Palm Beach County Said No to Project Tango, but Staff Approval Still Triples Data Center Space

Three months after Palm Beach County commissioners voted 5-1 to reject an expansion of the Project Tango data center, county zoning staff quietly approved a separate request that more than triples the data center space allowed on the 202-acre site at 20-Mile Bend. The Oct. 7 administrative approval, which did not go before the commission, lets landowner PBA Holdings build just under 700,000 square feet of data centers next to the Arden community and Saddle View Elementary School, according to WLRN, Stet News and WPTV.

The decision stunned residents who believed the July vote and a one-year moratorium on new data center applications had settled the matter for now. "It's a betrayal," Arden resident Ben Brown told Stet News. "What appears to be a backdoor option to triple the square footage of the data center site is pretty frustrating."

What staff approved

The site, off Southern Boulevard (State Road 80) in western Palm Beach County near Loxahatchee, already carried a 2016 master plan approval for about 206,000 square feet of data center space and 1.2 million square feet of warehouses, with roughly 600,000 square feet left unassigned. PBA Holdings asked county staff to assign that leftover space within the existing plan, a change that does not require a commission vote.

Zoning Director Wendy Hernandez approved it. According to documents obtained by WPTV, the reworked plan includes two 288,000-square-foot data center buildings, one 122,000-square-foot data center building, the existing 1.2 million square feet of warehouses, and a utility building and offices. The approval is final, short of a court challenge.

Hernandez told WPTV the request was submitted before the moratorium took effect, so staff were able to keep reviewing it. She declined an on-camera interview.

Here is how the data center allowance on the site has changed:

The July rejection

On July 15, after a roughly 12-hour hearing that filled overflow rooms at the Robert Weisman Governmental Center, commissioners voted 5-1 against PBA Holdings' request for nearly 3.6 million square feet of development, including about 1.03 million square feet for a hyperscale AI data center and 2.35 million square feet of warehouses. Commissioner Maria Marino cast the lone yes vote. County Mayor Sara Baxter, who represents the district, recused herself after publicly opposing the project before the hearing. The county Zoning Commission had earlier recommended denial 6-0.

That project was projected to draw about 600 megawatts of power, WLRN reported, 12 times the 50-megawatt threshold at which Florida's Senate Bill 484 imposes added regulatory hurdles. The site sits just east of Florida Power & Light's West County Energy Center, a natural gas plant that can produce 3,750 megawatts. Vice Mayor Marci Woodward said the plan was not compatible with the county's comprehensive plan.

Commissioners acknowledged at the time that the separate administrative request was pending and that they had no direct say over it. Woodward asked whether staff would consider the board's clear opposition, and Hernandez said yes, according to Stet News.

Conditions on the new plan

The 2016 approval carried no conditions on data center operations, county officials confirmed in July. The new approval does. Data center buildings cannot go within 850 feet of the eastern property line near Arden. Noise at neighboring homes is capped at 50 to 60 decibels depending on the time of day, with continuous sound monitoring the county can access. The county water utility will supply no more than 100,000 gallons a day to the entire site, and the project must use a closed-loop cooling system, which uses less water than other designs. Battery storage must meet fire safety requirements.

The developer had said in July that its closed-loop system would require 100,000 gallons of potable water daily. Neither the approval letter nor news coverage disclosed how much electricity the smaller build-out would require.

Who is behind Project Tango

Project Tango is the code name for an effort to draw a large, unidentified technology company to the site, Stet News has reported. PBA Holdings is a successor to GKK Corp., which bought 3,000 acres at 20-Mile Bend in 1993, mined rock there as Palm Beach Aggregates, sold mining pits to the South Florida Water Management District and later sold land for the 2,300-home Arden community. Its owners include Michael Klein and Enrique Tomeu, and its longtime project manager is Ernie Cox. A member of Cox's staff told WPTV the team would respond to residents' concerns, but no response had come by publication.

The site's other owner, WPB Logistics Owner, is run by executives of Atlanta-based developer TPA Group. It paid PBA Holdings $36 million for 60 acres in 2023 and is in a legal fight with PBA Holdings over development rights. WPB Logistics has filed its own administrative request to convert its 1.2 million square feet of warehouse rights into data center space, which remains under review. The 850-foot buffer in the new approval could block part of WPB Logistics' plans along the eastern edge.

Residents and the county's next moves

Residents have told WPTV they did not understand how the plan could be approved without a commission vote or public hearing, and many believed the moratorium would freeze activity on the property. Commissioners also had promised an expert task force to help rewrite zoning rules for hyperscale data centers. A memo for Thursday's zoning agenda says that idea was dropped in favor of hiring the consulting firm VHB, also known as Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, for up to $225,000.

PBA Holdings, meanwhile, has appealed the July denial under the Florida Land Use and Environmental Dispute Resolution Act, which sends the dispute to a special magistrate whose recommendation returns to the commission. No hearing date has been set.

Part of a statewide fight

Palm Beach County is one of several Florida communities wrestling with the AI data center boom. This week the Volusia County Council took a final vote on banning large-scale data centers, an issue that has surfaced in the governor's race. Manatee County froze data center applications for a year earlier this month while commissioners weigh a permanent ban, and in Jacksonville, JEA has said it is not ready to serve a hyperscale data center as residents push back on high utility bills. The fights share common threads: power demand, water use, noise and whether local rules written for warehouses fit facilities that can draw as much electricity as a small city.

What's next

Commissioners were scheduled to vote Thursday on the VHB consultant contract as they write new data center rules under the moratorium. Residents opposed to the project could seek to challenge the staff approval in court. Staff must still decide WPB Logistics' pending request for more data center space, and the special magistrate process on PBA Holdings' July appeal is still to be scheduled.