One Month to Go

Its Tuesday which means civic engagement day. What is that you ask? Well it's where you can participate in government processes.

How?

Tonight is the 2nd Comp Plan workshop that is open to the public. It will start at 530 and will be at the Lecanto Government Building. If that does not strike your fancy, there is also the North Florida Land Trust workshop about conservation that starts at 6. That will be at the Citrus Springs Community Center. This one is also happening Wednesday and Thursday.

Personally... My plan is to go to the Comp Plan workshop this evening and the NFLT Workshop tomorrow or Thursday.

Hope to see you at one of these.

Today, we are going back to the Data Center as I received more information. I was having a conversation with someone over the weekend. Their "complaint" with what I am doing is that I will mention I will revisit a topic and then never do... or do so later than expected.

That is not intentional at all. The problem is that it takes that long to get the records I am looking for.

Some records I can find on my own... Things involving courts or meetings, agenda items, backup material and so on. All those are published online and I can dig through them on my own.

Things like emails, text messages, purchasing documents, etc generally involve a public records request. Those take some time to get.

Take this for example. This was a request for emails. In theory, this should be pretty simple. It is a query that IT makes for specific terms found in emails and saves all those into a folder and sends them to me. In theory, should not take long. But the county gets several records requests a week and fills them as they come.

This one took 11 days.

Then another one related took 10 days.

So here we are, two weeks after I broke the story about the data center potential, updating the story with what I found. I didn't forget to come back to it... it just took that long to get what I needed.

That said... What did I find? Honestly, not much we do not already know.

It appears that there has been research into data centers as there are several emails in the inboxes regarding resources for data centers, AI, economic impacts of them and so on. These are your "signup for more information" type emails that are sent out to contacts on an email list.... junk mail if you will. But those generally show up when someone is researching something.

There were 22 of these emails in the inboxes of Steve Howard and Steve Baham.

Steve Baham also emailed himself some articles about Data Centers. He is doing research as well.

But here is the interesting thing.

There is an email from Commissioner Jeff Kinnard to Steve Howard on December 17, 2025 regarding a data center.

That is followed up by Steve Baham replying.

And two replies from Kinnard.

Ok good news is that they all agree that we need to have the discussions on what data centers look like here in Citrus County. I had mentioned the need for that recently as well.

Here are the problems.

1) The application was submitted December 5th. In my records request, there is no documented email communication to/from Steve Howard or Steve Baham prior to this date?

Remember, I asked for two years of emails. In a recent Chronicle Article, Commissioner Kinnard states that Amazon backed out of a deal. Where are the emails regarding that?

The first communications come after the application is filed? Umm.. Sure.

2) Commissioners seem to be in the dark. Aside from Commissioner Kinnard who has a few emails and a single email to commissioners from Steve (see below) that was sent to him from Summer Blevins (Representative Gus Bilirakis's Chief of Staff), there are no other email communications with Commissioners. Are they being kept in the dark about all of this? Or is it being done through phone/in person conversations?

Even she knows there is a potential data center coming.

3) Now that there is an application, we cannot change the LDC until the application is resolved. So all of those safeguards we may want here in this county... we cannot add them until this application has been approved/denied.

Why were these things not brought up prior to this application and after the Amazon deal fell through? Seems like that should have been the time to work on these issues.

That also explains the urgency to get this to the PDC. Going from application to the PDC in 3 months is not normal. Also, remember Tallahassee is proposing legislation to regulate data centers. If passed, that likely goes into effect in June/July. If the changes requested as part of this application are approved in April, that gives time to go to permitting before the new laws... thus... a grandfathered in data center under current laws.

4) What happened to the Quasi-Judicial rules? Once an application is filed, Commissioners are considered judges. They are not supposed to have conversations with the parties involved in the application. That also applies to staff. Staff is a party to the application and thus, off limits to commissioners.

Now, there are ways around that and the County altered the ordinance to allow ex-parte communication if it is disclosed via a form... but those conversations about the data center, potential restrictions and so on are NOT supposed to happen.

I will continue to monitor what is going on with this. We are about a month away from the PDC, so if you have any emails to send in, now is the time. You can reach out to Joanna Coutu and she will add them to the file for the PDC hearing for March 5th.

Joanna L. Coutu joanna.coutu@citrusbocc.com