In 1999, a Texas farmer donated 87 acres for a public park for just $10, and in 2025, the city sold it to a data center developer for $10 million

Mr. Bland, a Texas farmer in his 70s, saw that the neighborhood children had no safe place to run around and made a quiet decision in 1999. He'd give 87 acres of his land for $10 so kids could have a park. More than two decades later, that same land is being cleared for a 135,000-square-foot data center, just 500 feet from the home of the woman who has spent the last year fighting to stop it.

According to an investigation by 404 Media from the original deed from July 7, 1999, it was clear that the 87.97 acres in Taylor, Texas, were “held in trust for future use as parkland.” That deed is still on record. But in a series of transfers that eventually spanned nearly three decades, the land was eventually sold by the Taylor Economic Development Corporation (TEDC) to data center developer Blueprint for $10 million in 2025.

From a $10 handshake to a $10 million deal
The story of how parkland becomes a data center is really the story of how legal language is quietly worked around, one transaction at a time.


In 1999, Bland and his family sold the land to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation for $10, with the understanding that it would be used as a park. That foundation transferred the land to the Williamson County Park Foundation in 2003, which then transferred it to the City of Taylor in the same year. In 2008, the city sold it to the TEDC for $15,000. Then, in 2025, the TEDC sold it to Blueprint for $10 million, a stunning jump from what was supposed to be a permanent gift to the community.

For longtime resident Pamela Griffin, who grew up playing on that land and saw her own children do the same, the news of the data center plan in 2025 was a gut punch. At first she didn't know what a data center was. She looked it up with her family and was immediately alarmed and the fact that it would sit just 500 feet from her front door made it personal in an impossible-to-ignore way.

A community with deep roots and a long memory
To understand why this fight is so important to Griffin, you need to understand who this community is and how it got here.

Her family has lived on the land since her grandmother’s time, Griffin told 404 Media. “Back then, black and brown people weren’t allowed to buy in the city limits of Taylor,” she said. “So we had to buy on the outskirts.” The land Bland gave up wasn’t just open space for Griffin’s community; it was their backyard in the most literal sense. Her brothers played baseball right there. Her children grew up on it. And now a data center is being built in a neighborhood that historically had little political power to push back, located between a power substation and nearby railway tracks.

That history makes the city’s decision to sell the land seem like more than just a broken promise. It asks tougher questions about who gets protected when development comes to town and who gets left to deal with the consequences.

What it actually means to live next door to one
Griffin’s alarm is justified. Data centers affect local communities in five key ways, according to researchers at George Mason University writing in The Conversation: air quality, water quality, noise levels, land use and energy costs. Noise from the northern Virginia facilities has been recorded at 40 to 59 decibels on neighboring residential properties, levels that the EPA says can affect people’s ability to work, sleep and exercise.

Residents living near data centers in Virginia, Arkansas and Texas have been lodging repeated complaints about 24/7 industrial noise that contributes to increased blood pressure and anxiety, says the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Some of the affected residents only recently started moving when they found out that nothing would change.

The Taylor City Council has sought to ease Griffin’s concerns by offering mitigation measures such as a barrier wall, landscaping, closed-loop water cooling, and a private power substation. But reassurances carry little weight for a community that has watched a legal promise quietly get transferred away over 25 years.

The law, the deed, and the question of who holds power
That legal principle is at the heart of this fight, and it carries a lot of weight in Texas. Texas Local Government Code §253.001 generally prohibits a city from selling its land for public parkland without a public vote. Courts have held that a purpose expressed in a deed, such as the use of land for park purposes, is binding. The original deed does just that in this case.

The Taylor City Council claims its hands are tied. The land is in an Employment Center zoning district, which gives the city the ability to regulate the appearance of a building, not its use. Taylor’s executive director of community services told 404 Media that Blueprint didn’t even need the city’s explicit approval to build, because the zoning was already established. Griffin and the four relatives who joined her in a lawsuit have not been satisfied with that explanation. They say the language of the deed should trump zoning technicalities. Blueprint has won its first legal battles, but the group is now taking its case to the Third Court of Appeals in Austin.

Thirty million reasons the city says it needs this
The economic case for the data center is not insubstantial. Blueprint’s facility is expected to generate about $30 million in tax revenue over the next decade, $20 million of which would go to the local school district, according to the City Council. That is a really significant amount of money for a smaller Texas city like Taylor.

But that trade-off is playing out across the US. Local governments are caught between the tax revenue promises of the tech industry and the rights and well-being of existing residents. The boom in AI is speeding up the pace of building data centers, and communities, often poorer ones with less political power, are paying the price.

More than a data center fight
The compelling thing about Griffin’s case is that she has been precise about what this is and is not about. “I’m not fighting just because of a data center,” she told 404 Media. “I'm fighting because this land was deeded to be parkland.”

That is a distinction worth pondering. A man gave away land almost for free because he saw children, with nowhere to play. He kept that promise in writing. Now it’s up to the appeals bench in Austin to wonder if courts will eventually honor that original act of generosity.

Meanwhile, the kids in Taylor still don’t have that park.