To best trace the thread of Carlyn Ray’s ascent through the Texas glassblowing scene, you must first consider the lowly silkworm. 

At the ripe young age of 10, Ray raised the caterpillars in cardboard boxes in her Dallas home, fattening them up on mulberry leaves until they spun cocoons and began to pupate. It was at this point that the boxes were carted to her neighbor’s home, where the cocoons were boiled and unraveled before the fine silk was sent through a loom and weaved into unique works of art. “I would see the whole process, feeding the worms and watching them become this cocoon, then seeing how that thread becomes a tapestry, an everlasting piece of art.”

Also during her formative years, Ray attended a glassblowing demonstration in a barn outside of town, where tattooed, motorcycle-riding men showed the crowd how to heat soda-lime glass to lava-like temperatures, plucking the molten material from a furnace and transforming it into new forms. As the sizzling glass cooled before her eyes, Ray said, the die was cast for her future ambitions. She would become a professional glassblower, she recalls telling her parents then (they were supportive, the career prospects for starving artists being at least slightly less dim than those for caterpillar farmers), and over the intervening decades the now-44-year-old artisan established her own idiosyncratic take on what’s known as “weaving” glass.   

In May, Ray’s lifelong preoccupation culminated in what could fairly be considered the most striking public artwork to ever grace Abilene, a West Texas city of 133,000 that’s lately experiencing something of an identity crisis. 

Ray installs her blown-glass sculpture composed of 400 individual ribbons, clamshells, and clouds. (Courtesy/Turk Studio)

Abilene is a railroad town, like many other communities in the state’s sprawling western reaches, replete with rodeos and three private Christian universities and an air force base. Today, OpenAI’s “Stargate,” which has been billed as the world’s largest artificial intelligence training hub, is online and bringing a crush of newcomers to town, for better or worse. Abilene is also home to a growing collection of public art installations, including a rooftop brontosaurus that cranes its neck toward a Volkswagen bug, a 27-ton windchime in the shape of a tornado, and a full moon with a mildly menacing smile that’s set on a 20-foot pole, to name a few. 

Outshining the rest, Ray’s newest and grandest public work to date, called Gathered Radiance, is a jawdropping feat of engineering and artistry that rises well above the level of roadside oddity. Six years in the making, the three-story art installation comprises 400 individual blown-glass ribbons, clamshells and clouds suspended from a ceiling by sturdy cables. The piece was unveiled in May during the grand opening of Abilene’s newest public library, a modern, airy space that replaced the tumble-down main branch just across the railroad tracks that bisect the city. The new facility is housed on an eight-acre campus called Abilene Heritage Square, which wisely positions Gathered Radiance as its centerpiece. 

Ray’s pièce de résistance, along with the library that contains it, is more than just a public spectacle—it’s an endorsement of Abilene’s longstanding identity as a literary safe space in a state where conservative crusaders seek to censor and control the books their fellow Texans can access. According to statistics published by Abilene city officials after the unveiling event last month, the new library counted approximately 25,000 visitors during its first week of business. For comparison, that’s 30 percent of the total visitation recorded at its dilapidated predecessor for an entire fiscal year. The library was funded by a unanimous city council vote to the tune of $21.5 million for a 40-year lease, and Heritage Square got an architectural facelift courtesy of private donations from benefactors in 23 different states.   

“You can’t force this sort of energy and involvement in your community. This is organic,” said Julee Hammer, Abilene’s director of library services. “Very generous people want the community to be as wonderful as possible; they want to give it to the next generation. It’s an Abilene phenomenon.” 

This philanthropic and forward-thinking facet of the city’s identity may come as a surprise to folks elsewhere in the state, especially urbanites who write the place off as a backwater of cowboy cosplayers and religious zealots. (Though this bad rap is somewhat understandable: Taylor County, which includes most of the city, went 74 percent for Donald Trump in the 2024 general election, and 72 percent four years before that.) 

But the city simultaneously has a reputation as a bastion of books and literacy advocacy. State lawmakers have dubbed Abilene “The Storybook Capital of Texas,” and the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival held here each summer is the largest event of its kind in the country. The city has mostly been spared the militant moral activism that has plagued other Texas towns, such as Midland, Leander, and Granbury, where fights over public reading materials have been conspicuous and nasty. 

