Hill County TX Adopts, Then Rescinds Under $100M Federal Suit, the First Texas County Data-Center Moratorium — the Case Now Shaping Bell County and Fort Worth's Cautious Posture

On May 12, 2026, the Hill County, Texas Commissioners Court unanimously adopted Order 2026-5154, a one-year moratorium on data center construction in unincorporated Hill County — the first such county-level moratorium in Texas. Confirmed directly from the court’s own minutes (Volume Z-64, Page 296): the order followed an Open Forum in which named residents (Jack Merrill, Tim and Lori Lyness, George Pitterger, Tim and Kim Weiland, Ted Weiland, and others) spoke in opposition to existing and proposed data centers in the county. The order was made on motion by Commissioner Jim Holcomb, seconded by Commissioner Larry Crumpton, “in order for the county to address the issue at hand, and assess the far-reaching impact to the local community.”

The developer, RCM Hill LLC — reported elsewhere to be pursuing a 1,235 MW project locally known as “Project Aquila,” after 16-plus months and nearly $1 million in pre-development costs (KERA/Texas Tribune, June 5, 2026) — sued within about three weeks in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division, Civil Action No. 6:26-CV-00340, naming Hill County and named commissioners Shane Brassell, Jim Holcomb, and Larry Crumpton. Reported causes of action: the moratorium was ultra vires (exceeding a Texas county’s creature-of-statute authority under Dillon’s Rule), an unconstitutional regulatory taking, and a §1983 due-process violation (K&L Gates, June 10, 2026).

The county’s own minutes trace the sequence precisely:

• May 29, 2026: the court tabled both an executive session “regarding pending or contemplated litigation” and a request to waive the moratorium — the first documented sign of the suit’s pressure.
• June 4, 2026: after a closed session “to consult with attorney on current litigation regarding… RCM Hill, LLC Plaintiff v. Hill County,” the court passed Order 2026-5202, rescinding the moratorium, on motion by Commissioner Martin Lake, seconded by Commissioner Scotty Hawkins — roughly three weeks after adoption. The same session adopted a “Hill County Data Center Development Review Checklist” (Order 2026-5204) as the moratorium’s replacement — a process-driven review rather than a categorical ban — and separately ordered an RFP for engineering firms to review “heavy industrial projects such as wind, solar, data centers, electrical power generation or battery energy storage systems.”
• June 9, 6/23, 6/30, 7/14, 7/21, 7/22, 2026: the litigation recurs in executive-session agenda notices at every subsequent meeting through late July, confirming the case remained active and unresolved through that window.
• July 28, 2026: the court approved a budget amendment moving $141,401 from contingencies to “Purchase Professional Services” specifically “to cover the $100,000 lawsuit payment for RCM Hill, LLC… and other professional fees” — the county’s own primary record of the settlement cost. Secondary reporting (KWTX, July 15, 2026) states RCM Hill dismissed the case with prejudice on July 9, 2026, consistent with the payment recorded three weeks later; that dismissal date and its exact procedural form (voluntary dismissal/nonsuit) were not independently confirmed against the federal docket in this pass — CourtListener’s shared daily quota (125/125) was exhausted mid-session by concurrent workers and could not be queried; this is an access blocker, not a verified absence.

Tom Green County, watching the outcome, dropped its own planned moratorium (per K&L Gates and the corpus’s prior research pass research-texas-datacenter-state-vs-municipal-levers-2026-08-27.md); this timeline entry’s own direct search for Tom Green’s independent record was blocked by a sustained general-web search-engine outage (Brave, DuckDuckGo, Google CSE, and Startpage all unresponsive across every query run in this session — a tooling-limited negative, not content exhaustion) and by the site’s own lack of a working search function; it is carried here as not independently re-verified in this pass, resting on the prior worker’s secondary sourcing.

Why this is the mechanism, not Abbott’s directives. Texas counties are Dillon’s Rule entities with no inherent zoning power; Hill County’s categorical ban was maximally exposed to exactly this challenge, while home-rule cities (Fort Worth, Dallas) retain broader zoning authority. This is very likely why Bell County is proceeding by amendment to its abatement policy rather than an outright repeal (2026-08-17–bell-county-tx-tables-data-center-abatement-repeal-blackburn-leverage-sept-8-vote), and why Fort Worth structured its own moratorium as a delayed-effect process with a February 16, 2027 effective date and mandatory written findings rather than an immediate ban (2026-08-13–fort-worth-louisville-consecutive-datacenter-moratorium-votes) — both postures read as litigation-hardening in light of Hill County’s outcome. The national moratorium-wave narrative this timeline has assembled county-by-county needs this case as a structural counterweight: the wave’s real constraint in at least one state is a chilling effect from a single $100,000-plus lawsuit settlement, not gubernatorial preemption.

Note on sourcing and figure types

• The $100,000 figure is verified from Hill County’s own July 28, 2026 budget-amendment order as a lawsuit payment, not merely “fees” — the order describes moving $141,401 total to cover both the $100,000 RCM Hill payment and unspecified “other professional fees” (likely the county’s own defense-counsel costs), so the two should not be conflated as a single number.
• Commissioners Court minutes for the litigation-relevant dates (5/29, 6/4, 6/9, 6/23, 6/30, 7/28) were retrieved as OCR text from scanned PDFs, not a native text layer — flagged per this corpus’s discipline as not verbatim/not human-verified; the case number (6:26-CV-00340), order numbers, dollar figures, and commissioner names above were each cross-checked across at least two independently OCR’d documents where the underlying fact repeated (the case caption/number appears identically across the 6/4, 6/9, 6/23, 6/30, and 7/28 minutes).
• RCM Hill LLC’s own damages demand (reported elsewhere at up to $100 million) was not independently verified against the federal complaint in this pass — CourtListener access was blocked by the shared daily rate limit. The $100,000 figure verified here is the county’s settlement/lawsuit-payment cost, not the developer’s original demand; these are different figures of different types and should not be merged in any draft.