Joel EngelhardtPalm Beach County Mayor Sara Baxter’s opposition announced at town hall meeting could complicate county’s April 23 decision.
The meeting started to go south about 25 minutes in, as Deputy County Engineer Joanne Keller talked about regional road projects.
The 400 people packing the Royal Palm Beach Cultural Center came to hear — and be heard — about the Project Tango data center proposed for Southern Boulevard at 20-Mile Bend, west of the Arden neighborhood.
They noisily declared no interest in regional transportation.
For the remaining 90 minutes of county Mayor Sara Baxter’s Project Tango town hall, chaos and bedlam held sway. The crowd, which included moms with babies on their hips and at least 100 people standing, booed repeatedly. They shouted questions. They hooted. They hurled accusations.
In the end, they left with little doubt that they were unified in their opposition to the data center, which is scheduled to be heard by the Palm Beach County Commission on April 23.
Baxter shrugged off the catcalls and promised to vote against the data center, introducing a potential conflict that could leave her sidelined for the quasi-judicial proceeding.
“First and foremost, I want everyone to absolutely understand that I am not in support of Project Tango. Absolutely not,” Baxter said to applause at the start of the meeting. “I have never once said I support this project.
“There’s a lot of bad information out there and a lot of people trying to drum up a lot of hate toward me,” she said. “Let’s make that very, very clear. I am in no way in favor of this.”
Her words, however, failed to placate the crowd, stirred by reports in The Acreage Advocate that she had accepted $12,000 in campaign contributions from Project Tango landowners.
The report also noted a $25,000 contribution from West Palm Beach developer Stephen Ross, who isn’t connected to the Palm Beach County data center but is mentioned in the Advocate story because his former company, the Related Cos., is pursuing data center projects nationwide.
Ross, whose Related Ross company recently received County Commission approval to negotiate to build the county’s second convention center hotel, also made a $7,500 contribution to Baxter’s political committee in 2024.
Ernie Cox, project manager for the commerce center, said under confidentiality agreements he cannot identify who is in talks to operate the data center, but he declared that it is not Ross or another prominent billionaire with interests in the area, Larry Ellison.
‘Free from prejudgment’
Baxter, who is facing a Republican Party challenge in the August primary, said the contributions would have no effect on her data center vote.
“The idea that because somebody has donated to me or my campaign does not mean I’m voting for them,” she said. “I am saying it here loud and publicly: I am not in support of this project.”
But her public declaration of opposition could backfire.
Elected officials must behave as judges in quasi-judicial hearings “free from prejudgment,” a three-judge Palm Beach County Circuit Court panel wrote in a 2020 decision in a Boca Raton case.
The court quashed a 5-0 Boca City Council decision and ordered it reheard without the participation of two council members after it found the council members promised that they had “no intention of granting (the application)” and one said I would “do all I can to prevent this from happening.”
If the County Commission votes no on Project Tango, the applicant could sue to throw out the vote and remove Baxter, whose district includes the center, from voting.
To avoid such an outcome, state law allows Baxter to recuse herself, saying a voting board member may abstain in a quasi-judicial hearing “to assure a fair proceeding free from potential bias or prejudice.”
Either way, she would avoid the political fallout of taking any side in the controversial decision. And the developer would still need four yes votes from the remaining six county commissioners.
Cutting data center request in half
Baxter also declared that she had never supported the project, a point that angered project opponents who pointed to her support for below-the-radar zoning and land-use changes in 2024 and 2025 that allowed the project to expand from 138 acres to 202.
In 2016, the County Commission converted the site next to the Palm Beach Aggregates rock mines and a Florida Power & Light Co. power plant from rural residential, which would have allowed 13 homes on 10-acre lots, to Economic Development Center, a designation that allows warehouses and light industrial.
The landowners received final site plan approval for two data center buildings of 100,000 square feet each and a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse building. The landowners also had approval for an additional 614,000 square feet of warehouse space, county planning documents show.
The Aggregates’ owners, a partnership called PBA Holdings made up of Enrique Tomeu, Michael Klein and his trust and Tennessee contractor W.T. Phillips and his successors were given until June 2019 to begin construction. The commission extended the deadline in 2018 to June 2022.
The county dropped the “use-it-or-lose-it” provision in 2022 through a letter written by then-Planning, Zoning and Building Director Ramsay Bulkeley.
The landowners returned to the commission in 2024 with a new partner, Atlanta-based warehouse builders TPA Group under the name WPB Logistics Owner, to add 64 acres. WPB Logistics paid PBA Holdings $36 million for the land in February 2023.
