A Texas Farmer Provided 87 Acres for a Park. The City Sold It Off to Build a Data Center

It's a horrific betrayal of trust.

In 1999, a landowning family in Taylor, Texas, gave the city 87 acres for just $10. The goal was to make a park where the local kids could play in and enjoy. Pamela Griffin, a longtime local resident, told 404 Media that the farmer, which she names Mr. Bland, once explained his thinking to her father.

“I see the kids don’t really have nowhere to play,” she recalled him saying. He continued, “I’m thinking about giving this land for parkland because these kids need somewhere to play.” 

The deed signed on July 7, 1999, appears to match Griffin’s memory. According to reports citing the document, Bland granted the land to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, a public trust, for $10, with language saying the property was to “be held in trust for future use as parkland.”

But nearly three decades later, it’s heading for a very different future. In 2025, it was sold to a company called Blueprint Projects for $10 million. Blueprint now plans to build a 135,000-square-foot data center on the site, part of a project the city says represents a one billion dollar investment.

The proposed facility would include three data center buildings, an electrical substation, backup generators, and a closed-loop cooling system. It would house servers used for data storage, web hosting, artificial intelligence processing, and other computing needs.

A Gift Gets Sold

The land didn’t go immediately from gift to data center. Its path was a bit more winding. In 2003, the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation granted the land to another nonprofit, the Williamson County Park Foundation. One month later, that foundation gave the property to the City of Taylor. For several years, the land remained tied, at least in residents’ minds, to Bland’s promise. But in 2008, the city sold the property to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation for $15,000. Then, in 2025, TEDC sold it to Blueprint for $10 million.

That history has become central to the dispute. For Griffin, the issue isn’t necessarily about the data center being built there. If they were building, say, an office building, it would be more or less the same. The problem is that this was meant to be a park.

“I’m not fighting just because of a data center. I’m fighting because this land was deeded for parkland,” Griffin said.

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Yet data centers are increasingly at the core of environmental and social arguments in the US.

Parks, Money, and Data Centers

Taylor isn’t alone. Across the United States, data centers are spreading quickly as cloud computing and artificial intelligence drive demand for huge amounts of computing power.

To local governments, these projects can look attractive. Data centers promise investment, tax revenue, and development on land that may otherwise sit unused or underused.

But to nearby residents, the tradeoff can feel lopsided. Data centers can bring noise, construction traffic, heavy electricity demand, backup generators, and new industrial infrastructure. Even when companies promise closed-loop cooling and mitigation measures, neighbors often worry about water use, light pollution, air quality, and the loss of open space.

Above all, in this particular case, the more pressing issue is whether that land can be used for anything at all, or whether it should be considered a park.

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So far, residents have faced setbacks in court.

A judge dismissed their lawsuit against the project, reportedly on standing grounds. That means the court questioned whether the plaintiffs had the legal authority to bring the case, rather than necessarily deciding the full meaning of the original deed.

A request to halt construction while the case moved forward was also denied. Griffin and other residents have said they are appealing.

A Horrid Breach of Trust

The most painful part of the Taylor dispute isn’t just the money, though the numbers are striking (a $10 transfer meant for parkland became a $10 million sale for industrial development). Rather, it’s the sense that a promise made to a community has been converted into a private development deal.

Whether or not the courts side with Blueprint, residents see the sale as a profound breach of public trust. Land donated for children and community recreation was quietly turned into a multimillion-dollar industrial asset.

Mr. Bland’s original wish was benevolent, the kind of generosity we all admire in modern society. The city’s reversal has turned that gift into something else entirely. Bland wanted a place where kids could play. Twenty-seven years later, his gift has been soiled.

The legal precedent is also important. Deeds are supposed to carry memory forward, giving legal force to a promise long after the people who made it are gone. If land donated for public use can be passed from hand to hand until that purpose disappears, then every similar gift becomes more fragile. For residents, the fear is that Mr. Bland’s deed will not be remembered as a binding promise, but as a loophole waiting to be exploited.