Zoning Signal

Watch

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

Resolution (September 27, 2026)

Neither draft reached adoption, and neither was chosen. The minutes of the June 1, 2026 Planning & Zoning Commission meeting record Item 7, Ordinance 2026-05, approved 4-0 (AYE: Calderon, Martin, McCoy, Rose) on a motion by Commissioner Martin, seconded by Commissioner Rose, directing staff and legal to finalize a data center ordinance "compatible with the new state law." As the corpus records the motion, the direction includes size and scale thresholds, with small or boutique facilities allowed at baseline and special-exception review for larger proposals; minimum separation from residences, schools and parks; water and energy efficiency and renewable measures where feasible; noise and generator emission standards; heat mitigation and native landscape buffering; and impact analyses for larger proposals.

Vice Mayor Hernandez, speaking from professional experience in data center design, drew the distinction the motion follows: large hyperscale centers against smaller co-location or boutique facilities that use ambient air cooling and draw far less water and power.

The watch was published on June 4 from the June 1 agenda, before the minutes were posted, so the decision it framed as ahead had already been made. Ordinance 2026-05 does not appear on the Commission's July 6, August 3 or September 14, 2026 agendas. The tiered third version has not returned in the corpus record.

Calibration

Axis Forecast Outcome
Directional Adoption of Draft A (exclusion) or Draft B (admission) Misread: neither; a tiered third version directed
Horizon Near-term adoption Early: the deciding vote came June 1, before the watch was published
Significance The choice as the corridor's leading indicator on data centers Overstated: the fork dissolved, and no version has reached adoption

What was 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 mattered

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 $2.6 billion campus that would need 1.2 GW, whose development agreement the Fort Meade City Commission approved April 14, 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 §28 bars "more restrictive or burdensome" local regulation adopted before October 1, 2027, and the section expires June 30, 2028, not June 2026. Whichever draft Minneola adopts, it adopts into an active, litigated preemption regime, and 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 §28's window through October 1, 2027

Source trail

Connected records

7 connected records

Patterns2

Watch2

Corridors1

Entities1

Places1