For decades, the land that is now the Village of Indiantown was simply unincorporated Martin County. Its zoning, development standards, and land-use rules were governed by the same Martin County Land Development Regulations that still apply outside the Village boundaries. When Indiantown incorporated at the end of 2017, it continued under those County rules as a transitional code. That shared regulatory DNA remained intact until November 12, 2020, when the Village adopted its own Land Development Regulations and formally stepped out from under the County’s framework.
The split was deliberate. Indiantown’s new code was written to be leaner, clearer, and more tailored to a small municipality seeking both rural character and targeted economic growth. Martin County’s LDRs, by contrast, continued their long evolutionary path—layered, detailed, and shaped by decades of environmental priorities, agricultural preservation goals, and cumulative amendments. The two codes diverged in structure, process, buffers, and review timelines. Yet certain threads of common language remained.
One of those threads sits in the industrial use tables. Both jurisdictions list computer- and data-related activities as permitted uses. Indiantown’s table contains a clean, explicit line: “Computer and Data Processing” is permitted by right in both Light Industrial and Heavy Industrial districts. Martin County’s tables carry closely related categories—“Data processing services,” “Information services and data processing,” along with various computer research, assembly, and system-design uses—also marked as permitted in industrial and technology-oriented districts. On paper, the categories look remarkably similar. A casual reading could suggest the two jurisdictions still speak the same language when it comes to facilities that house servers and process information.
In practice, the similarity stops at the wording. The real difference emerges in how each jurisdiction chooses to interpret and apply that language when the facility in question is no longer a traditional data-processing operation but a modern hyperscale data center—massive in scale, continuous in operation, extremely high in power and water demand, and capable of generating significant noise and infrastructure pressure.
Indiantown has treated the “Computer and Data Processing” category as broad enough to encompass these large-scale facilities. When the Village approved the Tesoro Groves Planned Unit Development framework on the former FPL lands, staff and the applicant’s representatives explicitly placed data centers and data-processing centers within the light-industrial and PUD permitted-use structure. The Village’s leaner code, shorter review timelines, and relative deference to state environmental standards made that interpretation operationally workable. The category was not rewritten; it was simply read expansively.
Martin County has not made the same choice. Although its use tables contain parallel computer and data-processing language, the surrounding regulatory environment remains more restrictive. Higher local environmental buffers, stricter performance standards for industrial uses, longer review processes, and a generally more cautious posture toward intensive infrastructure mean that a hyperscale facility is far less likely to sail through as ordinary “data processing.” County staff have indicated that such projects would be evaluated under the normal commercial or industrial process, but they have not adopted the same ready acceptance of the category that Indiantown has demonstrated. In effect, Martin County keeps the door technically open while declining to treat modern hyperscale operations as a simple, by-right data-processing use.
The result is a telling illustration of how two municipalities that once shared a single code can still retain overlapping language yet chart sharply different courses. The words “data processing” and “computer” appear in both tables. The willingness to let those words stretch to cover the new generation of hyperscale facilities does not. One jurisdiction has chosen to interpret the shared category expansively; the other has chosen restraint. That interpretive difference, more than any single line of text, now defines the practical boundary between them.