SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
BROWNSVILLE — Following a marathon workshop on proposed data center regulations, city officials confirmed Tuesday that Brownsville’s new rules — a one-mile buffer from homes, schools, hospitals, churches, and other data centers, a five-acre footprint cap, and a Special Use Permit renewable every single year — have narrowed the list of legally compliant sites to exactly one: a barge anchored, and ideally still drifting, somewhere in the middle of the Brownsville Ship Channel.
“We want to be very clear that Brownsville remains open for business,” said city planner Dina Cavazos, unrolling a zoning map on which every parcel of land was shaded red. “We simply also require that business to maintain 5,280 feet of separation from anything a human being might recognize.”
City GIS technicians explained that a one-mile buffer around even a modest five-acre site demands roughly 2,000 acres of certified nothing. Not even the Heavy Industrial zones survived review; industry, it turns out, is a thing. After weeks of analysis, the only polygons meeting the standard were underwater, slightly past the jetties.
Barge Must Still Satisfy the Landscaping Ordinance
Being offshore does not exempt the facility from aesthetics. Code requires a 20-foot landscaped buffer of native trees plus an 8-foot masonry screening wall, meaning the barge must sail with a perimeter of potted monte and a wall one naval engineer described as “essentially a very confident planter.” Planners noted the ship channel itself legally counts as the moat, a savings they called “a win for taxpayers.”
The closed-loop cooling requirement is considered a wash, since the entire Gulf of Mexico is right there and has verbally agreed to keep to itself.
Former Walmart Developer Now Pricing Tugboats
The developer who hoped to convert the former Walmart at 7480 Padre Island Highway — a 265,000-square-foot building on 32 acres near the Port — has revised its plans to include towing the entire former Walmart out to the compliant coordinates. “The good news is the building already survived being a Walmart,” said a project consultant. “The bad news is the parking lot is now ballast.”
Commissioners also floated a 90-day moratorium on new data centers, extendable once to 180 days, before briefly considering a moratorium on moratoriums, which was tabled one mile away from itself for everyone’s safety.
“People ask why a data center can’t be within a mile of another data center,” Cavazos said. “Because they’d start talking. Then it’s a cluster, then a district, then a neighborhood — and neighborhoods are precisely one mile too close.”
