In February, residents in San Marcos packed city hall for eight hours to fight a proposed data center that would have pulled more than 25 million gallons of water a year from the river the town is named after. One protester wore a blow-up salamander costume, a nod to the endangered Texas blind salamander that lives in those springs. A crowd of hundreds sang and chanted outside. Inside, resident after resident told the council to reject the zoning change the project needed. The council voted it down.
That’s what it looks like when the public gets to weigh in before a decision is final. It’s messy, it’s loud, and it works.
Now picture the version of this story where none of that happens. A county government negotiates with a developer for months before anyone outside a small circle of officials and lawyers knows a project is even on the table. By the time residents hear about it, the terms are set, the land is under contract, and the vote feels like a formality. That version isn’t hypothetical. It’s the default outcome anywhere an elected official signs a non-disclosure agreement with the developer whose project they’ll later vote on.
I think that should never happen.
The position, stated plainly
Elected officials who will cast the actual vote on a project, whether it’s a zoning change, a tax abatement, or a permit, should never sign an NDA with the developer seeking that vote. I’m not arguing against confidentiality everywhere in local government. Economic development staff routinely sign NDAs during early site-selection talks, and there’s a reasonable case for that. The line I’m drawing is narrower and, I think, harder to argue with: the person who votes should never be legally bound to keep secrets about the thing they’re voting on.
Why this is a structural problem, not an accusation
None of this requires assuming any official is corrupt. The problem is built into the arrangement itself. An elected official’s job is to represent the people who elected them. An NDA is a legal commitment to withhold information from those same people, at the request of a private company that stands to profit from the vote. Those two obligations can’t both be honored at once. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the official is. The conflict exists the moment the signature does.
And the timing is what makes it worse than ordinary government secrecy. NDAs get signed during the exact window when public input still has leverage: before land is bought, before infrastructure commitments are made, before anyone can point to sunk costs and argue it’s too late to change course. Once a project reaches the “we’ve already invested millions, you can’t stop it now” stage, the public hearing becomes theater. The NDA is what protects that window from ever being contested.
What the alternative looks like
Cooke County didn’t sign anything behind closed doors. In May 2026, the Commissioners Court passed a public resolution addressing data centers before any specific project was announced for the county. It laid out conditions it wants any future developer to meet: no high-water-use cooling systems, transparent reporting on power and water demand, protection for farmland and roads. It also stated the obvious limitation up front, that Texas counties don’t have zoning authority the way cities do, and asked the governor and legislature to fix that gap.
That’s the opposite move from an NDA. Instead of negotiating quietly and presenting residents with a finished deal, the county put its concerns on the record first, in public, months ahead of any specific proposal. Whatever you think of how much power that resolution actually has, and it’s mostly a request rather than a binding rule, the process itself respected the difference between preliminary planning and secret dealmaking.
The argument on the other side, and where it actually applies
Developers and some officials will tell you confidentiality is just how site selection works. A company weighing five counties doesn’t want county A to know it’s also talking to counties B through E, because that leaks its negotiating position and can kill the deal before terms are even set. States and counties that won’t sign anything, the argument goes, lose projects to the ones that will.
That argument has real force, but only for one part of the process. Economic development staff doing early groundwork on behalf of a county isn’t the same as the elected body that will vote on the final zoning change or tax abatement being bound to silence about it. The staff-level confidentiality argument doesn’t require the decision-maker to also be gagged. If anything, keeping those two roles separate protects the negotiating leverage developers want while still leaving the actual vote in the open, which is exactly where it needs to be.
What you can check right now
This isn’t an abstract policy debate. It’s a records request. Most Texas cities and counties are subject to open records law, and any NDA a local government signed with a developer is a document that can be requested. If you want to know whether your city or county has one on file, ask. You don’t need a reporter or a lawsuit to find out. You need a public information request and a little patience.
If your local officials come back and say no such agreement exists, that’s useful information too. If they can’t answer clearly, that’s worth paying attention to as well.