How Auburndale Approved a Data Center in Polk County Without Ever Saying It Out Loud

Two of the four planned buildings at 810 Pace Road in Auburndale were completed in 2025, and a data center is going into them. So, exactly how in the world does something this big get approved without anyone ever saying the words “data center” in the public record?

The Citrus Tea News followed the land, zoning, power, water, planning meetings, commission minutes, transcripts and permits. Everything lined up and pointed in that direction, but it wasn’t quite enough to publish.

That is, until today.

In chess, the opening is called development. You bring your pieces out one at a time, none of them threatening anything, until the board is set.

On Nov. 4, the Auburndale Technology Center announced itself as a data center.

Check.

Polk County covers about 2,300 square miles and 17 municipalities, and the Pace Road corridor and an MOU signed back in 2019 connect three of them on this project, with land just south of I-4 touching parts of Auburndale, Lakeland and Polk County.

Unless you knew to look in all the places at once, it would be difficult to recognize what was developing as every piece of infrastructure was put in place or approved before a move was made or anyone actually named it what it is. In fact, no one in Auburndale, until now, ever used the words “data center” on public record when talking about this development project.

Every bit of it was done by the book, without breaking any rules.

Here’s how it happened.

The land sits in Auburndale. The water permits went to the Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD). Polk County approved the power. Legislation was signed. Water and wastewater improvements were made. Tampa Electric substations added, Duke transmission lines laid, FDOT road improvements in the works, and more.

Every single one of these projects runs right through the corridor where the new data center will operate.

The answers were right there, each one hiding in plain, broken, jurisdictional sight.

Much of the project is still being built and developed for occupancy, but with a new building plan permit change submitted Nov. 4 and the announcement of the Auburndale Technology Center, we have enough to lay out the timeline and many of the details, as we discovered them.

For months, all eyes have been trained on the data centers we did know about: Stonebridge in Fort Meade, and Project Swan in Lakeland. The public outcry has been far from silent. The mayor and one Fort Meade commissioner are facing a second round of recall efforts, and multiple lawsuits have been filed.

After public comment and unanswered questions about the real impact on local residents, animals and the environment, Lakeland approved a moratorium to stop the process for up to 12 months, with a caveat that it could return to the conversation sooner if needed.

The project’s website describes it as a data storage and computing facility at 810 Pace Road.

But Wait, There’s More…

In June 2026, Auburndale updated its land use codes to include more general terms for industrial and innovation and technology, a change that Auburndale Community Development Director Julie Womble said by phone in September could allow a data center tenant. Womble also confirmed no data center tenants had applied for a permit or tenancy at that time.

In addition to the replat, Intersect Orlando II LLC purchased five adjacent residential parcels on Bryan Lane for $3,550,000, on deeds recorded May 1.

A 1967 house valued at $286,763 on the tax roll sold for $1.1 million. So did a vacant lot. The sellers were longtime residents of unincorporated Polk County, outside Auburndale city limits and just outside the overlay.

The Land

The Central Florida Development Council (CFDC) began working closely with Auburndale and Lakeland on a large project they called the Central Florida Innovation District, a joint corridor approved in a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Lakeland, Auburndale and Polk County in 2019.

After three years of hearings on semi-truck traffic, Auburndale approved a warehouse park on Pace Road, near Florida Poly and the new SunTrax station.

The Planning Commission recommended denial of the park, 3-2, in October 2023, meaning approval at the City Commission would require a supermajority.

That hearing wasn’t silent on the power issue. Kevin Quinn, vice president of development and construction for Lincoln Property Company, told the Planning Commission that prospective tenants included an artificial intelligence (AI) energy reliability company that wanted zero impact on the grid and was working on integrating AI into it.

The board recommended denial anyway.

The objections raised were not about the power, it was over the buildings. Lindsey Zimmerman of the CFDC and Maggie Mariucci, assistant vice president of university relations at Florida Polytechnic University, both objected to the design of the warehouse and cross-dock.