“In a lot of cities, there are anti-establishment flashes, but the establishment here consists of very conservative Republicans and very liberal Democrats working together,” said Glenn Dromgoole, a former editor of the Abilene Reporter-News and owner of Texas Star Trading, a local bookstore and gift shop. “We haven’t had the problem where the extreme right took over the city council, the school board, that kind of thing.”

Even still, the threat of change is riding on the city’s (ceaseless) wind. Among the horde of visitors who swarmed the new library on opening day was Tammy Fogle, a local gadfly who has for years sought to push Abilene further to the right. In 2022, she campaigned to classify Abilene and other regional towns as “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” Two years later, she raised hell over a statue for the city’s Storybook Garden that depicted characters from the KittyCorn book series. (One book in the series features a kitten who wants to be a unicorn; Fogle claimed the story was “grooming” children to adopt pro-transgender values.)

Fogle’s most recent right-wing blitz has been against school library books she deems immoral or inappropriate for children. She is the leader of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a group that bills itself as “fighting for the survival of America” by promoting “parental rights” across the country. Though Fogle has no children attending schools in the Abilene Independent School District, she nonetheless has raised at least 27 challenges regarding books collected in the district’s library system. When an advisory council reviewed Fogle’s challenges and voted to keep most of the books on the shelves, she attempted an end-run around local officials, filing a petition with the Texas Education Agency to reverse the decision.

Fogle may be granted increased purview over the city’s library materials before the end of this month. She’s a candidate for an open city council seat, having survived the May general election with 27 percent of the vote. In the June 13 runoff contest, Fogle faces off against Ben Bailey, a business owner and a veteran of the U.S. Navy, who won 32 percent of the vote. Fogle declined to be interviewed for this story.

Ray’s Gathered Radiance is suspended from the ceiling of Abilene’s newest public library during its grand opening on May 16. (Courtesy/Turk Studio)

Now, as Abilene finds itself at an inflection point, Ray’s blown-glass spectacle gives residents a prime opportunity for self-reflection—literally. “I feel the energy really culminating in Abilene,” Ray says, “this blossoming effect, like it’s just starting to open up.” Her Gathered Radiance, along with works displayed at Ray’s solo exhibition inside the Grace Museum a few blocks from the library, casts a glimmer across the city’s centerline, a beacon of imagination and creative exploration in a divisive world. “Colors and light, there’s something about that that naturally ties books and art and learning together. It opens minds to possibilities.”

The artist has a book recommendation, as it so happens: Elena’s Serenade, an illustrated children’s book about—what else—a girl who wants to be a glassblower. In the story, set in Mexico, Elena is discouraged from pursuing her artistic dreams. “Who ever heard of a girl glassblower?” her father says dismissively. In a flash of defiance, Elena sets out for Monterrey to learn the trade. Spoiler alert: Upon reflection, Elena’s doubters reverse course; it turns out that the girl is a splendid glassblower after all. What she really needed was a show of confidence from her supporting cast. In other words, whether you’re in Mexico or West Texas, it takes a village to advance the arts. 

Interested members of Abilene’s reading public can find the 40-page picture book among the manifold titles in the city’s permanent collection—for now, at least. To anyone who’d rather see the book scoured from the shelves, might I suggest a long look in the mirror?

The post Abilene, Through the Looking Glass appeared first on The Texas Observer.

This March marked one year since veteran Dallas journalist Robert Wilonsky returned to the Dallas Morning News as a city columnist.

He didn’t have to come back. Journalism itself has been taking a pummeling of late. Our current administration regularly vilifies news outlets that drop stories that make our Cheeto-in-Chief look bad, however accurate or factual they may be. Newspapers are generally going the way of the dodo. We live in a time when neocon mouthpiece Bari Weiss is the head of CBS News, torpedoing revealing 60 Minutes pieces, while Olivia Nuzzi writes a barely read tell-all detailing her torrid, highly unprofessional fling with—of all people—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But Wilonsky—whose shiny bald head, hulking physique, and salt-and-pepper goatee make him a dead ringer for pro-wrestling legend (and “fellow bar mitzvah boy,” as Wilonsky noted) Bill Goldberg—is a die-hard newspaperman. His byline has appeared in publications going all the way back to 1986, when he was still in high school. He thought he was done with reporting when he left the Morning News in 2020, eventually getting a sweet gig as communications director of Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, churning out press releases and interviewing celebs about the pop-culture memorabilia they were putting on the auction block. 

