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Minneola data-center ordinance — Draft A or Draft B

Whether Minneola adopts the hard-cap exclusion (Draft A) or the performance-based admission (Draft B) of Ordinance 2026-05 — the leading indicator of whether the corridor participates in the Florida data-center wave at all

Condition
The Minneola Planning & Zoning Commission and City Council recommend and adopt one of the two competing drafts of Ordinance 2026-05 — Draft A (hard-cap exclusion-by-arithmetic) or Draft B (performance-based admission with denial authority). Resolves on the version that reaches adoption.
Significance
82
Horizon
near term
Confidence
high
Status
pending

Minneola Ordinance 2026-05 (June 1 Planning & Zoning Commission agenda) is the corpus's first explicit data-center text amendment, and it arrives as two competing drafts the city must choose between. Draft A — the "P&Z" version — is exclusion by arithmetic: a 5 MW power ceiling, a 50,000 gpd cap on reclaimed water only with a 25% reuse-retention floor, a 10,000 sf building cap, 35-foot height, a one-acre maximum, 2,500-foot separation, mandatory direct-to-chip or immersion cooling, and EMF shielding. A single hyperscale center draws on the order of 1.2 GW and millions of gallons per day, so Draft A's 5 MW cap is roughly one two-hundred-fortieth of hyperscale scale — it does not regulate the use so much as zone it out. Draft B is performance-based admission: 500-foot setbacks, a utility-impact analysis carrying denial authority, and a Chapter 163 development-agreement option. The drafts are a genuine in-or-out policy fork — "not here" versus "here, on our terms." The choice is the leading indicator of whether the US-27 corridor participates in the Florida data-center buildout at all, made before any local data-center applicant exists, and made into the active SB 180 freeze that runs to mid-2028.

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What's pending

Minneola's data-center ordinance — Ordinance 2026-05, on the June 1, 2026 Planning & Zoning Commission agenda — does not arrive as a single text. It arrives as two competing drafts the city must choose between before adoption. Both add "Data Centers" as a Special Exception in the I-1 district and prohibit them in B-1. They diverge on whether a data center can actually be built.

  • Draft A (the "P&Z" version) — exclusion by arithmetic. A 5 MW provider-power ceiling, a 50,000 gpd cap on reclaimed water only with a 25% reuse-retention floor, a 10,000 sf building / 35-foot / one-acre maximum, 2,500-foot separation, mandatory direct-to-chip or immersion cooling, and EMF shielding.
  • Draft B — performance-based admission. A 500-foot setback, a utility-impact analysis carrying denial authority, and a Chapter 163 development-agreement option.

The watch resolves on which draft reaches adoption.

Why this matters

Draft A is the Water Gate in its hardest form — the corridor's first pre-emptive exclusion code, an ordinance that excludes a use class by setting its arithmetic below viability rather than channeling it. The 5 MW cap sits roughly one two-hundred-fortieth of a hyperscale's draw. The 50,000 gpd water ceiling is pinned to a real number: it matches the figure the Fort Meade hyperscaler in Polk County (a $2.6B, 1.2 GW campus approved April 15, 2026) conceded after committing to closed-loop cooling — then made stricter by requiring reclaimed water only with 25% retention. Draft A does not regulate hyperscale data centers; it zones them out.

Draft B is the opposite posture coded into the same ordinance: a door with a lock the city holds, not a wall. A utility-impact analysis with denial authority and a development-agreement pathway admit the use class while reserving the conditioning leverage.

The choice is the leading indicator. The corpus already carries the cross-corpus propagation watch, tracking whether other cities follow Minneola with parallel ordinances. This watch sits upstream of that one: it tracks what Minneola actually decides its own posture to be. A Draft A adoption signals the corridor's first jurisdiction choosing categorical exclusion; a Draft B adoption signals conditional participation. The downstream propagation question reads differently depending on which template the first mover sets.

The timing carries a Grandfather Window dimension, now corrected. SB 484 (data centers, effective July 1, 2026) explicitly preserves local authority to reject data centers and authorizes reclaimed-water conditions in large-scale data-center CUPs — Minneola is exercising a lever the state just confirmed. But the corpus-wide correction this cycle resets the clock: SB 180's "more restrictive or burdensome" freeze runs to mid-2028, not June 2026. Whichever draft Minneola adopts, it adopts into an active, litigated preemption regime — code that tightens standards is challengeable through that window. Draft A, as the more restrictive of the two, carries the larger SB 180 exposure surface.

Resolution criteria

This watch resolves when one version of Ordinance 2026-05 reaches adoption through the Planning & Zoning Commission recommendation and City Council vote. The outcome assessment will capture:

  • Which draft prevailed — hard-cap exclusion (A) or performance-based admission (B), or a hybrid that merges provisions of both
  • The vote and the discussion — whether the choice was contested on the dais, and which commissioners drove the posture
  • Whether the adopted thresholds moved from the drafted numbers (a softened 5 MW cap, a raised water ceiling, a relaxed building cap)
  • How the choice positions the corridor — categorical exclusion sets a template other corpus cities can transplant; conditional admission sets a different one
  • Whether the SB 180 exposure of the adopted version draws any later challenge, given the corrected mid-2028 freeze window

Source trail