I normally try and stay out of states/issues outside of the Rocky Mountain West, but I wanted to highlight something happening in rural Texas that I learned about thanks to a young patriot in the DMs. Please spread the word on this if you can. In rural Texas land development issues, if a solar company or data center wants to come in and buy land to build, there’s a few core statewide transparency rules that always apply to government actions to allow locals to know what’s happening in their back yard. The Texas Open Meetings Act means anything city councils, county commissioners courts, planning commissions do must be open to the public. Time/date must be posted in a reasonable place a few days before the meeting. Agendas need to inform the public of topics discussed at meetings. Then, the Public Information Act ensures all permits, agendas, applications to develop etc are public and requestable. In the field of land management, transparency is probably the most important guiding light for good governance. Texas is obviously very strong on private property rights, so in rural areas in particular, solar and data centers can proceed with minimal county level planning-style review, but in exchange these types of projects are still subject to the state’s transparency laws. The reality in rural Texas (unincorporated county land) is that formal public engagement is minimal, with residents only learning about projects through voluntary developer outreach or from the local news. That makes the transparency laws of the state all the more important. But even that level of public information is too much for the solar companies, data center companies, and local government people who stand to cash in, so they’re forming a new type of governmental entity called a “hybrid EDC” (Economic Development Corporation) to avoid having to give any information to local residents under state transparency laws. Economic development corporations are Texas local Government tools to structure deals with industry (like solar companies and data centers). Traditional EDCs were subject to the state’s transparency laws, so increasingly these hybrid EDCs are being formed to get around all that. Hybrid EDCs are a blend of public and private authorities, part local government and part private developer. They’re allowed, by law, to sidestep the Open Meetings Act via nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) between local officials, hybrid EDC staff, and solar company/data center developers. This legally restricts what information can be shared about water/power demands of incoming projects, ownership, or any impacts until after the project gets approved. Negotiations on solar/data centers occur privately and agendas can have vague code names for what’s being discussed. Residents learn details after land is controlled, tax incentives have been framed, and permits are signed off on. Hybrid EDCs also buy property with 0 public outreach, avoiding public hearings, while solar/data centers use LLCs to simultaneously quietly acquire land and avoid informing locals. Hybrid EDCs can hold closed executive sessions on all of these goings on, even holding final votes with minimal public notice after all the decisions have been made and permits are good to go. This allows solar and data centers to leverage weaker permit tracks for power and water use avoiding all that pesky public notice and public meetings. So all of this is happening according to the letter of the law (already thin in rural Texas) while reducing public input and engagement to 0. Even if community groups make Public Information Act requests or Open Meetings Act requests, NDAs signed under the hybrid EDC model make those requests effectively powerless. This is not an anti-solar anti-data center post, but why go to all the effort to avoid sharing information with local people? Why go to all the effort to work around state transparency laws? This is why there’s a backlash against this type of development.

Elon Musk is a real-life Bond villain ft.trib.al/zAOuVKk