But Wilonsky couldn’t stop investigating what was going on in Dallas. “I would drive around the city,” said Wilonsky, 57, during a Zoom call from a Morning News conference room. “I would see things, I would see people, I would read headlines, I would still read council agendas, I would still be very involved and active in discussions about the city, and I realized that as much fun as I had holding Star Trek props, it wasn’t the same or as meaningful to me. … The longer I was away from journalism, the more I missed my city.”

Apart from the brief time in the ’90s when he moved to Los Angeles to oversee a new alt-weekly’s music section, Wilonsky has always stuck with Dallas. The current place of residence he and his wife share is right next to his childhood home, which was built by his grandfather in 1955. “I share a backyard fence with my childhood home,” he said. “So many of my friends still live in the neighborhood we lived in. It’s like the most boring John Updike novel.”

Wilonsky has always found his hometown fascinating, something he picked up from his father, Herschel. “My dad was a great storyteller, and he loved the city, and he would tell great stories about Dallas,” he said. “I think I just inherited from him his interest in telling stories about the city … the things that had disappeared, the things that had taken their place, and the toll that it had taken on the people who had been kind of caught in between.”   

A young Wilonsky read everything from comic books to works from such Dallas-Fort Worth sportswriters/men of letters as Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake, and Blackie Sherrod. While in high school, he won a competition where several young journalism students talked to a kid who did coding for Apple. “I remember very distinctly coming back from that event and just wanting to tell his story, and I did, and it got published,” he said. “I won an Apple computer, and from that moment on, I thought, ‘Well, what an extraordinary way to make a living.’”

During his college years at the University of Texas at Austin, he edited The Daily Texan, publishing comic strips from future graphic novelist Chris Ware and a young, pre-filmmaking Robert Rodriguez. After graduating, he got the music-critic job at the Dallas Times Herald (then the Morning News’ competition), holding that position until the newspaper ceased publication, in 1991.

A year later, Wilonsky moved over to the local alt-weekly, the Dallas Observer, where he spent two decades as a music editor, film/TV critic, sports columnist, and pop-culture reporter. There was also a stint in the 2000s when he interviewed movie stars and filmmakers for Higher Definition, a talk show that aired on Mark Cuban’s HDNet channel. 

As much fun as he had interviewing rock legends like Jagger and Bowie, and giving his two cents on everything from summer blockbusters to comic-book culture, Wilonsky wanted to report more on his city. “Part of me wishes I still did a little bit of that, because I do miss the comfort and the provocation of art,” he said, “but it got to the point where I just wanted to write about Dallas, for better or for worse.” 

His years of editing the Dallas Observer’s Unfair Park news blog led to him getting the digital managing editor position at the Morning News, overseeing the paper’s website. He was also a city columnist and city hall reporter, preferring the former role, which allowed him some distance from the politicians.

He also got to write about battling stage IV kidney cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2017. “I was given a year and a half to live,” he remembered. “I just wanted to see my son graduate.” 

Over at UT Southwestern Medical Center, he joined a clinical immunotherapy trial that shrunk his kidney tumor to an operable size. He’s now cancer-free and has gotten to see his son, Harry, who’s now serving as a bullpen catcher for the Miami Marlins, grow up to be a young man.

But Wilonsky wasn’t just struggling with his own cancer. His father was also diagnosed with kidney cancer, unfortunately losing his battle in 2021. Wilonsky gets a bit teary-eyed talking about his old man, remembering how he and his family discovered a secret the elder Wilonsky left in a kitchen cabinet. “I see in the cabinet that my father had taped my last column inside a cabinet that only he could reach, and he wrote on it ‘Robert’s last column.’ And I just … I just didn’t know he cared about it this much.”

Wilonsky wishes his pops was still around to see him back on the beat. Ever since taking Morning News editor Rudy Bush’s invitation to come back to the newsroom, Wilonsky has been hitting the streets hard for column fodder. He’s hung out with homeless people, even devoting one column to a guy who lived in the storm tunnels underneath Harry Hines Boulevard. He’s written about buildings that have been shuttered, businesses and developments that have riled up neighborhoods, and landmarks that more locals should know about. (Did you know there’s a run-down house in South Dallas that once belonged to Ray Charles?)

“Most of the best pieces I think I’ve come up with in the last year have been a function of me driving around the city and noticing a thing that somebody might not have noticed or didn’t think to write about or didn’t know to write about,” he said.