In December, the county Zoning Commission approved the landowners’ plans to increase the permitted amount of space devoted to data storage to nearly 1.8 million square feet from 206,000 square feet.
The proposal called for about the same amount of warehouse space as previously approved, 1.9 million square feet.
They gave it the code name Project Tango under a state law that allows the potential end-user’s identity to be shielded from public records to improve the state’s competitive edge.
In front of a packed hearing room on Dec. 10, Baxter announced that the applicant had asked for a postponement until April 23.
On Wednesday night, Cox said PBA Holdings would submit a scaled-back proposal, reducing the request for data storage space to 1.032 million square feet in five buildings, down from 11 buildings.
Warehouse space in the proposed Central Park Commerce Center would be increased to 2.4 million square feet, he said in an interview.
County’s glitchy presentation
To residents of Arden, a 2,300-home community built on land once owned by Palm Beach Aggregates, the center would be too close to their homes and the new Saddle View Elementary School, which opened in August.
Cox announced to derision that the updated proposal would put the closest data center building 2,000 feet away from the school. Most residents suggested the figure is really 1,000 feet.
Technical problems haunted Cox’s slide presentation, with the screen going black as he spoke, stirring the crowd’s unrest.
The glitches continued as first Keller and then six other county officials rose to speak so that by the time the three representatives of the Planning, Zoning and Building Department spoke, audience interruptions had become commonplace.
“I’m aware you don’t want this project,” PZ&B Director Whitney Carroll told the crowd before handing the mic off without giving a report.
Baxter intermittently pleaded with the crowd for calm.
“Guys, again, I’m not in favor of this. I’m just trying to get you the information,” she said at one point, adding, “Please stop screaming. We will get to the questions.”
The crowd hooted as Don Kiselewski, FPL’s senior director of external affairs, explained that the power company is obligated to serve all customers, even data centers. FPL’s large-load rate structure, he said, assures that existing customers never subsidize the power needs of a data center, calling the approach the “most forward-looking and customer-protected tariff in the nation.”
Public comment back and forth
While about 70 people put in cards to speak, Baxter, Cox and the county presentations took the first hour of the two-hour meeting, and in the end only about 20 residents went to the microphone.
And those exchanges were combative.
“Guys, if I was your family member, how would you want people to treat me,” Baxter asked before changing course. “Listen, I am still a person. I am your representative. But yelling and screaming and being disruptive does not do anyone in this room a service.”
Baxter got into a protracted dialogue with Tony Reyes, an Arden resident, who came to the meeting with his wife and three children.
She argued that the County Commission did not bear the cost of an independent noise study because “why would we spend money on that if we’re all ready to vote no? It would then be a waste of money.”
Reyes urged the county to spend money on research. “We don’t want to hear that your hands are tied,” he said.
Arden resident Maria Blake asked Cox to spell out one benefit the data centers would deliver to the community.
“It supports all of the economic development that communities were working on, and also all of the devices that each of us use every day,” Cox said. “Currently that data is being processed somewhere, typically outside of Florida.”
That’s not a good enough reason, Blake said, expressing fear over the potential impact of data centers.
“You are going to be storing our information at your facility, saving all of our information for your use that we’re going to be paying for with electricity bills, water, air pollution. Who is OK having cancer of 600 kids and all of these people on your hands? Who is OK with that?
“Nobody is OK because nobody in their right mind would want this monstrosity,” she said. “We have kids to raise. We did not come here to die. And you are not going to come here to build for billionaires.”
Annexation into Wellington?
The meeting ended as promised at 8 pm but the intrigue carried over to the next day, when the County Commission voted to enter into negotiations with Wellington over an annexation proposal enlarged to include Arden and the data center property.
Wellington had been pursuing the involuntary annexation of Artistry Lakes, a 446-acre site east of Arden approved for 534 homes. The county objected, saying it had sufficient grounds to block the village’s reach.
In response, the village asked to enter into negotiations to create an Interlocal Service Boundary Agreement, which allows annexation of noncontiguous land.
The map reviewed by county commissioners on Thursday extended beyond Artistry to include a site to the east, Arden and the data center site.
County commissioners were told state law required them to enter into negotiations but didn’t require them to reach a deal. After a 30-minute talk that never touched on Arden or the data center, commissioners voted 5-0 to move forward.
Editor’s note: This story was corrected after publication to reflect that Wellington initiated the involuntary annexation of Artistry Lakes.
Joel is a founder, reporter and editor at Stet News. His award-winning newspaper career spanned more than 40 years, including 28 years at The Palm Beach Post, which he left in 2020. Joel lives with his wife in Palm Beach Gardens. He volunteers on the board of NAMI Palm Beach County and the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
