The Black Mountain Data Center: A $10 Billion Lesson in Permission Collapse

Six months later, the same council has tabled the project’s next rezoning request three consecutive times. Council members who voted yes are now calling for a data center ordinance. The district representative is demanding site plans and infrastructure studies that weren’t required before. A town hall drew angry residents who said they had no idea the project existed. The mayor has publicly stated the council needs to “do more homework.”

The project didn’t change. The approval risk environment did.

This is an Approval Risk Breakdown—a diagnostic analysis of how a project’s narrative environment, stakeholder dynamics, and permission structure determine whether it moves forward or stalls. What follows is not a policy argument for or against data centers in Fort Worth. It is a structural analysis of how this project lost momentum, and what it reveals about the approval risks facing major infrastructure development across the country.

1. Project description

Black Mountain Energy, a Fort Worth-based energy conglomerate led by CEO Rhett Bennett, is developing a large-scale data center campus in southeast Fort Worth, situated between the cities of Forest Hill and Everman. The project sits on agricultural land stretching from Esco Drive south to Anglin Circle, adjacent to residential neighborhoods and local businesses—most notably Weston Gardens, a historic botanical garden and event venue dating to the 1930s.

Since January 2025, Black Mountain has pursued a series of rezoning cases to convert agricultural land to light industrial use. The footprint has expanded incrementally: approximately 141 acres initially, then 171 acres, then 119 more in September 2025, bringing the total to over 450 acres. The company is now seeking an additional 80 acres, which would push the campus toward 530 acres.

The developer describes the full buildout as a potential $10 billion investment, including data center buildings, fiber optic infrastructure, a power substation, and road improvements. A related entity, Fort Worth Power Core LLC, has filed for air quality permits to operate natural gas power plants on or near the site.

2. Narrative environment

Data centers occupy an unusual position in the public narrative. They represent enormous capital investment with minimal visible community benefit. They don’t generate foot traffic. They don’t create retail activity. They don’t fill schools. Their primary output—computation—is invisible. What is visible is the footprint, the power consumption, and the water demand.

Nationally, the narrative environment around data centers has shifted materially over the past two years. Coverage has moved from economic development stories to environmental and infrastructure strain stories. Residents across Virginia, Georgia, and Texas have organized against data center proposals, and the framing has hardened: data centers consume public resources for private gain.

In Fort Worth specifically, three narrative dynamics converged:

The Weston Gardens narrative

Weston Gardens became the symbolic center of opposition. A multigenerational family business, a botanical garden with roots in the 1930s, a gathering place for weddings and celebrations—threatened by a conglomerate’s expansion. Sue Weston’s petition gathered over 900 signatures. Her son, Jackson Weston, told the council, “There will always be another opportunity for a data center in this day and time but never another place like Weston Gardens.”

This is a textbook narrative capture dynamic. The project stopped being evaluated on fiscal merits and started being evaluated through an identity lens: heritage versus industry, community versus corporation. Once that frame solidified, every subsequent rezoning request reinforced it.

The “we didn’t know” narrative

Despite over 300 notification letters sent to nearby residents, Forest Hill community members told reporters and council members they were unaware of the project until a town hall held just before Christmas 2025. At the March 2026 town hall, residents expressed frustration that they learned about a $10 billion development next to their homes through word of mouth, not through any structured engagement by the developer or the city.

This is a communication failure that became a legitimacy failure. When residents feel excluded from a decision that affects them, their opposition carries moral weight that fiscal arguments cannot overcome.

The resource anxiety narrative

Water usage, grid strain, noise, and air quality became recurring concerns—amplified by national reporting on data center resource consumption. The World Resources Institute has reported that large AI-processing facilities can consume up to five million gallons of water per day. Even though Black Mountain has stated the facility would use closed-loop cooling and rely on the power grid rather than on-site gas generation, the national narrative created a baseline of anxiety that the developer’s reassurances could not fully neutralize.

Three narratives formed independently and then reinforced each other: heritage under threat, excluded residents, and resource scarcity. By the time the developer offered technical answers, the questions had become emotional.