As long as he and/or newspapers are still around, Wilonsky will continue to be a devoted follower of “the religion of righteousness and truth-telling,” as he put it. He knows his return can’t save journalism or even return his own paper to the glory days of yore—though he speaks highly of the “young, thoughtful, insightful, scrappy, dedicated truth-tellers” he now calls coworkers. Yet, even as his industry suffers, Wilonsky believes that journalism’s North Star shines bright enough to follow. 

“I believe that there are still those who want the truth, need the truth, crave the truth, respect the truth, and want to hear the truth,” he said. “And I’m very honored and do not take for granted my position as being one of those people who still gets to tell them the truth.”

The post The Great Wilonsky Returns to the Newsroom appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In the Trump administration’s war on immigrants—adults and children alike—South Texas is a nexus.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have arrested 33,583 people in the San Antonio and Harlingen areas of responsibility between Trump’s first day in office and March 10 of this year, according to the agency’s data. In Minneapolis, three ICE agents who shot people have a Rio Grande Valley connection. The Department of Homeland Security plans to put hundreds of miles of buoys in the Rio Grande, 17 of those miles being in the Valley, to allegedly stop people from attempting to cross. Texas’ only licensed Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi court interpreter was detained in Harlingen’s airport in March, which also happens to be where ICE flies many of its deportees out of the United States.

And the Dilley detention center, officially the Dilley Immigration Processing Center or previously the South Texas Family Residential Center, which sits about an hour southwest of San Antonio, was reopened by the Trump administration after ICE (during the Biden administration) had closed it in 2024. Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, infamously detained in Minneapolis, were sent to and released from there earlier this year. 

Daniel Hatoum is a San Antonio-based senior supervising attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. The Texas Observer spoke with him in early June about family detention, how habeas corpus cases became de facto immigration law, Senate Bill 4, and what mass deportation does to society. 

TO: Dilley detention center has become a common name right now in the immigration news lexicon, but most people may not know what it is, besides its name and that Liam Ramos and his father were detained there. The Texas Civil Rights Project is part of an effort with the Texas Immigration Law Council called Operation Clear Out Dilley, which is an attempt to help release the 50 or so children in the facility. Can you describe who’s held there, and under what legal authority? What does daily life look like?

It’s a family detention facility, which means it’s a facility where parents and their children are held together. These types of facilities have been used because the detention of children is a very fraught exercise. Children could face additional harms that adults may not be subject to when it comes to detention. During the Bush administration, there was a concerted effort to try to detain families out of a fear that people might be coming over the border with children and using those children as a way to avoid detention. 

The first big family detention center is actually still a detention center today: It’s the Hutto Detention Facility in Taylor. There was a lot of litigation about that. The government did not do well in that litigation, and that facility ultimately had to stop detaining children. 

“When someone comes selling the idea of mass deportations, this is going to be the result.”

During the Obama administration, what ended up happening is that they implemented family detention as well to try to detain folks, and they opened two facilities, the Karnes family detention facility was the first one, they also opened the Berks [County] facility in Pennsylvania, which is very small, then they needed an even bigger facility, and that’s when Dilley was opened. That one holds the most amount of family detention beds that we’ve seen.

It’s a former natural gas camp that has all these trailers, so when you hear [Congressman] Joaquin Castro talk about it, I believe he refers to it as the “Dilley trailer prison.” That’s a pretty accurate description. … So, who’s there? Well, it’s parents and their children, but the age of the children doesn’t exempt them from detention there. So, tender-age children can go to family detention centers. Children who are infants can be in a family detention center. There have been high-profile cases of babies that have gone to family detention centers. Our client in the “Ms. Z” case, which we took on last year, was a six-year-old with a history of leukemia. 

Food is rotten in Dilley. There’s no other way to put it. That’s what’s happening. I guess the only other way to put it is worm-filled, because it’s often filled with worms. It’s not child-appropriate. Remember, when you have children who are as old as 16 months, 18 months, they have very specific food needs, and we’ve heard multiple reports from many folks in the detention facility that those needs were not met. 

The other thing that’s worth pointing out is that the American Academy of Pediatricians has indicated, since 1997, when the first big case about children’s detention came out, that any time in detention for a child is extremely harmful. It causes children to suffer; it creates long-term developmental problems. … Family detention center has this feedback [loop] where parents are put in a position of helplessness because they can’t get what their children need because the administration will not give them what they need, and the children are watching their parents be helpless, the parents are watching their children suffer and they’re only spiraling worse.

