The Marion County Board of County Commissioners has officially voted to schedule a public workshop to establish guidelines for evaluating and managing potential data centers, following comments from several local residents and a former mayor.
On Tuesday, the board voted to schedule a workshop to discuss guidelines and potential legislation surrounding the potential construction of data centers in Marion County in the future.
With the board’s approval, the data center workshop is now scheduled for Tuesday, September 1, at 2 p.m. inside the McPherson Governmental Campus Auditorium, located at 601 SE 25th Avenue in Ocala.
During Tuesday’s meeting of the board, former Ocala Mayor Kent Guinn was among the residents who offered public comment on the matter.
Guinn, who served as Mayor of Ocala for over a decade and spent 12 years as a city councilman representing District 4 prior to his mayorship, lauded commissioners for taking a proactive stance on the issue.
“This is a thank you for having the workshop that you’re going to have on Sept. 1 on the data center. I think it’s important for you to set up these guidelines…be it electricity, gas, water,” said Guinn.
The former mayor noted that establishing clear rules could potentially benefit the region and suggested that data centers could offer opportunities to replenish the county’s tax coffers, citing the upcoming homestead tax amendment on Florida’s ballot this November.
Several other residents shared comments, with many citing concerns that were based, in part, on the belief that the board was voting to approve the construction of a data center on Tuesday. Multiple board members clarified that the workshop is the county’s attempt to begin developing a framework that will help guide decisions if data centers are proposed in the future.
Commissioner Craig Curry cited the board’s recent attendance at a gathering of the National Organization of Counties, saying he and his fellow commissioners were trying to understand all they could about the issue in order to make informed decisions moving forward.
Curry said that during the gathering, representatives from counties across the country were able to provide extensive feedback about their experience with a host of different issues, including data centers.
“There was over 3,000 counties across all 50 states at that meeting. From agriculture, to data centers, there was a whole plethora of topics. But data centers…this is the hot topic across the country. Not just Marion County and not just Florida,” said Curry. He suggested that the information he and his fellow commissioners gleaned at the conference was invaluable.
“We were able to talk to commissioners in different counties and different states that have actually built centers, that are living with them. We got to talk to them about ‘how is the noise, what are you experiencing from water,” said Curry. “There’s a lot of misinformation, and there’s a lot of good information out there, and that’s what we’re trying to do with the workshop.”
Curry explained that the workshop was the county’s effort to approach this topic in the most appropriate way possible.
“It’s new, it’s scary to a lot of people, but we are assembling a lot of good information and then talking to people that have actually built these things and are dealing with them. So, there’s no decision that’s been made,” said Curry.
Chairman Carl Zalak III emphasized that a discussion to establish rules was important to ensuring the county wasn’t at the mercy of developers in the future.
“If we don’t put rules in place, if we don’t have a way to do that, then what we get left with, is what people in the past have had problems with, is when you get an application and you have no rules in place…it is way better to have the discussion of how those things are going to work,” said Zalak III.
When the topic of a potential “moratorium” on the building of data centers came up, although County Attorney Matthew “Guy” Minter confirmed that the county could do such a thing temporarily, he suggested that any citizen would still have the right and ability to submit an application that would be subjected to the same development review.
The push for a proactive workshop also comes in response to newly enacted state legislation, Senate Bill 484, which went into effect on July 1. Signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis in May 2026, SB 484 explicitly preserves local zoning authority over data centers while establishing statewide mandates for utility cost allocation and requiring water management districts to mandate reclaimed water for cooling purposes.
The county believes that having rules defined at the state level clarifies several variables normally subject to individual developer negotiations, making policy alignment essential before any developer submits a formal application for a data center in Marion County.
Leading technology corporations define a data center as a dedicated physical facility engineered to house critical digital applications, interconnected servers, and data storage networks.
Because these systems run continuously around the clock, they require extensive power grid access and advanced industrial cooling frameworks to prevent hardware from overheating.
According to documentation from the Congressional Research Service, data centers accounted for roughly 4.4% of all electricity consumed in the United States in 2023, a figure analysts project could reach up to 12% by 2028.
Large hyperscale facilities can consume as much energy as 100,000 households and draw millions of gallons of water daily, prompting active policy debates regarding grid reliability and local resource impacts.
Through the upcoming September 1 workshop, Marion County leaders aim to construct a comprehensive municipal game plan that aligns with state and federal guardrails before large-scale developers seek to break ground locally.
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