Lincoln updated the plans based on input at that meeting, skipped a second trip to the Planning Commission for its recommendation, and went straight to the Auburndale City Commission for approval.

On Dec. 18, 2023, the City Commission approved the land use change and Industrial Planned Unit Development zoning unanimously. Mayor Dorothea Taylor Bogert called for public comment on each ordinance. No one from the public spoke on either item.

The minutes and transcript of that meeting contain no mention of a substation, a switchyard, generators, a data center or information sciences.

The Gambit

In 2023, the city approved Exhibit B to Ordinance 1762, with two use schedules:

Buildings 1 and 2, on the west side of the property, could be used for research and development, light manufacturing, health technology, industrial mixed use, financial institutions or information sciences.

Buildings 3 and 4, on the east side of the property, were limited to e-commerce and logistics, distribution, industrial mixed use, research and development, health technology, office space and vocational institutions. Information sciences was not among them.

In 2024, Knight PC Holdings conveyed the land to a shell company called Pace Road Owner LLC, a Lincoln Property Company entity, and construction began on Buildings 3 and 4.

The leasing brochure marketed Building 3 at 820 Pace Road and Building 4 at 810 Pace Road. A record survey sealed March 2 of this year, after both were finished, is titled Pace Road Industrial Buildings 3 and 4 and puts them at 225,570 and 270,866 square feet for warehouse and distribution.

Every document The Citrus Tea News reviewed called them Buildings 3 and 4, and they are the only structures built.

With two built structures classified on property records as a distribution warehouse (Buildings 3 and 4), Hillwood, a Dallas developer, bought the 75-acre property from Lincoln Property Company for $95 million in December 2025, under a shell company called Pace Road DC Development.

It would be easy to assume the “DC” in the shell company name stands for Data Center, but a good theory still isn’t a fact.

This distinction leads directly to the setup, with one game piece sitting in front of the other.

The Switch

The use schedules moved with the numbers, and then, on June 22, 2026, the building numbers changed, and so did the use designations, one bit by little bit.

A civil site plan attached to the application for an Environmental Resource Permit from SWFWMD included a note printed twice on the document: “Prior approved site plan building numbers have changed.” It now labeled the standing structures as Existing Building 1 and Existing Building 2.

The two unbuilt structures on the west side are now Buildings 3 and 4.

The permit application the developer filed with the city Nov. 4 describes interior tenant development of the existing building shell at 810 Pace Road, with operations spaces, office areas, shipping and receiving areas, and interior and exterior mechanical and electrical infrastructure. It does not use the words data center. Neither did the hearings, the minutes, the zoning, or the three power approvals issued this year.

The Water

The company’s website says the facility will use about 4,665 gallons of water a day, less than what the previous owner allocated for the planned warehouse use. It puts a comparable warehouse at roughly 10,000 gallons a day and a typical golf course at about 100,000. The cooling system is closed loop, meaning the same water circulates through a sealed system and is reused rather than replaced. It also states that a water conservation plan is in place and will comply with Florida’s 2026 statutory framework.

The Power

Lincoln Property Company, the original developer on the project, advertised a Central Florida Data Center Campus with up to 350 MW (megawatts) of power, explicitly designed for hyperscalers, on a webpage published four days before the Auburndale Commissioners read the 2023 ordinances, and 32 days before the Auburndale City Commission ever officially approved the land that December.

The Citrus Tea News captured the screenshot (below) on Aug. 5 with the live listing of the data center campus on the company’s website.

None of the marketing materials identified an exact location. Upon further inspection, however, the image URL for the building photo was labeled Pace-Road. Nowhere else on the page was a city or an address attached to the campus.

The live page on Lincoln’s website was last modified on Oct. 9 featuring four projects, none of which are in Florida.

Application BC-26-0177, filed Nov. 4 and listed as under plan review, is the first one to describe a tenant building out the space, but it does not name the tenant.

On the updated 2026 plan, Buildings 1 and 2 may be used for e-commerce and logistics, distribution, industrial mixed use, research and development, light manufacturing, health technology, office space, vocational institutions, information services, technology and information sciences.

