A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead

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Data centers<br>A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead

Matthew Gault

Jun 8, 2026<br>at 9:00 AM

In 1999, a farmer gave away 87 acres of land to a small Texas city to use as a park. The city sold to a data center developer for $10 million.

Pamela Griffin. Carrie D'Anna photo.

Almost 30 years ago a farming family deeded land to the City of Taylor, Texas, on the condition the city use it for a public park. For the nominal fee of $10, the farmers granted the 87 acres to a public trust in 1999. Taylor sold it to Blueprint, a data center developer, for $10 million in 2025. Now the land that was supposed to belong to the community will become a 135,000 square foot data center.<br>Pamela Griffin and her family have owned homes near that land for generations. Griffin and her brothers and sisters played baseball on it, camped out on it, and then watched as their children and their children’s children did the same. Now a data center will be there, just 500 feet from Griffin’s home, nestled between a power substation and the nearby railroad tracks.<br>Griffin told 404 Media that she and her family had lived in the area since her grandmother bought land there. “Back then, Black and brown people weren’t allowed to buy in the city limits of Taylor. So we had to buy on the outskirts,” Griffin, who is Black, said. Griffin’s father bought more land, including a vacant lot in the neighborhood for Griffin’s ten brothers and sisters to play in. Behind the lot was the property of a farmer called Mr. Bland.<br>According to Griffin, Mr. Bland was friendly and would sometimes talk with her father. “We used to play baseball back there and our balls used to go on his property and he’d see us play and he’d throw the balls back to us and wave at us when he was on his tractor. One day he was talking to my dad […] and he said, ‘I see the kids don’t really have nowhere to play.’ He said, ‘I’m thinking about giving this land for parkland because these kids need somewhere to play.’”<br>According to court records and real estate documents obtained by Griffin and reviewed by 404 Media, Bland and his family made good on that promise in 1999, granting the land to a public trust for $10 on the condition it be used as a park. That condition was included in the deed itself. Over the years, the land changed hands several times until 2025 when the City of Taylor sold it to data center developers for $10 million.<br>When local organizers knocked on Griffin’s door last year she had never heard of data centers and didn’t know the city planned to build one in the field her family played in. “I was like, ‘what is a data center?’ So me and my sisters and my brothers, we all got together and we started looking it up and we said, ‘oh, this is not good for the neighborhood,’” she said.<br>“Pam, if you’d been fighting an apartment complex or anything else […] you would have won that case.”<br>Griffin went to a city council meeting to tell them she didn’t want a data center near her home. Like essentially everyone else in America, Griffin is worried about what the building will do to the air, water, electricity, and noise near where she lives. “We can’t afford it,” she said. “I got a lot of old people in our community that can’t afford to move.” She said the city council brushed off her concerns and said the data center builders would try to “minimize health risks.”

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According to information about the data center on Taylor’s website, the city is planning to address the community’s concerns. “Any noise from equipment will be contained within the building envelope and a solid barrier wall in the front and an earthen berm with landscaping, will also provide additional noise reduction,” it says. The site also claims the data center wouldn’t use a lot of water because of a closed-loop system and that developers would pay for a new power substation so as not to tax the local grid.<br>The city’s website also says there’s nothing it can do to stop the data center, even if it wanted to. “Can the City just say no to data centers?” one part of the FAQ reads. “In short, no.”<br>Daniel Seguin, Taylor’s executive director of community services, told 404 Media that Blueprint did not need the City’s explicit approval to build a data center. “Blueprint Projects did not require City approval to use the property as a data center because the property’s existing Employment Center zoning already allowed such a use,” he said.

“The City of Taylor’s Land Development Code primarily regulates form, not function. The only approvals that our code requires are for the general layout of the buildings, landscaping,...