Overview

The Cloudburst campus straddles the Hays–Guadalupe county line at the southwest corner of Frances Harris Lane and Center Point Road. It is master-planned for up to 1.2 GW of AI/HPC capacity, paired with an on-site natural-gas power plant supplied through an Energy Transfer pipeline contract. Water service is sought from the Crystal Clear Special Utility District.

Across both counties the assemblage now totals roughly 829 acres over 22 parcels — 16 in Guadalupe County and 6 in Hays County. Guadalupe County commissioners approved a tiered tax-abatement and development agreement on a 3–2 vote in April 2026.

Documents Compared

The water figure that wasn't presented

The first slide is the "Water Supply and Demand" presentation CloudBurst gave to the Guadalupe County Commissioners Court. The second is the same chart rebuilt with the power-generation water demand drawn from CloudBurst's own FOIA disclosure — about 3.16 million gallons a day, or roughly 1.15 billion gallons a year. The public slide leaves that bar off entirely.

Presented to the publicCloudBurst — Commissioners Court slideCounts only the air-cooled campus, residential, fire and cooling. No power-generation bar.

Rebuilt with power generationActual demand — FOIA disclosure addedAdds the 1,154,130,000 gal/yr power-generation bar reconstructed from the FOIA disclosure.

1.17 BGY

Total site demand

3.16 MGD

Daily peak (power gen)

3.75×

Power gen vs. all residential

132×

Power gen vs. the campus

FOIA Disclosure Page 77Crystal Clear SUD LUE Calculator — CloudBurst Data Center

Crystal Clear SUD Utility Profile — for contextPage 6 of CCSUD’s published drought-contingency plan. Compare CloudBurst’s projected 1,154,130,000 gallons per year against the District’s entire historical retail water use (5-year average roughly 545 million gallons/year).

FOIA Disclosure

Putting 1.2 gigawatts in context

A gigawatt is an abstraction until you set it next to the places people actually live. At full build-out the Cloudburst campus is designed to draw about 1,200 MW — the kind of load normally associated with a mid-sized city, concentrated on a single site at the Hays–Guadalupe county line.

What's in the cooling loop: 1.44 million gallons of propylene glycol

CloudBurst's buildings are air-cooled, but each is filled once with a closed-loop cooling solution — water mixed with up to 20% propylene glycol. Per CloudBurst's own slide, that is about 600,000 gallons per building, scaling to 7.2 million gallons of cooling solution across the full campus, of which up to 1.44 million gallons is propylene glycol.

From the presentationCloudBurst — Closed-Loop Water Cooling System slideCommissioners Court presentation. Marked “Confidential – Draft.”

The tax break

On April 21, 2026, the Guadalupe County Commissioners Court approved a tax-abatement and development agreement with CloudBurst Texas, LLC on a 3–2 vote — reversing a 3–2 denial two months earlier. The agreement abates a share of the county property taxes on each data-center building for ten years.

Share of county property taxes abated each year, per building (Agreement §2.3). Each of the planned buildings runs its own 10-year clock from its completion date.

In exchange, CloudBurst commits to a minimum investment of $500 million (at least $125 million per building) and to creating, on average, just 30 full-time jobs per building by the fifth year — with an average annual payroll of $3 million per building (§1.4, §3.1). Local hiring is “best efforts,” not required. The abatement covers county taxes only; school-district (Navarro ISD) taxes are not abated.

The fight to keep it secret

The 135-page FOIA release on this page didn't come out voluntarily. After a concerned citizen filed a Public Information Act request with Crystal Clear SUD on September 4, 2025, CloudBurst's attorneys (Seyfarth Shaw, LLP) sent the Texas Attorney General a five-page letter on October 7, 2025 urging that the records be withheld — on four overlapping grounds:

1. Trade secret — §552.110(b)Argued the records reveal confidential development methodology, project timelines, design and engineering specifications, and CloudBurst's "competitive position."
2. Commercial / competitive harm — §552.110(a) and §552.104Argued release would cause "substantial competitive harm" and tip off "bidders and competitors" in an ongoing competitive situation.
3. Computer-network security — §552.139Argued the documents identify technical details and vulnerabilities of CloudBurst's network and information systems.
4. Homeland Security / critical infrastructure — §552.101 with Texas Gov't Code Ch. 418 (§§418.176–418.182)Argued the records, if released, could enable “an act of terrorism or hostile act by a foreign adversary of the United States” against CloudBurst as critical infrastructure.