The administration has claimed all sorts of new authorities to detain people when it previously wouldn’t have … people who have received parole to be in the country, who received permission to be here, who were released on their own recognizance, who the government said, “You are not a flight risk, you are not a danger. We will not detain you,” and the government takes that back and says, “Actually, who cares? We’re going to detain you.”

So, under what authority? Their whims, and the fact that there are people in charge right now who think they can get away with it.

How did habeas corpus become the legal remedy sought out by people in detention centers? Before last year, there were few of these cases in federal courts. Now there are nearly 40,000 active habeas cases in the United States, 9,000 of which are in Texas. 

It used to be that if you came to the border, the authority that governed your detention was authority related to the border, and courts were really friendly about saying that you didn’t have access to what’s called a bond hearing. So if you came to the border, you asked for asylum, and they wanted to detain you, they could; that’s all there was to it. And we sort of accepted that lay of the land largely for reasons of national security. 

But let’s say you entered the country, you lived in the country for six or seven years, or you’re released on your own recognizance, which happens a lot. … The Trump administration decided that all those people—those who made it in, who were working, who had built community ties—those people need to be arrested at alarming rates, but they can’t go ask an immigration judge about whether to release them on bond or bail. Our current version of the Immigration Nationality Act, prior to 2025, every person in that situation … they likely would have been bond eligible. That bond hearing would have been a very quick procedure, takes about a week.

Oftentimes, they have no criminal records, and we know the vast majority of people in detention have no criminal records, and the judge would go, ‘Okay, for $1,500, you can go about your life while your immigration case is litigated.”

Now, though, the administration said, “Actually, we have a new interpretation of all this.” … For example, you entered without inspection, you’ve been in the country for 20 years. We arrest you in that instance. We’re going to treat you like you never entered in the first place, like you have no community ties whatsoever. And we’re going to say you’re detained under a statute that has typically and historically been used for border enforcement, and that statute means that you have no right to ask to be out of detention. Since you can’t ask an [immigration judge] anymore for help, there’s only one place left to go, and that’s federal court, and the remedy in federal court when you want to get out of detention is habeas corpus. 

Now, general immigration practice has become habeas corpus. Because for your client to get out of detention, to fight their case out of detention, you have to win a habeas case in most instances. 

During the 2018 family separation crisis, there were several instances of the federal government not being able to track the children or parents, or both. Some families were separated for years, and there are still families that haven’t been reunited. With the Dilly detention center in mind, is there still a risk of that today?

When we have immigration detention and immigration arrests, mass deportation, the result of that is going to be parents without children and children without parents. That’s what’s going to happen. I think just generally, societally, we were told that only criminals will be arrested.

If we believed that at one point, which I really do think a lot of good-meaning folks did believe that, that has completely been dispelled. 

Family separation is happening en masse right now, just not in the zero-tolerance way that we saw happening … people getting lost, getting separated in the deportation system we have right now, which appears to be pure chaos. Folks are being sent to third countries without following the proper procedure, folks are getting dumped somewhere they’ve never lived before. Folks are getting sent to Mexico without permission or without clear oversight. Very easy to lose immigrants that way. It’s really hard to unring the bell, and that means families will be separated for prolonged periods of time, if not permanently.

Inside Dilley in 2019 (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Senate Bill 4, from 2023, is the Texas law that allows police officers to arrest people they suspect illegally crossed into the United States and that effectively creates a state deportation process. It’s now enforceable. Texas Civil Rights Project is one of the groups that sued to block SB 4 from becoming law, calling it unconstitutional for a state to enforce federal immigration law. How does being arrested by a Texas police officer complicate a person’s immigration case? 

It complicates it because it introduces a new law enforcement agency with its own mission and its own ends. When we do immigration law, it’s really administrative. It’s dealing with the Executive Office of Immigration Review—EOIR. It’s immigration courts, very specific rules. It’s dealing with ICE. ICE has very specific rules. There are ways to operate that are well settled and well trodden. 

Now we have a new law enforcement agency that has its own removal orders, has its own mission, has its own guidance that’s separate from the federal government, isn’t bound necessarily by the rules of the federal government, maybe not in the same way. For example, regulations that ICE might be bound to, [Texas] may think it doesn’t need to be bound to those, for whatever reason, and it’s harder to argue that they are. That’s going to create a level of chaos in handling immigration cases, and that chaos is almost always going to make it more difficult to help hardworking folks who are just trying to live and survive. 

