⭐ Morning Briefing — August 28, 2026

(Latest updates through August 28, 2026)

Top Story: Granbury officials reversed course Wednesday, agreeing to finally send five recall petitions targeting the mayor and four council members over the Project Patriot data center fight to the city council, after residents took the city to a state appeals court over its earlier refusal.

📰 Today's News

1. 🗳️ Granbury Reverses Course, Will Finally Send Recall Petitions Over Project Patriot to Council

Almost a month after Granbury officials refused to certify recall petitions against Mayor Jim Jarratt, Mayor Pro Tem Bruce Wadley, and council members Greg Corrigan, Skip Overdier and Zeb Ullom, the city reversed itself and agreed to present the petitions to the council within 15 days, according to an Aug. 24 news release from resident group Voices of Granbury, reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, KERA News and the Hood County News.
The reversal came after residents challenged the city's non-certification decision with a writ of mandamus filed at the 2nd Court of Appeals; residents now want that court to rule that the recall clock should run from their original July 13 submission date rather than the Aug. 24 date the city used when it reversed course.
The recall drive followed contentious hearings over annexing roughly 2,000 acres into Granbury and zoning it for industrial use as the "Project Patriot" data center site, despite vocal resident opposition; the petitions list six allegations against the officials, including a claimed violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act.
Organizers say each petition carries more signatures — over 5,000 combined — than the number of votes the named officials received when they were elected; Granbury had previously said most signatures couldn't be verified or were missing required information.

Today's Signal: Granbury residents needed a state appeals court to force their own city council to accept petitions it had already rejected once — the same pattern of residents turning to courts rather than city hall that's also playing out in Tarrant County's Westlake fight, just with a different county and a different data center.

2. 📝 Farmersville Punts on Data-Center Zoning Rules — For Now

Farmersville's Planning & Zoning Commission spent its Aug. 24 meeting weighing whether to create a dedicated data-center zoning classification, require a planned-development process for any future project, or simply wait, the Farmersville Times reported.
Commissioners settled on the third option, reaching a consensus to take no action on new data-center rules for now while saying they'd be ready to respond if a specific project proposal is actually submitted.
No data center has been formally proposed within Farmersville's city limits; the discussion was preemptive, prompted by the broader wave of data-center zoning fights spreading across Collin County and the rest of the Metroplex.

Today's Signal: Farmersville is choosing to wait for an actual application before writing rules for it — the opposite of Granbury's experience, where zoning decisions made years before a data center existed are now the whole legal fight.

3. 🤠 Abbott's Own Agriculture Commissioner Says the Data-Center "Pause" Is All Hat and No Cattle

A detailed review published Aug. 27 by Texas Public Radio and Houston Public Media found that Gov. Greg Abbott's much-touted "pause" on data-center grid approvals only reaches roughly 300 large-load projects — those over 75 megawatts with no power plant of their own — leaving data centers with dedicated on-site generation, plus more than 150 proposed "medium-sized" (25-75 MW) projects statewide, entirely outside the freeze.
Even for the projects it does cover, the pause doesn't add any evaluation of water use, noise or neighborhood impact — it only requires ERCOT to verify a project is real, via a lease or deed, permits, and a $50,000-per-megawatt financial commitment, before the agency's separate interconnection study (still on track for April 2027) begins.
Individual survey responses on water and energy use will stay confidential, with only aggregate figures made public, and a PUC spokesman said penalties for data centers that ignore the survey would be handled "on a case-by-case basis."
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said that without new legislation behind it, Abbott's directive is "all hat and no cattle"; UT Austin energy researcher Joshua Rhodes called it "a pause in the start of the process" rather than a moratorium, and former ERCOT market monitor Beth Garza doubted the industry will have real clarity even by next April.
Separately, Bloomberg Law reported this morning that the uncertainty is now rippling into corporate law practices, with attorneys describing clients unsettled by Texas's shift from data-center cheerleader to auditor.

Today's Signal: The audit's fine print — confidential survey answers, a carve-out for medium-sized projects, and no new review of noise or water impact — means most of what's actually driving resident complaints in places like Westlake and Granbury will never show up in anything the state makes public.

Quiet today on new TCEQ air-permit filings in the eight tracked counties, on hyperscaler land or construction filings, and on new behind-the-meter generation announcements.

📍 Today's Watch List

Actionable Signals for Friday, August 28

Whether Granbury's city council, once it receives the recall petitions within 15 days, votes to call an election based on residents' preferred July 13 filing date rather than Aug. 24.
Whether the 2nd Court of Appeals rules on which date governs the recall timeline, per the pending writ of mandamus.
Whether Farmersville's council ever authorizes its Planning & Zoning Commission to draft data-center rules, or whether the "wait-and-see" posture holds until a project is actually filed.
Whether ERCOT's confidential Batch Zero survey responses produce any public aggregate findings on water and energy use before the Dec. 10 audit deadline.
Whether Gov. Abbott or state lawmakers respond to Sid Miller's "all hat and no cattle" critique with anything beyond the current audit.
Whether ERCOT's separate interconnection study — the step that actually determines how much power Batch Zero projects receive — holds to its April 2027 timeline despite the audit-driven delay to verification.