3. Stakeholder intensity

Stakeholder intensity in the Black Mountain case follows a pattern that anyone who has served on a city council will recognize: diffuse support, concentrated opposition.

Opposition intensity: high and rising

• Weston Gardens ownership and employees, who have personal and economic stakes in the outcome and have pledged to fight the project at every stage of approval.
• Forest Hill residents along Lon Stephenson Road, who feel blindsided and have organized through community meetings and council attendance.
• Environmental justice advocates, including Echo Heights resident Letitia Wilbourn, who has described the area as “already highly polluted” and argued the developer failed to engage neighboring communities.
• Neighboring city officials from Forest Hill and Everman, who have publicly requested more communication from Black Mountain and raised concerns about cross-jurisdictional impacts.

Support intensity: moderate and largely institutional

• The developer and its consultants (Halff Associates), who have made economic development arguments focused on tax revenue, jobs, and capital investment.
• Some council members, particularly District 3’s Michael Crain, who has voiced support while acknowledging the need to balance neighborhoods with new technology.
• Economic development interests within the city, who view the project as a significant addition to Fort Worth’s competitive position in the data center sector.

The critical asymmetry: opposition stakeholders attend meetings, testify, organize petitions, and generate media coverage. Support stakeholders submit economic projections. In the approval risk environment, the intensity gap matters more than the numerical balance.

4. Permission structure

This is the core of the case. The permission structure that enabled the unanimous September 2025 vote has eroded—not because the project changed, but because the political cost of supporting it became visible.

Every elected official evaluating a vote is running two calculations simultaneously: is this good policy, and is this survivable? The first calculation explains initial approval. The second determines whether that approval holds. In this case, the second calculation changed.

What held in September 2025

In September, the council had enough cover to vote yes. The project was framed as economic development. Staff supported it. The developer presented fiscal impact data. Opposition was present but had not yet consolidated into a durable narrative. Council member Chris Nettles, whose district includes the site, voted in favor and expressed confidence in the proposed buffers.

What collapsed by early 2026

Between October 2025 and March 2026, the permission structure deteriorated along three axes:

• Repeated activation events. Each new rezoning request gave the opposition a fresh mobilization opportunity. The incremental approach—adding 80 acres on top of 450—invited the question: how big does this get? Every additional request reinforced the perception that the project’s scope was not transparent.
• Media amplification. Coverage expanded from the Fort Worth Report to WFAA, NBC DFW, KERA, and the Star-Telegram. Each story centered the same characters: Sue Weston, frustrated residents, a developer offering assurances. The narrative frame hardened with each cycle.
• Political exposure concentration. Council members began calculating the reputational cost of another yes vote. Martinez called for a data center ordinance. Nettles demanded a site plan and infrastructure studies. Parker said the council needed to “do more homework.” These are not policy objections. They are political repositioning. The officials who voted yes six months ago are now creating distance from the project because the approval risk has shifted onto them.

The council didn’t change its mind about the project. It changed its assessment of the political cost of supporting it. That is what permission collapse looks like.

The most telling indicator: the 80-acre rezoning request has been tabled three times—in January, February, and March 2026. Tabling is not opposition. It is hesitation. Projects do not die in votes. They die in hesitation. That gap between intent and action is the approval risk.

5. Outcome analysis

As of March 2026, Black Mountain’s data center campus is not dead. The 450+ acres already rezoned remain approved. The project retains significant economic logic. But the 80-acre expansion is stalled, the developer has been forced into a reactive posture—holding town halls, commissioning infrastructure reports, promising additional studies—and the council has signaled it may pursue broader regulatory constraints on data centers citywide.

Update, April 2026: The Fort Worth Zoning Commission voted unanimously on April 8 to recommend council approval of a site plan amendment—increasing building height from 55 to 70 feet while reducing the building footprint by 50% and expanding the southern setback from 80 to 150 feet. The City Council is expected to vote in June. Opposition remained vocal at the April 8 hearing. The 80-acre rezoning request is proceeding on a separate track, also headed to council in June. The project is advancing, but the structural conditions that produced three consecutive tablings have not changed.