Is there something more that folks should know about this current moment regarding immigration law and people in detention? 

I would like to reiterate one point, which is that this should be a lesson for us. When someone comes selling the idea of mass deportations, this is going to be the result: Families in detention cells, children in detention cells, families separated. I think that there’s a fantasy that if we just did immigration detention the “right way,” that families won’t be separated, that people would not suffer. 

The trade-off to accepting what I would call a fantasy is the suffering that we’re seeing right now. So I hope that if people in the future think about mass deportation, and whether they want to support that policy or not, they think back to the present moment, they think about the people who have died, they think about the children who’ve cried, they think about the folks who will never recover and ask themselves whether that is worth it.

The post A Texas Immigration Lawyer Breaks Down Family Detention, Habeas Corpus, and Senate Bill 4 appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Caldwell County Judge Hoppy Haden, a stout 63-year-old who sports a cowboy hat and a white handlebar mustache, is hoppin’ mad about the artificial intelligence-fueled data center boom in his backyard. 

Like so many other rural Republican county officials across the state, Haden is staring down several energy- and water-sucking data center projects that he and other county officials have very few powers to constrain. “By the time I hear about it, [developers have] already bought their land, so it’s not like they’re asking our permission to show up,” Haden told the Texas Observer. “So that’s frustrating, right? But I can’t do anything about that, so I’m trying to do something about things that I can do.”

The open pastures of rural Caldwell County, situated between Austin and San Antonio, are poised for at least four new data center developments. One of the largest developments is a 3,000-acre tech compound from the Denver-based data center developer Tract, which chose its site in Caldwell specifically for its access to the Permian Highway gas pipeline and to nearby transmission lines, according to the Caldwell/Hays Examiner. A New York-based data firm called Edged is planning another major data center on 330 acres near the county’s fracked gas plant. 

The developments are among the more than 400 proposed data centers that are rapidly proliferating around Texas, and which collectively could, per the state’s power grid provider, quadruple electricity demand by 2032, and could consume as much as 161 billion gallons of water this year, according to the Houston Advanced Research Center. That’s in addition to the projects’ other well-publicized scourges, like light and noise pollution, heat, habitat loss, higher utility rates, greenhouse gas emissions, and potential health effects.

All this has Judge Haden walking a tight rope between current state law, which grants counties next-to-no zoning authority, and angry citizens who have banded together under the banner of the nonpartisan Caldwell Data Center Action Team (DCAT) to demand the county do whatever it can to stop or delay the developments for as long as possible. In some ways, Haden exemplifies the the ruling Republican Party’s divide over Texas’ data center boom, caught between unabashed champions like Governor Greg Abbott and grassroots conservatives pushing for an approach that seeks maximal local control, such as a countywide moratorium on data center development along the lines of what Hill County commissioners originally passed in May.

The policy debate thus far has exposed deeper tensions within the party as GOP state leaders have for years engaged in an expanding war on local control—aimed at big blue cities—in favor of state supremacy. But that ideological shift now has local Republicans finding that they, too, have fallen prey to that crusade. 

So far, Haden and other county officials are choosing a middle lane between these political poles. Two days after Hill County commissioners passed their data center moratorium, Caldwell County commissioners took a more moderate action by unanimously passing a resolution calling on the state to grant counties greater land-use authorities to rein in data centers. The resolution also calls for independent environmental assessments and for developers to disclose their energy, water, and infrastructure impacts before they can proceed.

Haden is also working with his county’s state legislators, Republican state Representative Stan Gerdes and Democratic state Senator Judith Zaffirini, to draft legislation that would do just that. Haden says his draft bill would grant counties the ability to impose certain land-use requirements on data centers within county subdivision ordinances. This would allow county officials to impose a range of limits on data center projects, including clear limits on potable water use, stormwater use, and wastewater discharge, forcing the data centers to use more efficient closed-loop water cooling systems with non-potable water and “dark sky” lighting, among other stipulations.

“This is not a property rights bill. I’m not asking for [developers] to be able to come or not to come. What I am asking is to be able to regulate our national natural resources if they arrive here,” Haden told the Observer.

Right now, Haden says, counties can only impose such requirements as part of a development agreement that would grant developers lucrative tax abatements or reinvestment zones. For now, Haden says, the county is granting tax abatements as a means of leverage in order to ensure data centers follow basic rules—sparking ire among many of his constituents in the process. 

