Government
BY AMIRA VAN LEEUWEN
Comal County commissioners are asking state legislators to review or repeal the State Sales Tax Exemption for Quali ed Data Centers. The commissioners are asking the Texas Legislature to designate an independent assess- ment on regional water availability and drought contingency planning for counties with Priority Groundwater Management Areas, or PGMAs, to appropriate legislative committees. This would allow the committees to evaluate water con- sumption and help enact statewide legislation to address the impacts of large-scale data center developments, especially in water constrained areas, such as counties with PGMAs, according to a May 14 resolution approved by the court in a 4-1 vote. Commissioners are also asking state o cials and relevant regulatory agencies to require full, transparent public reporting of expected water usage for all proposed data center developments before nal approval. The court also supports data centers using closed-loop cooling systems in regions with high water availability, according to the resolution text. Explained A qualifying data center is a facility of at least 100,000 square feet consisting of a single building or portion of a building that has been or will be constructed or refurbished to house servers and equipment for processing, storing or distributing Comal County asks state to revisit data center tax breaks
Hill Country PGMA PGMAs are areas in Texas experiencing or expected to experience critical groundwater problems, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Parts of Comal County and Hays County are in the Hill Country PGMA, according to Texas Groundwater Conservation District.
Hays
Kendall
Comal Comal
PGMA boundary Existing data centers
Guadalupe
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SOURCE: TEXAS GROUNDWATER CONSERVATION DISTRICT COMMUNITY IMPACT
“What this [resolution] does is it asks the state to take a look at these things and give some direc- tion, especially in areas where folks have PGMAs like we have in the county here,” Webb said. Precinct 4 Commissioner Jen Crownover said the resolution will show state legislators that data centers are an important matter to the community. Haag said he thinks the state is already well aware of what the data centers are doing and what some of the problems are. He said the state can “do what they want” with the tax money coming in from data centers. “Would you rather have a 500-acre development with 10 buildings on it with 10 people or 20 people in each building, or do you want a 500-acre piece of property with however many houses they can cram in there. What’s the di erence,” Haag said.
data, according to the Texas comptroller. Items essential to the operation of a quali ed data center are temporarily exempt from the state’s 6.25% sales and use tax, according to the Texas comp- troller. The sales tax exemption for a quali ed data center lasts for 10 or 15 years beginning from the date the comptroller’s o ce certi es the data center. The sales tax exemption is temporary. There are four data centers in San Antonio and two data centers in Austin that are registered Qualifying Data Centers and Qualifying Large Data Center Projects in Texas, according to the Texas comptroller. What Comal County commissioners are saying Precinct 3 Commissioner Kevin Webb said there are things that the state controls that counties don’t. He also said he does not care for the sales tax break the state is giving data center developments.
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