Dozens of residents turned out Monday night in this Polk County town of about 5,300 people to oppose a proposed hyperscale data center. State Rep. Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, headlined the gathering and framed the project as a fight over transparency and the environment. That is a fair description of how the room felt. It is a thinner description of what has already happened.
In April, Fort Meade commissioners voted 5-0 to approve a 20-year development agreement with Stonebridge, operating as Fort Meade LLC, for a campus on roughly 1,300 acres of former phosphate land west of U.S. 98. The proposal is large by any Florida standard: up to 4.4 million square feet, a reported $2.6 billion investment, and an estimated 1.2 gigawatts of power if built to full scale. Developers have talked about hundreds of jobs by the early 2030s. Critics say permanent local employment would be far smaller and that a multiyear tax break would shift costs onto everyone else. Forty of 41 speakers opposed the deal at the April meeting. The commission approved it anyway.
That vote did not finish the project. It started a second fight over permits.
The city’s existing water allocation cannot supply the campus under rules the Southwest Florida Water Management District adopted in December 2025. A data-center water permit now has to go before the district’s full board in public session. Stonebridge’s agreement reserved 50,000 gallons a day from the city. State commerce officials have called that figure “woefully underestimated” for a facility of this size. Until a consumptive-use permit is granted, construction cannot proceed no matter what city hall signed. Power is the other unresolved number. A load that large is not a municipal afterthought. The question is whether Duke Energy or another supplier can deliver it without pushing the cost onto residential ratepayers who never asked for the campus.
Residents have not waited for Tallahassee to sort that out. Two lawsuits seek to unwind the city’s approval. A recall drive targeted Mayor Jaret Williams, Vice Mayor Petrina McCutchen, and Commissioner Matthew Taylor. The supervisor of elections certified petitions against Williams and Taylor; the McCutchen petition fell short. The officials call the allegations false and have moved to fight the recall in court. That is local government doing what local government does when a small tax base collides with a project the size of a city.
Nixon’s town hall folded that fight into a Senate race against appointed Sen. Ashley Moody. Nixon wants more federal and state guardrails and says communities should see the data on health, water, and household costs before anything is built. Moody’s public line has been narrower and more local: communities and the state should decide what they want, residents should not eat the power bill, and environmental rules already on the books should be enforced. Those two positions are not as far apart as a campaign flyer needs them to be. The gap is who gets to write the next rule and from how far away.
Florida does not yet have a hyperscale campus in operation. Proposals have popped up in several counties because the computing load behind cloud storage and artificial intelligence is real. Pretending the demand will vanish if Fort Meade says no is not a water policy. Neither is waving through a gigawatt project on a handshake and a lowball gallon count. The honest conservative answer is the same as the honest local one. The people who live next to the site, pay the water bill, and sit on the electric rate case should see verified numbers before dirt moves. Water districts and the Public Service Commission exist for that reason.
What Monday’s meeting did not change is the sequence. Fort Meade’s elected commission already voted. The water board has not. The lawsuits are pending. The recall is in the courts. A Senate candidate can amplify a town’s fear. She cannot substitute for a permit. If the project fails, it should fail because the aquifer, the grid, and the tax deal do not add up—not because a campaign needed a backdrop in a town that already spoke.
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