Sarasota County, FL Commissioners Direct Staff to Draft 12-Month Hyperscale Data Center Freeze, No Carveout, After Informal XF Group Inquiry

Sarasota County, Florida commissioners voted 5-0 on July 8, 2026 — at a regular board meeting in Venice, following a presentation by assistant planning director Michele Norton — to direct county staff and the County Attorney’s office (Joshua Moye) to draft a 12-month freeze on the “acceptance, review or approval” of applications for hyperscale data centers (defined by Florida’s 2026 statute as facilities of 50+ megawatts). County Attorney Moye told the board the freeze itself was not yet in force: his office would draft the provisions and bring the commissioners “an update in August or September” — i.e., this was a directive vote, not an adopted ordinance, and no ordinance or resolution number had been assigned as of this writing (2026-08-28). Treat the “moratorium” framing common in press coverage as describing the board’s clear intent, not yet a codified, numbered legal instrument — distinct from 2026-07-29–desoto-county-fl-moratorium-approved-loophole-preserved, which was a fully adopted, numbered ordinance (2026-016) by the time of that reporting.

The trigger: per Norton’s staff report, the county “has recently been approached by a company expressing interest in property along Cattleman[s] Road for a data center” — an informal inquiry from XF Group, not a filed application. No parcel address, acreage, or megawatt figure was ever attached to this inquiry in any source reviewed; XF Group’s corporate identity could not be established (see xf-group).

No carveout, unlike DeSoto: no source — across nine local outlets covering the vote — describes any exemption for a pending or already-approved project. WSLR’s coverage makes the contrast explicit: “neighboring DeSoto County’s moratorium notably excludes an application for a major data center near Arcadia,” with no equivalent noted for Sarasota. Commissioner Joe Neunder’s stated position was categorical opposition (“For me, it’s a no. Not now, not ever”), not a negotiated exemption; Commissioner Mark Smith called the facilities “an environmental disaster” that “don’t belong in Sarasota County.” This is the structural difference from DeSoto this research pass set out to test: DeSoto’s board wrote a named-application carveout into its adopted ordinance because a $5-6B, three-application project with a Dallas-based developer was already in the rezoning pipeline; Sarasota’s board had nothing filed to carve out, and stated an intent toward a permanent prohibition rather than a temporary pause.

Distinct from North Port’s separate action: Sarasota County’s neighboring city of North Port — a separate incorporated jurisdiction — received a formal, NDA-protected data center application on 2026-07-20 (unrelated site, unrelated applicant so far as any source shows) and is moving toward an explicitly retroactive 18-month moratorium (commission vote 3-2 to schedule a first hearing for 2026-08-31) written to reach that pending application. North Port’s posture is the opposite of DeSoto’s carveout model and procedurally different from the county’s own freeze; see xf-group for the full disambiguation. Do not conflate “Sarasota” (the county, XF Group/Cattlemen Road, no pending application) with “North Port” (the city, a different unnamed applicant, a pending NDA’d application, retroactive moratorium design).

Confirmed still open, 2026-08-28: no ordinance number has been assigned. A separate cross-state synthesis pass (independently, same corpus, 2026-08-27 — synthesis-august-datacenter-moratorium-wave-2026-08-27) checked the county’s Aug 25 and Aug 26 meetings against national/local press and confirmed the same negative: no data-center vote occurred at either meeting. The “permanent ban” push Commissioners Neunder and Smith signaled for August has not yet produced a vote as of this writing. This is a genuinely open question, not a research gap — worth a follow-up pass once September arrives.

XF Group corporate-identity update, 2026-08-28: Sunbiz access is now unblocked (see xf-group) and a Florida LLC named “XF_GROUP L.L.C.” (Doc. No. L21000527672, active, Parrish FL address, renamed to this name 2026-01-07 from “XF Kempo”) was located as the leading candidate for the entity behind the Cattlemen Road inquiry — but no source confirms the link to Sarasota County’s staff report by name, address, or officer. Treat as unconfirmed, not resolved.

Florida county pattern, extended: by 2026-08-27, at least two more Florida jurisdictions had acted independently — Escambia County (permanent land-code prohibition, July) and Martin County (4-1 motion to place a moratorium on the next agenda, Aug 25-26) — and the City of Tallahassee’s commission (not the state legislature) rejected an explicit AI-data-center ban 3-2 on Aug 26. None of these adds evidence of coordination; each tracks its own local procedural facts, consistent with xf-group’s finding.

See xf-group for the corporate-identity research and the Sunbiz detail.