The $10 Deed and the $10 Million Data Center
A promise in a deed, a neighborhood with no standing Continue reading on An Injustice!
A promise in a deed, a neighborhood with no standing
In 1999, a Texas farmer named Frank Rhea Cromwell signed away 87.97 acres for $10, and one sentence at the top of the deed said why: the land was “to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas.” In 2025, fifty-three of those acres sold for $10 million to a data center developer. And this past October, a judge ruled that the neighbors to whom the park was promised had no standing to object.
Taylor, Texas, is a small city northeast of Austin. Pamela Griffin grew up on the south side, in a three-block pocket that was one of the first places in Taylor where Black and Hispanic families could buy residential lots after the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Richard Stone reported for the Austin Free Press. About 35 families live there now, most on land the original families still hold. Griffin’s grandmother bought on the outskirts in the years when Black residents could not buy inside the city limits at all. Her father bought a vacant lot so Griffin and her ten siblings would have somewhere to play, and that lot backed up against Frank Cromwell’s farm.
Cromwell waved at the kids from his tractor. He let them play baseball in his field and fish for minnows. And he said the quiet part out loud to Griffin’s father: “If something happens to me, I’m going to give this land to y’all for a park.”
“We did not know that man kept his word,” Griffin told KUT’s Kailey Hunt in September 2025. “He knew we needed something, and he was willing to give it to us.”
One sentence at the top of a deed
He kept it in writing. On July 7, 1999, the Cromwell family deeded the 87.97 acres to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation for $10, with the purpose stated in a single line: “to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas.” Matthew Gault reviewed a copy of that deed for 404 Media this June. The sentence is there.
What happened next is a chain of paperwork, and the sentence did not survive it. The chain is laid out in Gault’s investigation and Stone’s reporting:
1. In 2003, the foundation handed the land to the Williamson County Park Foundation, which handed it to the City of Taylor a month later.
2. In 2005, Taylor zoned the tract industrial. No park was ever built.
3. In 2008, the city sold the land to its own economic development corporation for $15,000.
4. In 2023, a new land development code re-labeled the area “Employment Center,” a designation under which a data center is already a permitted use.
5. In 2025, the Taylor Economic Development Corporation sold 53 acres to Blueprint Data Centers for $10 million, and 27 adjoining acres to a steel company.
The parkland sentence was omitted from the later transfers, so the development corporation held the land with no restriction visible on its face. A $10 gift, held in trust for children, converted into $10 million of sellable ground in five clerical moves. Nobody had to repeal the promise. They just stopped copying it forward.
What’s coming instead
Blueprint Data Centers is an Austin developer that bought the ground through a parent entity, NCP Travis BPP Project LLC, and took a strategic investment in April 2025 from Northampton Capital Partners, an asset manager with about $1.1 billion under management. The plan, per the company’s own announcements and the Austin American-Statesman’s Claire Osborn: a 135,000-square-foot data center built in three phases, up to $1 billion in capital over its first decade, and 30 megawatts of committed electricity scaling to 60. It will sit about 500 feet from Pamela Griffin’s home.
The Taylor City Council approved the tax deal on August 8, 2024: a 50% property tax rebate for ten years on each of the three construction phases, plus half the local use tax on construction materials handed back, Osborn reported. The city projects roughly $30 million in new revenue over the decade. And the company’s binding jobs commitment, in the city’s own news release: a minimum of five.
Residents found out late. Carrie D’Anna spotted the project on a council agenda and started a Facebook group and a flyer run; Griffin walked her three blocks handing flyers out, Hunt reported. Neighbors spoke at hearings in June and July of 2025, and the council approved the project’s site plan unanimously, granting a 30-day delay rather than the 90-day moratorium the neighborhood asked for. Mayor Dwayne Ariola has described the project as “a concrete room with computer servers in it,” per Gault. He offered that as reassurance.
The city’s own FAQ asks, “Can the City just say no to data centers?” Its answer, as Justin Caffier reported at Gizmodo: “In short, no.” The zoning was already in place. Taylor’s development arm collected the $10 million; Taylor’s FAQ pleads helplessness. Both statements are true, and that is the problem.