The trajectory is consistent with what I call late-stage fragility: a project that cleared early hurdles on the strength of its economics now faces compounding resistance that its economics cannot resolve.

Three outcomes are plausible:

• The 80 acres are eventually approved with conditions, but at the cost of significant delay, public concessions, and a precedent that emboldens opposition on future phases. The project proceeds, but the developer has lost control of the narrative and the timeline.
• The council imposes a data center ordinance that effectively constrains not just this project but future data center development in Fort Worth. Martinez and Parker have both signaled interest in this direction. If that occurs, Black Mountain’s regulatory environment changes retroactively.
• The project stalls indefinitely, not through a formal vote against it, but through the accumulation of delays, studies, and conditions that make execution uneconomical or prompt the developer to redirect capital elsewhere.

None of these outcomes reflect a failure of engineering, financing, or market demand. All of them reflect a failure of approval risk management.

6. What should have been done differently

I served six years on a city council. I have seen versions of this story play out more times than I can count. The fundamental error in the Black Mountain case was not about communication tactics or community engagement checklists. It was a failure to understand the approval risk faced by the elected officials being asked to vote yes.

Here is what that means in practice:

Misdiagnosed problem

The developer treated this as a project approval problem. It is a political survival problem. Every elected official evaluating a vote is running two calculations simultaneously: is this good policy, and is this survivable? Black Mountain’s presentations focused entirely on the first question—fiscal impact, job creation, infrastructure investment. They never adequately addressed the second. As data centers become more prominent in public discourse and their resource demands become more visible, the political risk of supporting them increases. That rising political risk needed to be mapped and mitigated before the first rezoning request, not after the third tabling.

Unbounded phasing

Coming to the council repeatedly—January 2025, then June, then September, then January 2026, then February, then March—turned a single approval decision into a recurring political event. Each request gave opposition a new activation point, gave media a new story, and gave council members a new opportunity to recalculate their exposure. A phased development plan is common in projects of this scale. But each phase must be presented within a comprehensive narrative framework that gives officials a reason to say: we anticipated this, and here is why phase two is consistent with what we already approved. That framework never existed.

Delayed permission-building

By the time Black Mountain engaged residents in Forest Hill—through a town hall just before Christmas 2025—the company had already secured rezoning on over 450 acres. From the developer’s perspective, that was progress. From the community’s perspective, it was a fait accompli. Residents who learned about a $10 billion development next to their homes months after the first votes were cast did not experience engagement. They experienced notification after the fact. The distinction is critical. Engagement builds permission. Notification generates resentment.

No protection for decision-makers

The council members who voted yes in September had no durable political cover. There was no coalition of community voices supporting the project. There were no early endorsements from neighborhood leaders or civic organizations. There was no pre-hearing groundwork that established a public case for why this development served the long-term interests of the community. When opposition intensified, the officials who voted yes had nothing to point to except the developer’s fiscal projections. That is not sufficient. Officials need the ability to say: I voted yes because the community supported this. Without that, they are exposed.

You cannot ask an elected official to expend political capital on your project if you have not invested in creating the conditions that make that vote survivable. That is the fundamental mistake. Everything else follows from it.

The structural lesson

The Black Mountain data center case is not unique. It is a pattern. Across the country, data center developers are encountering the same friction: strong fundamentals, weak permission structures. The projects are well-financed and technically sound. The approval environments are deteriorating because developers have not adapted to the reality that public infrastructure approvals are now, fundamentally, political risk events.

The technical merits of a project determine whether it should be approved. The narrative environment, stakeholder dynamics, and permission structure determine whether it will be.

Black Mountain’s project may still move forward. The economics remain compelling. But the cost of reaching approval—in time, in public concessions, in regulatory constraints, and in political capital burned—will be significantly higher than it needed to be. That cost was avoidable. It is almost always avoidable, if the approval risk is mapped and managed before the first public hearing, not after the narrative has already formed.

That is what approval-risk strategy is for.

Projects are not killed by opposition. They are killed when decision-makers lose the ability to say yes.