Joel EngelhardtNew proposal could escape public scrutiny under existing county rules.
The owners of the controversial Project Tango hyperscale data center project in Palm Beach County are warring against one another, creating rival bids for hosting the still-unidentified company that would be housed there.
The owner of 60 of the site’s 202 acres on Southern Boulevard at 20-Mile Bend has filed an application that could blow up the efforts of their onetime partner, PBA Holdings, to win public support with a scaled-back plan. The separate plans would set aside more space for the unpopular data centers than PBA Holdings envisioned in a revised plan.
Atlanta-based TPA Group, owner of 60 acres in the center of the site under the name WPB Logistics Owner LLC, filed its own site plan proposal on April 27 to replace warehouse space with 1.15 million square feet of data center space.
With an additional 200,000 square feet of data center space allocated to PBA Holdings, data centers would account for 1.35 million square feet, about 350,000 square feet more than PBA Holdings had promised in recent public pronouncements.
And the worse news for the growing list of angry neighbors, taxpayers, politicians and environmentalists fighting the proposal is that the new request from TPA Group could very well be determined to be administrative, meaning it would not be required to go before the County Commission for approval in a public hearing.
Project Tango, the code name given to the project by the Business Development Board, has met stiff public resistance since it surfaced in December. The county has twice delayed its consideration of zoning changes for the project, pushing the final County Commission hearing to July 15.
Until now, the two owners have appeared to be united, signing on to proposals and giving consent to be represented by the same land planning firm, Urban Design Studio.
But now, Urban Design Studio has made a submission on behalf of the Atlanta-based owners TPA Group while the local group headed by Enrique Tomeu relies on planners with the Carlton Fields law firm and WGI.
If TPA Group moves forward with its proposal for 1.1 million square feet of data center space on its 60 acres instead of warehouses, PBA Holdings would be limited to 700,000 square feet of data center space on its remaining land, under current county approvals.
PBA’s project manager, Ernie Cox, said publicly in February he would reduce the amount of allowed data center space from 1.8 million square feet to about 1 million square feet. He said he would submit the revised plan in March.
But the county said it has not yet received the revised plan. Last month, PBA sought the delay until July 15.
With its late April submission, TPA Group made its move to claim 1.1 million square feet of data center space for itself.
PBA Holdings, calling itself Project Tango, disavowed any involvement in the Atlanta group’s proposal in a statement issued Wednesday to Stet News.
“Project Tango is not part of the WPB Logistics (TPA) proposal and has no involvement in that application,” said the statement attributed to land-use attorney Brian Seymour. “The two projects are entirely separate and independent developments with different applicants, ownership entities, applications, design teams and review processes before Palm Beach County.
“We understand that multiple applications in the area may create confusion for residents and the public. For that reason, we encourage each proposal to be evaluated independently based on its own specific plans, studies, impacts and commitments.”
But Seymour said in a subsequent interview the two sides are not at war.
“I don’t think there’s anything in their application that indicates a war,” he said. “It would be premature to make any determinations one way or the other.”
History of the site
PBA Holdings first bought the property in 1993. It dug lucrative rock mines, some of which were converted into water storage reservoirs, and sold off a section two decades ago to Florida Power & Light for a huge power plant. In 2014, the rock mine owners sold off an eastern section for $77 million to make way for the 2,300-home Arden community.
It is the power plant that makes the site particularly attractive to data center operators, which rely on nearby power sources to fuel massive electricity consumption.
Whether an operator such as Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon is committed to the project remains unknown, but the Business Development Board’s initial involvement indicates that an end-user had expressed interest.
In 2023, PBA sold 60 acres for $36 million at the entrance to the rock mines and the power plant to TPA Group. The site plan for those 60 acres, part of a 202-acre industrial development, called for warehouses.
‘Basically the worst case’
TPA’s proposal for the site at 20-Mile Bend west of the Arden community, calls for replacing 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space on the 60-acre site with four data center buildings, each with 289,250 square feet, totaling 1.157 million square feet.
The site plan shows each building accompanied by an outdoor generator yard, water chillers and a water treatment building, indicating a break with the other landowners’ promise to enclose all noisemaking activities, avoid all diesel generators and use a closed-loop water system to cool the computers.
“This is basically the worst case of all the things you read about all across the country,” said Ben Brown, who lives in the neighboring Arden community and has been leading opposition efforts. “That was their commitment to be a good neighbor. And now a new player has come in and… they obviously have no care in the world about what’s right or wrong. They’re all about the profit.”
Could proposal avoid a County Commission vote?
The application references an additional 200,000 square feet of already approved data center space that would remain outside of the 60 acres. That brings the total of data center space allocated in site plans to 1.35 million square feet.
Site plans merely reflect the distribution of allowed uses on the site, meaning the applicant can seek to undergo administrative review to assure they meet county codes but not go before the zoning board or the County Commission.
Asked whether this proposal could be handled without a public hearing, a spokeswoman for the county’s Planning, Zoning and Building Department said not necessarily.
“The specific request would need to be reviewed by staff,” the statement said. “Certain circumstances may require a site plan modification (applicant) with an existing board approval to go through the public hearing process.”
Before the application is submitted, the applicant must ask for a pre-application review, which is what TPA Group submitted.
The approval of warehouse and data center uses on the site date to 2016, with several amendments since. The owners submitted a request for County Commission review in December to add square footage and modify the phasing of construction while getting a variance to reduce the amount of required parking.
First look at PBA’s reduced plan
An idea of what PBA Holdings had in mind for the site after the raucous Feb. 25 town hall session held by county Mayor Sara Baxter comes across in an April 24 traffic study submitted to the county.
It calculates traffic impacts based on the promised reduction to 1.03 million square feet of data center space.
The traffic study by Pinder Troutman Consulting also spells out plans for a 216,000-square-foot enclosed sound mitigation building, saying the building is meant to respond to neighbors’ concerns by housing a “closed loop cooling system and ancillary transformers to mitigate noise from the data center.”
Additionally, the revised traffic study counts more trips from warehouses because warehouse use would increase by 533,564 square feet to 2.35 million square feet.
As part of that calculation, TPA’s 60 acres remain unchanged, containing 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space.
Who is TPA Group?
TPA Group, led by J. Bradford Smith, is a privately owned development company that builds housing, office parks and warehouses, and recently began moving into data centers.
It has proposed a $5 billion, nine-building, 2.56-million-square-foot data center called Newton County Technology Park in Newton County, Ga., east of Atlanta.
Its Project Marvel is seeking an 18-building, 4.5-million-square-foot data center campus in Bessemer, Ala.
Among its holdings, too, are transportation logistics centers in Orlando, Memphis, Tenn., and Norcross, Ga. It also has 1,350 acres in the Palm Beach Park of Commerce, a warehouse complex on Beeline Highway west of Jupiter.
TPA Group recently announced it is teaming with Houston Rockets basketball star Kevin Durant to redevelop a 515-acre former Six Flags America site in Maryland’s Prince George’s County.