Four of those uses were absent from the 2023 schedule for the original two structures, includng light manufacturing, information services, technology and information sciences.

The Nov. 4 permit application is for 810 Pace Road. On the plan the city approved in 2023, that was Building 4, where information sciences was not an allowed use. On the plan filed in June, it is Building 1, and now it is an allowed use.

Auburndale’s code lets the Planning Commission or its duly authorized agent approve minor changes to an approved plan, and treats anything that does not require a formal amendment as “administrative.” That means a use can be added to a binding site plan by staff, with no notice and no public hearing.

No published records show it going before the Planning Commission, and Auburndale has no published Planning Commission minutes on its document-hosting site for 2026.

Plans sealed in May 2024 by Adkinson Engineering put electrical service at each building at around 2.5 megawatts, a small fraction of the figure ATC will need.

In fact, the developer’s energy need is double what Lincoln originally advertised for the entire campus. In its first phase, the ATC website says the facility will use 350 megawatts, with 700 megawatts at full development.

ATC describes the facility as modestly scaled and about a tenth the size of a hyperscale data center and says the project will pay all costs to generate and deliver power, language that contemplates new generation being built and not only new lines.

Florida law sets the threshold at which a customer becomes a large load customer at 50 megawatts. At full development, the Auburndale data center will be 14 times that.

In comparison, the Osprey Energy Center, the Duke Energy gas plant on West Derby Avenue in Auburndale, is rated at 540 megawatts nominal under its state siting permit.

The Proof

And then there was the moment when a very good theory became a very real fact. The proof sat on a single line, moving from number 477 on the list of some 650 projects to 48th place on FERC page 216, with nearly $4 million already spent. Tampa Electric’s own books call the Pace Road work a data center.

Tampa Electric spokeswoman Cherie Jacobs told The Citrus Tea News in September that the Pace Road project is a 20-megawatt battery storage facility, and that the company is no longer planning to expand its Pace Road substation.

Twelve days later, the owner of 810 Pace Road granted Tampa Electric a perpetual easement to build a substation and switchyard on the property. The easement says the facilities are “associated with a substation and switchyard to be constructed by Company.” It lists transformers, breakers, switchgear, a control house, battery storage and transmission lines.

The company said it was no longer expanding its substation on Pace Road. This is not that substation. Its a second one, and Tampa Electric is the one building it.

Duke Energy has already built the transmission lines. A 230 kV line runs out of a new substation at the Osprey Energy Center on Derby Road, north up the Polk Parkway corridor through the middle of the Innovation District to I-4, on its way to Kathleen. Another goes to Haines City.

Duke took the right of way by eminent domain. Part of the land it condemned was acreage held by the University of South Florida Board of Trustees for Florida Polytechnic. The judgment was recorded 19 days before the City Commission approved the warehouse park in 2023, and the line went into service last summer.

On May 7, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 484 into law at Florida Polytechnic University.

Part of SB 484 requires every utility in Florida to file a tariff for customers drawing more than 50 megawatts at a single location, and to show those customers cover their own cost of service without shifting it to everyone else.

Tampa Electric filed its tariff a day before the deadline and six days before the easement was signed. It is still pending.

And that is how a city gets a data center without ever saying it out loud.

Nothing in the record was hidden. Every approval was filed, stamped and posted where the law says it should be. The land use went to the City Commission. The substation went to county staff. The stormwater went to the water district. The transmission went to a judge. The rates went to Tallahassee. Each was a small decision, made correctly, in its own venue.

No single public entity touched every piece. The corridor runs across three local governments, two utilities and a state agency, each handling its own small corner of the board.

In August, the city said no tenant under consideration was a data center. In September, it confirmed the use category includes them. Tampa Electric said it was not expanding its substation, and it is now building a second one at the site.

The land is zoned. The buildings are up. The water permits are in place. The power is being constructed.

This leaves just one question on the table:

Why has a facility planned to draw up to 700 megawatts on Pace Road never come before a public meeting?

Because there hasn’t been one.

Checkmate.

