantown’s.
With enactment of SB 484 on July 1, electricity rates and the electrical grid are regulated, unlike Loudoun County. In fact, large-load electric customers, such as hyperscale data centers, must undertake a power study, which costs the data-center developer $500,000 or more and usually takes up to 12 months or so to complete, depending on the size of the data center.
Those studies are submitted to the Florida Public Service Commission to ensure the reliability and sustainability of the regional power grid and to approve the tariffs being charged by FPL. The power studies are public records.
Also, unlike Loudoun County, Florida has required consumptive water-use permits for decades to monitor the state’s aquifers and protect the water supply for future generations. SB 484 made issuance of those permits even more stringent. The state can now require that reclaimed (reuse) water be used for data centers under the updated law, something that Loudoun County may also consider in their new regulations. Indiantown already has that capability.
Only one data-center pre-application is currently under review by Indiantown’s planning department, the Growler project on Warfield Boulevard on what had been the site of a former steel mill. IT HAS NOT YET COME BEFORE THE VILLAGE COUNCIL FOR REVIEW. Land use is not an issue, since it’s on a heavy industrial site that was a former steel mill, and neither is the electrical supply. The developer has complied with the state’s required power study.
Recognizing that a pre-application is not a final site plan and could change prior to its final application, Growler’s pre-app shows the intent to use a closed-loop cooling system for data center servers, reducing water usage significantly. The now-withdrawn Silver Fox 606 data-center application showed its servers air-cooled, thus water use was limited to only sanitary needs. Silver Fox also completed an electrical power study prior to withdrawing its application.
Considering the expense, the power study is a reliable metric of a data-center developer’s commitment to bringing the project to fruition. We see that is the case with the Growler project, also under strict EPA oversight as a Superfund site, and with Silver Fox 606, which also completed a power study.
That’s NOT the case regarding the allegation that the Beskar Investments application for annexation of 1,200 acres of land north of Warfield Boulevard includes plans for a data center. They put the cart before the horse and commissioned a far-cheaper economic analysis study without knowing any data-center details in a ploy to appeal to village council members. If a data center had truly been planned, they would have already commissioned a required power study.
Council members must approve Beskar’s annexation request PRIOR to considering any development project, and the only application that will come before the council is the annexation request and the changes needed to the village’s Comprehensive Growth Management Plan as a result. To infer or to outright accuse council members of knowing that Beskar’s plans include a data center is inaccurate.
The misinformation — or dis-information that results from deliberate or unintentional omission of pertinent facts about Indiantown and about data centers generally — does not help form good policy. Or foster good decisions.
Fear clouds thinking and closes minds. Now is the time for the community to be working together to achieve the best possible outcomes, not to be pulling apart