Kevin Myers spent 33 years in uniform, from 1989 to the summer of 2022. He told a Fort Worth Report reporter he wanted "some peace finally, where I can just live the rest of my life quietly." He lives in the Lakes at Marshall Ridge, a Keller subdivision that backs up to roughly 500 feet of undeveloped land just across the town line in Westlake. That land is where PowerHouse Data Centers wants to build the Circle T Data Center, four buildings totaling about 1.1 million square feet on 88 acres off U.S. Highway 377.
The fight over that project has produced a temporary restraining order, a dissolved temporary restraining order, a hearing scheduled for October 23, and enough court filings that a Tarrant County judge told both sides' attorneys she needed more time just to read them. What the fight has not produced, and by most legal readings cannot produce, is a scenario where Keller's city council gets a vote on what happens on that parcel. The land sits inside Westlake's town limits. The zoning that governs it was set before either subdivision existed as it does now, and that timing is the part of this story worth understanding if you are shopping for a home anywhere near a DFW municipal boundary.
A Fence Line Zoned Before the Houses Arrived
The 88-acre tract has carried a commercial and industrial zoning classification since 1998, according to Westlake's own public statements on the project. That classification never changed. What changed was the land next to it, across the town line in Keller. In 2006, Keller's city council rezoned an adjacent tract from commercial to residential under Ordinance 1309. In 2015, the council went further, approving Ordinance 1742, which converted another portion from industrial commercial to residential and added 15 more homes directly along the fence line bordering the Westlake tract that remained zoned commercial and industrial.
Westlake's account of that 2015 meeting states that most residents who spoke were in favor of the residential zoning, and that they cited a preference for homes over a commercial buffer on that land. If that account is accurate, it means the choice at the time was framed as houses versus a parking lot or warehouse, not houses versus a data center. Nobody at that meeting was voting on the specific 300-megawatt campus now proposed. They were voting on a zoning classification for a small city, and the property across the line kept the classification it had carried since the Clinton administration.
Whose Vote Actually Counts
Because the Circle T parcel was already zoned for this kind of use, Westlake's Planning and Zoning Commission approved the site plan on August 4, 2026, without a rezoning vote and without requiring Keller's input, because Keller has no legal standing over land inside Westlake's borders. Town staff said the plan met or exceeded every applicable requirement, including architecture, setbacks, buffering and landscaping, and that left the commission with no basis to deny it.
Keller's response moved through its own council instead. On August 12, the council adopted a resolution opposing the project. On August 19, it voted unanimously to pursue legal action, the same day Governor Greg Abbott announced that PowerHouse was among three developers agreeing to new statewide standards covering infrastructure costs, water use and neighborhood impact. Hours before the Westlake Town Council could vote on a development agreement that Monday, a Tarrant County judge issued a temporary restraining order at the request of the Lakes at Marshall Ridge Homeowners Association, pausing any council action on the agreement.
Here is a compact version of how the case has moved since:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Aug. 4, 2026 | Westlake's Planning & Zoning Commission approves the Circle T site plan |
| Aug. 12, 2026 | Keller City Council adopts a resolution opposing the project |
| Aug. 18-19, 2026 | Keller authorizes legal action; a Tarrant County judge issues a temporary restraining order |
| Aug. 26, 2026 | Judge hears arguments on whether the HOA's lawsuit proceeds |
| Sept. 25, 2026 | Judge Kimberly Fitzpatrick dissolves the restraining order, citing unmanageable last-minute filings |
| Oct. 23, 2026 | Hearing scheduled on the underlying lawsuit, with the City of Keller as intervener |
What the Lawsuit Can Actually Challenge
The lawsuit does not argue that the land should never have been zoned commercial. That argument would be difficult to win against a classification that has stood for 28 years. Instead, the plaintiffs, the Lakes at Marshall Ridge HOA along with two residents and former Westlake Planning and Zoning commissioner Linda Bjorn, are pressing procedural claims. Their attorney, Jason Friedman, has argued the site plan does not include the 150-foot setback and landscaped buffer the plaintiffs say Westlake's own zoning ordinance requires between the data center and single-family homes. The suit also alleges that a December 2024 zoning text amendment nearly doubled the permitted building height on the property, from 45 feet to 80 feet, and that the meeting agenda for that change never used the words "data center."
Westlake's position is that the 506-foot distance from the building line to the nearest Keller backyards exceeds its 150-foot minimum setback requirement, and that the site plan exceeded the town's standards in several categories rather than merely meeting them. Those are two different readings of the same ordinance, and the October 23 hearing is where a judge will weigh them. When Judge Fitzpatrick dissolved the restraining order on September 25, she did so over frustration with the volume of last-minute filings, not over the merits of either argument. Bjorn told reporters after that hearing, "We are still in the fight."
The Same Distance Reads Two Different Ways
One number in this dispute changes meaning depending on which town you're standing in. Westlake has said the project sits more than 1,200 yards from the nearest home inside Westlake's own limits. Multiple outlets, including the Fort Worth Report, have reported the site is about 500 feet from the nearest backyards in Keller's Marshall Ridge. Both figures are accurate. The distance to a Westlake home is roughly seven times longer than the distance to a Keller home, because the subdivision built closest to the fence line happens to sit across a jurisdiction line where a different council made a different zoning decision nine years apart from Westlake's.
That gap is the whole mechanism. A town can measure its own compliance honestly and still leave a much shorter distance to whoever lives across its border, because the ordinance it's measuring against is its own, not its neighbor's.
What This Means If You're Comparing Suburbs Along a Town Line
Westlake's appeal to relocating buyers rests partly on the corporate names anchored there. A developer representative told a Westlake planning meeting the Circle T project's design took a cue from the presence of Charles Schwab and Deloitte headquarters nearby. That corporate proximity is part of what draws executive relocations to this stretch of the Metroplex in the first place, and it sits a few miles from a legal fight over what else gets built inside the same town limits.
The practical lesson isn't about this one parcel. Westlake, Keller, Southlake, Trophy Club and Colleyville all share boundary lines with each other, and a subdivision's own city zoning map only tells you what your city controls. It says nothing about what sits zoned across the fence in the next town over, or how long that classification has been sitting there waiting on a use. Before writing an offer on a home near any of these borders, it's worth pulling the zoning map for the adjoining jurisdiction, not just your own, and asking how long the adjacent parcel has carried its current classification. A property zoned commercial for three decades with nothing built on it yet isn't necessarily quiet. It's undeveloped.
FAQ
Does the Circle T dispute affect zoning inside Westlake generally? No. The case concerns a specific 88-acre parcel and the process by which its site plan was approved. It does not reopen zoning elsewhere in the town.
Is the lawsuit likely to stop the data center from being built? That's genuinely unresolved. The October 23 hearing addresses whether the site plan complied with notice and setback requirements, not whether the underlying commercial and industrial zoning itself was proper.
Should this change how I think about buying near a DFW town line? It's a reason to check the zoning history of adjacent parcels across a jurisdiction boundary before you're under contract, the same way you'd check anything else that could change a property's surroundings over time.
If you're weighing a move near the Westlake-Keller line, or comparing any of the affluent suburbs that share a border in this part of the Metroplex, The Pistana Group can walk you through what's actually zoned on the other side of the fence before you write an offer.