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Sources: “Lakeland Commission Passes Data Center Moratorium In 4-3 Vote,” The Citrus Tea News, thecitrustea.com, August 3, 2026; Julie Womble, community development director, City of Auburndale, telephone interview, September 2026; Tampa Electric Company, written statements to The Citrus Tea News, September 4 and September 24, 2026; Lincoln Property Company, written statement to The Citrus Tea News, September 16, 2026; “Commercial Building Permit Application BC-26-0177, 810 Pace Road,” City of Auburndale, filed November 4, 2026; “Building Permits BC-26-0096 and BC-26-0097, 810 Pace Road,” City of Auburndale, July 16, 2026; “Exclusive Permanent Easement, Instrument 2026248843,” Polk County Clerk of the Circuit Court, polkcountyclerk.net, recorded October 14, 2026; “Special Warranty Deed, Instrument 2026004433,” Polk County Clerk of the Circuit Court, polkcountyclerk.net, January 8, 2026; “Warranty Deed, OR 13335/00867,” Polk County Clerk of the Circuit Court, polkcountyclerk.net, November 12, 2024; “Ordinance No. 1762 and Exhibit B, Pace Road Development Conceptual Site Plan CP-27,” City of Auburndale and Langan Engineering and Environmental Services, sealed October 11, 2023; “Pace Road Development, Civil Site Plan CS-102,” Salas O’Brien, sealed June 22, 2026; “Map of Record Survey, Paving and Drainage, Pace Road Industrial Buildings 3 and 4,” Michael J. Lewis, PSM, sealed March 2, 2026; “Ordinance No. 1770,” City of Auburndale, auburndalefl.com, May 20, 2024; “City Commission Minutes, May 20, 2024,” City of Auburndale, auburndalefl.com; “Planning Commission Minutes, October 3, 2023,” City of Auburndale; “City Commission Minutes, December 18, 2023,” City of Auburndale, auburndalefl.com; “Record LDNON-2026-53, Pace Substation Expansion,” Polk County Land Development Division, polkfl.gov; “Record LDDRC-2026-134, Pace Substation Transmission Laydown Yard,” Polk County Land Development Division, obtained through public records request, July 9, 2026; “Environmental Resource Permit 43047793, application 937353,” Southwest Florida Water Management District, watermatters.org, August 21, 2026; “Site Development Plans for Pace Road, Phase 1,” Adkinson Engineering, sealed May 21 and 22, 2024; “Data Centers,” Lincoln Property Company, lpc.com, page captured by The Citrus Tea News August 5, 2026; “Auburndale Technology Center,” auburndaletechnologycenter.com, undated; Tampa Electric Company Annual Report to the Florida Public Service Commission, FERC Form 1 page 216, Construction Work in Progress (Account 107), fiscal years 2024 and 2025, floridapsc.com; “Petition for Approval of Large Load Customer Tariffs, Docket No. 20260146-EI,” Tampa Electric Company, floridapsc.com, September 30, 2026; “Osprey to Kathleen Transmission Line,” Duke Energy, duke-energy.com; Duke Energy Florida v. City of Lakeland et al., Stipulated Final Judgment, Case No. 2022-CA-003879, OR Book 12921, Page 2225, recorded November 29, 2023; Mitch Perry, “Florida Public Service Commission rejects Duke Energy’s data center plan,” Florida Phoenix, November 3, 2026; “Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Law to Protect Floridians from Subsidizing Data Centers,” Executive Office of the Governor, flgov.com, May 7, 2026; “Osprey Energy Center, certification PA 00-41,” Florida Department of Environmental Protection, floridadep.gov; Polk County Property Appraiser, parcel 25-27-17-000000-032000, polkflpa.gov; Chapter 2026-65, Laws of Florida, CS/CS/SB 484, flsenate.gov; Section 366.043, Florida Statutes, flsenate.gov; Section 163.326, Florida Statutes, flsenate.gov; Section 163.3208, Florida Statutes, flsenate.gov; Florida Division of Corporations, sunbiz.org.