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.
No standing
Pamela Griffin, three of her siblings, and a neighbor named Polly Randle hired a Taylor lawyer, Chris Osborn, and sued to stop all commercial development on the site, the deed at the center of their case. Blueprint’s lawyers argued the deed contains no enforceable restriction at all, and a real-estate appraiser testified for the defense that deed restrictions, in his experience, come as specific clauses in the body of a document, not a single line at the top, Edie Zuvanich reported for the Taylor Press. Even the 15-acre buffer the city kept between the site and the houses is not planned as a park; the city’s comprehensive plan marks it for commercial- and residential-type development, Taylor’s assistant city manager testified.
On October 8, 2025, Judge Ryan Larson of the 395th District Court in Georgetown denied the injunction and dismissed the case. Not on the deed. On standing: the ruling held that the neighbors are not parties entitled to enforce it. “We were disappointed that he denied the injunction, of course, but we were really surprised that he also dismissed the case,” D’Anna told Zuvanich. The family has appealed to the Texas Third Court of Appeals, where the case is pending as of this writing.
Here is the part worth slowing down for. Texas law does protect parkland. Chapter 26 of the Parks and Wildlife Code requires three things before land “dedicated and used as a park” can be taken for another use: notice, a public hearing, and a finding that there is “no feasible and prudent alternative.” Used. Taylor never built the park, so the strongest shield in Texas law for park ground may never attach to ground that spent 26 years waiting to become one. And charitable gifts in Texas are enforced, for the most part, by the attorney general, not by the neighbors a gift was meant for. The promise was broken before it was kept, and the not-keeping is what put it past the neighbors’ legal reach.
Read that paragraph again. The defense never claims the promise was not made. The defense claims nobody left in that courtroom is allowed to care.
The arithmetic Texas is doing
Taylor is not an outlier; it is the pattern. Texas now has more than 300 data centers operating and, per an Aterio analysis that the Texas Tribune’s Paul Cobler and Apurva Mahajan reported in April, 142 under construction, one more than Virginia. The state comptroller estimates the sales-tax exemption for data centers will cost Texas $3.2 billion over the next two years. Organized opposition has surfaced in San Marcos, Amarillo, College Station, Waco, and Harlingen. The buildings keep coming anyway, and they go where the ground is cheap and the resistance is presumed to be manageable.
Ground gets cheap, in part, by sitting next to people whose objections have historically been easy to discount. The 53 acres in this story were not pried away from a country club.
Where I stand in this
I should be honest about my seat at this table. I am a doctoral student in artificial intelligence. The models I study have to live somewhere, in buildings exactly like the one rising near Pamela Griffin’s porch, and my field’s appetite is the demand side of this story. I typed this essay on the supply chain that ate her park. That is not a reason to quit working in AI. It is a reason to refuse the comfortable fiction that the buildings land where they land by accident.
The deed is still on file in Williamson County. One sentence at the top, $10 at the bottom, and 26 years of paperwork insisting the sentence stopped counting somewhere between the courthouse and the closing table. Frank Cromwell watched other people’s children play on his land and wrote them a promise into the one kind of document Texas claims to hold sacred. He kept his word.
The appeal will decide whether anyone else has to.
Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.
References
Blueprint Data Centers. (2025, August 13). Blueprint Data Centers delivers accelerated digital infrastructure readiness with strategic Austin facilities, energized by 2026 [Press release]. Telecom Ramblings Newswire.
Business Wire. (2025, April 14). Northampton Capital Partners invests in Blueprint Data Centers [Press release].
Caffier, J. (2026, June 8). A farmer donated land for a public park and the city sold it to a data center developer for $10 million. Gizmodo.
Cobler, P., & Mahajan, A. (2026, April 8). Texas losing a billion dollars a year on data center tax break. The Texas Tribune.
Gault, M. (2026, June 8). A farmer donated land to turn into a park. The city is building a massive data center instead. 404 Media.
Hunt, K. (2025, September 26). It was supposed to be a park. Instead, this property in Taylor is being turned into a data center. KUT.
Osborn, C. (2024, August). BPP Projects plans to build new $225 million data center in Taylor. Austin American-Statesman.
Stone, R. (2026, May 18). Minority report: Taylor data center plan raises community ire and questions of equity. Austin Free Press.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Code, ch. 26. Protection of public parks and recreational lands. Texas Legislature.
Zuvanich, E. (2025, October 1). Blueprint Data Centers hearing kicks off. Taylor Press.
Zuvanich, E. (2025, October 11). Judge rules in favor of data center. Taylor Press.