Source documents

Primary-source records are linked below. They open in a new tab.

Overview

Palomino Alpha is a proposed 360 MW data-center campus on roughly 942 acres just south of the unincorporated community of Zorn, hugging State Highway 123 and wrapping around the LCRA Transmission Services "Zorn Site" substation — a power-readiness factor cited in the project's own description.

The Reinvestment Zone #1 assemblage spans 20 parcels. Four of them — 186.4 acres in the northeast corner — are held by members of the Kutscher family, including Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher.

What the public was told vs. what the FOIA emails say.

Palomino Alpha representatives have publicly described the February 24, 2026 First Amendment to the Development Agreement as providing a “buffer” around the proposed data center.

The FOIA-obtained emails between the developer and Judge Kutscher describe the same additional acreage differently. From an October 28, 2025 draft sent by the developer’s representative:

“The proposed expansion of the development area under the Guadalupe County Development Agreement is directly related to the planned increase in project capacity from approximately 360 megawatts to over one gigawatt … positioning Guadalupe County as a key participant in one of the largest data center infrastructure projects in Texas.”

Tom Dubel email to Judge Kutscher, October 28, 2025 (pages 26–27 of FOIA production) — drafting the “proposed expansion” language for Commissioner Engelke. Page 27 contains the ERCOT-as-source-of-delay framing that became the public justification for the February 2026 amendment. View full PDF

— Tom Dubel, Cirrus Advisors (representing Palomino Alpha), email to Judge Kutscher, October 28, 2025.

The tax break

Watch — Commissioners Court meeting

2:40:49Palomino Alpha Tax Abatement agenda item begins

2:46:30Court reconvenes from Executive Session and approves the Tax Abatement Agreement

Important Note A copy of the Tax Abatement Agreement was not included with the Agenda for the December 17, 2024 Guadalupe County Commissioners Court meeting — meaning the public had no way to review the agreement before it was approved.

Dec. 17, 2024 Guadalupe County Commissioners Court agenda — no Tax Abatement Agreement document attached to the Palomino Alpha item.

The hearing where the Palomino Alpha Tax Abatement Agreement was discussed. Source: Guadalupe County — Granicus clip 994.

The original Tax Abatement Agreement between Guadalupe County and Palomino Alpha was signed on December 17, 2024. The First Amendment, also effective February 24, 2026, doesn’t change the financial terms — it extends the construction timeline: start by Dec 31, 2027 (was Dec 31, 2026); first phase complete by Dec 31, 2029 (was Dec 31, 2027); all phases complete by Dec 31, 2034 (was Dec 31, 2032). All other terms of the original abatement carry through.

Those underlying terms are the same architecture as the Cloudburst deal:

Share of county property taxes abated each year, per building (Original Agreement §IV.C). Each building runs its own 10-year clock from its certificate of occupancy.

In exchange, Palomino commits to a minimum investment of $400 million ($125 million per phase) and a minimum of 50 full-time-equivalent jobs across the entire campus by one year after all phases are completed (Original Agreement §V.C). The applicant's own narrative in Attachment 3 forecasts 75 jobs at full build-out with a total payroll of about $4.5 million — meaning the per-job public investment in this deal compares unfavorably to most economic-development benchmarks.

And it’s likely even larger than that. The numbers above are calculated against the project as the agreement describes it — a multi-phased 480 MW data-center campus, as set out on page 27 of the First Amendment (Attachment 1 — Section III Facility Description). The abated value, in other words, was sized to that footprint.

FOIA-released communications between the developer and Judge Kutscher describe a different plan: an expansion in capacity from approximately 360 MW to over 1 GW. Because the abatement attaches to the actual taxable value of the improvements and equipment as built — and because Section 3.08 of the amended Development Agreement specifically allows on-site generation and ancillary infrastructure to be expanded “without limitation” — a 1 GW+ build-out would carry materially more taxable value through the same abatement schedule, and therefore a materially larger tax break, than the ~$18 M figure shown above.