(Photo illustration by Texas Observer)

Haden said Gerdes, who did not respond to the Observer’s request to comment, agreed to help carry the bill during an annual meeting with local county judges in his district. Data centers dominated the discussion.

Later that week, on May 22, Judge Haden joined Zaffirini, her staff, and local activists from Caldwell DCAT and the San Marcos-based Data Center Action Coalition in a community center in Luling to discuss potential state legislation. Zaffirini told the Observer she was open to supporting Haden’s bill. “I’m very interested in [the county’s] proposals, and we’ll pursue them and we’ll vet them in the process,” she said. 

The Laredo-based senator told the local constituents that she’s a strong proponent of local control, and counseled those in attendance to engage the regulatory powers at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Public Utilities Commission and testify at the Legislature’s upcoming committee hearings.  

In turn, local activists urged Zaffirini and Haden to back a moratorium similar to Hill County’s, arguing that the data center projects are being rushed into construction while they wait for legislative and regulatory process to play out.

Haden’s draft bill is one of several pieces of legislation focused on data centers, a topic that will be a central issue for the GOP-controlled legislature when it returns to session in January. Earlier this year, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick directed state senators to focus on the issue in several interim committee hearings scheduled this summer that will weigh data centers’ economic benefits against the projects’ vast resource costs to local communities. One issue he’s zeroed in on is the possibility of eliminating state sales tax exemptions for data centers, which are reportedly costing the state at least $1 billion a year.

According to The Texas Tribune, state Representative Cody Vasut, who represents a rural-ish district in coastal Brazoria County, has vowed to bring a bill that would return regulatory control over data centers to counties next session. He filed the bill last session, but it languished in committee. State Representative Helen Kerwin, a rural Republican from Glen Rose, also called on the governor to support a statewide moratorium until the necessary environmental studies can be completed, while soon-to-be state Senator David Cook has said he plans to bring a bill that would also give counties new powers to regulate data centers.  

The outgoing Republican Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, too, has called for a statewide moratorium, questioning the benefits of continued tax incentives and subsidies for data center developers. “We must not surrender our resources to global corporations without asking hard questions about the costs to Texas families, farmers, ranchers, and property owners,” Miller wrote.

Caldwell County Judge Haden is running out of patience and has called on Abbott to call a special legislative session specifically to address data center regulation. “Governor Abbott could call [a special session] tomorrow. He has chosen not to. I mean, for God sakes, we have special sessions over who can use which restroom, but we don’t have a special session for this,” Haden said just before voting to pass the county’s resolution supporting data center regulation. 

Meanwhile, Governor Abbott, who has received more than $2 million from the AI industry, fully embraces the data center boom—exemplified by his high-profile photo op last November with Google CEO Sundar Pichai welcoming three new data centers in West Texas and selling the state as a new AI hub. “This is a Texas-sized investment in the future of our great state,” Abbott said. “Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”

Other influential Republican legislators, including state Senator Paul Bettencourt, are applying a now-familiar GOP line at the Capitol—statewide uniformity over local control—to the data center debate. “These should be statewide, top-down guidelines. You can’t have 254 different counties and 1,000 cities all coming up with different answers. Stuff would never get built,” he told the Tribune.

When Hood County considered enacting its own data center moratorium last month, Bettencourt wrote a letter to state Attorney General Ken Paxton warning that counties had no constitutional or statutory power to enact such a development pause and threatened state legal action if it did so. The county commissioner’s court then voted to kill the pause on several proposed projects. 

Hill County, which proceeded with its pause, voted on June 4 to renege on its moratorium after being slammed with a $100 million lawsuit from the industry. The county could potentially face another suit by the state for exceeding its authority in passing the original moratorium. 

Susie Carter, a Caldwell DCAT member and former Hays County Commissioner, who owns 120 acres adjacent to Virginia-based Powerhouse’s 500-acre data center development in Caldwell County, is among the conservative Republicans calling on GOP leaders to back state or local moratoriums. 

Carter told the Observer she hopes that calls for a statewide pause from state leaders like Sid Miller might influence Judge Haden and Caldwell commissioners to pursue a similar moratorium to Hill County’s—but so far, Haden told the Observer, that’s something he isn’t willing to do.

“We need to quit approving [data centers], and we need to call a moratorium, or a pause, statewide to let people come to understand what really is involved with them,” Carter said.

The post Data Center Boom Exposes GOP Faultlines over Local Control appeared first on The Texas Observer.