A Texas Regulator Cited ‘High Public Interest’ in Data Centers. Its Solution? Cancel Scheduled Public Hearings.
The TCEQ didn't do much to tell the public of the cancelations. It still hasn't rescheduled them.
By Kathryn Guerra
San Antonians love their Spurs. So it should tell you something that back on May 28, as the Spurs faced elimination in Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, many San Antonio residents were willing to skip the biggest game of the year to that point to attend a public hearing with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and representatives of the data center developer Vantage. It was that important.
Fast forward three months, and many San Antonians planned to attend another data center hearing involving the TCEQ and the same developer. But despite strong public interest, the hearing never happened. Neither did a separate data center air permit meeting in the Panhandle.
In August, as communities in San Antonio and Amarillo prepared testimony opposing major air quality permits tied to hyperscale AI data center developments, Public Citizen learned that the TCEQ had abruptly canceled both meetings. These meetings were meant to let communities voice opposition to neighborhood pollution from gas plants that would power those facilities.
The TCEQ canceled the Aug. 17 public meeting for the Vantage Data Center in San Antonio and the Aug. 24 public meeting for the Fermi Data Center near Amarillo.
Why?
At first, TCEQ wouldn’t tell us why. But the agency did respond to the press, saying the meetings were canceled, “Due to high public interest.”
The agency also didn’t bother to inform the public. It told the data center developers and updated its website. Beyond that, TCEQ didn’t bother to put out a press release or a simple social media post. The press found out because San Antonio advocates told them the meetings were canceled.
If TCEQ wasn’t known as an industry friend and the Texas Legislature hadn’t legally mandated improvements to its public participation processes, we might buy that. But if heightened public interest were the concern, shouldn’t the agency have added public participation opportunities? How does removing them help the public?
Public Citizen obtained internal agency emails via a public records request showing that a week before the Aug. 17 public meeting for the Vantage Data Center in San Antonio, a TCEQ staffer in the Chief Clerk’s office emailed agency staff.
“Leadership has asked us to cancel this hearing and reschedule for a later date,” he wrote. Two minutes later, he sent the same email to the staff organizing the August 24 public meeting on the Fermi America Project Matador permits near Amarillo.
TCEQ refused to disclose whether the agency’s own leadership or someone higher up in state government made the call to cancel. Instead, it sought a ruling from the Texas Attorney General under the Texas Public Information Act to withhold all remaining communications from the public. That ruling is pending as of this writing.
In a letter to the Attorney General, TCEQ seeks to hide the names of staff it says met with agency attorneys for legal advice and assistance on the legal justifications and implications of canceling and rescheduling public meetings. Why is TCEQ trying to hide who made the call to freeze out the public?
Meanwhile, neighbors arrived at empty meeting venues. TCEQ said its “normal precedent” is to send agency staff to the location of canceled meetings to redirect residents. But we went to the San Antonio venue for the canceled meeting and didn’t see any agency staff there. Hotel staff knew nothing about the canceled hearing.
“My vote is that mailing out the notice and updating calendars must be good enough. We can’t afford to go all the way to Amarillo just to say it is canceled,” the Chief Clerk emailed a staffer, who agreed, “The application only had four IPs [interested parties].” Recent experience with data center public meetings should have shown the TCEQ there was significant public interest. The TCEQ’s public meeting for the Vantage data center in the same community just three months earlier had a packed house. It garnered 420 comments, the vast majority submitted during or after the public meeting – not before.
TCEQ allowed Vantage to begin construction of its data center in December 2023 with minor permits that let Vantage bypass public participation. The August meeting would have been the public’s first opportunity to oppose the Vantage data center permits.
Public notice and the opportunity for public participation are legally required for major source air permits. These meetings let the public voice opposition through formal comments, which TCEQ must consider before issuing the permit. During public meetings, neighbors can also ask the TCEQ and the applicant questions about the permits, their compliance history, and other relevant topics.
Community opposition in both Amarillo and San Antonio has organized, invested their time, spoken to their neighbors, and is ready to oppose these permits. Opposition to data centers has reached an all-time high in Texas, where state leadership waved Big Tech in without putting guardrails in place to protect communities and resources.
The pushback against the TCEQ has been particularly sharp. The agency is being called out for regularly bypassing the public and authorizing data centers with low-level permits that circumvent public notice and participation requirements, despite information suggesting the facilities’ emissions exceed the legal thresholds for the minor source permits TCEQ is granting. TCEQ has also allowed data centers and their massive co-located gas plants to file separate, smaller permits instead of applying together as a single site, avoiding major-source applicability, public participation, and more stringent pollution controls.
The May 28 San Antonio hearing was contentious. Similar scenes of angry residents have played out across the state, in communities big and small, as backlash against data center development grows. Was the “leadership” seeking to avoid more of these angry scenes by canceling hearings in San Antonio and Amarillo? We’d like to believe the TCEQ, but which story would we believe? The one in which “heightened public interest” leads to fewer public meetings? Or the one in which unnamed “leadership” doesn’t want the public talking about data centers?
TCEQ hasn’t rescheduled these public meetings or scheduled any others on data center permits since. In September, Gov. Abbott directed TCEQ to pause all data center permits until the Texas Water Development Board and ERCOT complete an audit, which the agencies say they expect to finalize in December. The directive did not tell the TCEQ to improve its public participation processes or to improve protections for Texans from air pollution. The TCEQ must respond to the governor’s directive by October 19.
Across Texas, people are watching.