Public Disclosure and Ethics Questions

Texas government codes spell out how a county official with land in a project is expected to disclose, step back, and keep public business on the public record. A Public Information Act request has produced a partial picture of how the Palomino Alpha project paper trail actually looked.

What the codes generally require

1. Land in the project — file a written disclosure and step back from the deliberation and the vote.Texas Local Government Code Chapter 171 directs an official who, or whose spouse, parent or child, owns real property in a matter to file an affidavit with the County Clerk before action, and then to “abstain from further participation in the matter.”
2. County decisions on contracts happen in open session.The Texas Open Meetings Act (Government Code Chapter 551) requires that final action on contracts, real-estate matters, and tax abatements occur in public, and prohibits using a series of one-on-one briefings (a “walking quorum”) to do the deliberation privately.
3. County business conducted on personal email is still public business.Under the Texas Public Information Act (Government Code Chapter 552), an official’s county-business emails are public records even when they are sent to or from a private account.
4. Annual personal financial disclosure.Local Government Code Chapter 159 requires county officials in counties of 125,000+ population to file an annual Personal Financial Statement with the County Clerk, listing real-property interests held by the official and his or her spouse.

On the public record, the Kutscher family parcels (64243, 149858, 139579, 140259 — 186.39 acres adjacent to the LCRA “Zorn Site” substation) were inside Palomino Alpha Reinvestment Zone #1 from the day the Court designated it. They were inside the project on the day the Tax Abatement Agreement was signed. Judge Kyle Kutscher abstained from that vote. The minutes do not say why.

Genesis of the Palomino Alpha Project.

The earliest documented County contact tied to the Palomino Alpha footprint was a pre-development meeting in June 2024, held between the developer’s land representative (Yarrington Land, with Kimley Horn as its engineer of record) and Guadalupe County. The FOIA production does not identify who attended that June meeting on behalf of the County — the meeting is documented only by a later reference to it in an October 2024 email from Yarrington’s Robby Friddle to Commissioner Drew Engelke. Whether Judge Kutscher was in the room, briefed afterward, or not yet looped in, is not clear from the record we have.

By August 2024, however, the record is unambiguous: Judge Kutscher and Palomino Alpha’s tax-abatement consultant Tom Dubel of Cirrus Advisors were in direct contact through the Judge’s personal Yahoo account, and the four Kutscher-family parcels — Parcels 64243, 149858, 139579, 140259 (186.39 acres adjacent to the LCRA “Zorn Site” substation) — were already planned as the anchor properties of the project. When Dubel submitted the formal Palomino Alpha application to Judge Kutscher’s personal email on October 8, 2024, it arrived with a metes-and-bounds description of exactly those four Kutscher-family parcels attached.

It was Tom Dubel, CPA, a Principal at Cirrus Advisors — a state and local tax consulting firm whose published practice areas include “property tax abatements and incentives,” “data-driven state & local incentives negotiation,” and “credits & incentives compliance.” Cirrus describes itself as “a trusted business advisor providing state and local consulting services… to maximize public funding opportunities for investments, and enhance public-private partnerships in local communities.” The first person Palomino Alpha sent to talk to the County Judge directly was a tax-abatement specialist.

Three questions the record leaves open

1. Why were no documents made available to the public before the meeting?No copy of the proposed Tax Abatement Agreement was attached to the December 17, 2024 agenda. Members of the public showing up to comment had no way to learn, before the vote, where the project would sit, who was behind Palomino Alpha, how large it would be, or what the tax break was projected to be worth. How is a member of the public supposed to make an informed comment on terms they have not been allowed to see?
2. If this project was so good for the county, why no public discussion of why?The agenda item was followed by a closed-door Executive Session. The Court reconvened at 2:46:30 in the meeting recording and approved the agreement — with no substantive open-session discussion of how this deal would actually benefit Guadalupe County, what it would cost the County in foregone tax revenue, what it would mean for water, power or roads, or what was negotiated behind closed doors. A deal pitched as a generational economic win is normally explained in public, not voted on after a recess.
3. Why didn’t Judge Kutscher clearly state, on the record, that he was abstaining because his land and his family’s land were part of the project?An abstention with no stated reason appears in the minutes as a one-line non-vote. Stating the actual reason — direct land ownership inside the Reinvestment Zone — would have given the public the single most important piece of context for evaluating the deal they were watching being signed. The record does not show that explanation being given.

Connecting to Cloudburst — and to financing.

CloudBurst co-founder Cynthia Thompson told the same Commissioners Court that the abatement was required to secure CloudBurst’s investment-bank financing. That framing — a public tax break presented as a condition of private debt — is documented elsewhere on this site.

Palomino Alpha is a first-time data-center developer. Was the tax break a condition for the developer to secure funding?

None of this is an accusation.

The codes above set out the steps the law expects. The documents on this page are a sample of what the public record currently contains. The records that would let any citizen — or a county-government attorney — determine whether each step was taken in each instance are maintained at the County Clerk’s office and are available on Public Information Act request.

The behind-the-meter pivot — why Cloudburst’s success is Palomino Alpha’s success

To understand why Palomino Alpha’s February 24, 2026 amendment was structured the way it was, it helps to look at what was happening to every data-center developer in Texas at the same time.

By mid-2025, ERCOT’s large-load interconnection queue had grown nearly 300% in a single year, with over 233 GW of large-load requests on file. More than 70% of that load was from data centers. Substation transformer lead times pushed past three years; the full path from interconnection application to energized data center stretched to seven years on average for AI-class projects. [Utility Dive] [LandGate]

For any data-center developer betting on grid power, that was an existential timing problem. The industry-recognized work-around — the one being executed publicly, in this exact corridor, by Palomino Alpha’s nearest neighbor — is called behind-the-meter (BTM) natural-gas power generation: instead of waiting in the ERCOT queue, the data center builds its own on-site gas-fired power plant, fed directly by a natural-gas pipeline that already runs through the corridor.

February 10, 2025 — Cloudburst proves the model, in this corridor, at 1.2 GW scale.

Energy Transfer LP (NYSE: ET) and CloudBurst Data Centers publicly announce a long-term agreement under which Energy Transfer’s Oasis Pipeline, LP will supply up to 450,000 MMBtu per day of firm natural gas to CloudBurst’s data-center campus — enough to generate up to ~1.2 gigawatts of direct, “behind-the-meter” electric power for at least 10 years. Energy Transfer calls this its first commercial arrangement to supply natural gas directly to a data center. [BusinessWire]

In one announcement, the corridor next door to Palomino Alpha goes from theoretically capable of supporting a behind-the-meter 1.2 GW data center to contractually committed to doing exactly that. The 24-inch Energy Transfer pipeline corridor — the same one named in CloudBurst’s application to Guadalupe County — now has a published, signed, ten-year, multi-hundred-thousand-MMBtu-per-day data-center anchor.

In the same press release, Cloudburst’s Executive Chair stated the plan to bring more data centers onto the same pipeline network.

“We are very excited about our close relationship with Energy Transfer and feel extremely confident in their ability to provide redundancy through their vast pipeline network and storage capacity. In addition, we will work closely with Energy Transfer to identify additional potential data center sites, on or close to their strategic natural gas pipeline network, using our proprietary site selection software.”

— Cynthia Thompson, Executive Chair, CloudBurst Data Centers, Inc., February 10, 2025 [BusinessWire]

Read in February 2025, that paragraph reads like routine commercial puffery. Read against what actually happened next, it reads as a stated plan: Cloudburst and Energy Transfer publicly committed to identifying more data-center sites “on or close to” the same pipeline network — using Cloudburst’s own site-selection software. Palomino Alpha is the data-center site immediately adjacent to Cloudburst, on that same pipeline network, in the same Guadalupe County corridor. By February 24, 2026 the Court had amended Palomino’s Development Agreement to give it the express right to tap exactly that natural-gas infrastructure.

What changes for Palomino Alpha the day Cloudburst signs the gas deal

Three things, all of them documented in the public record:

1. Pipeline capacity is no longer a hypothetical.Cloudburst’s deal proves Energy Transfer can and will deliver multi-hundred-thousand MMBtu/day of firm gas to this corridor for behind-the-meter data-center power. Any second project pursuing the same model is no longer arguing that the gas could arrive — the precedent is signed and public.
2. The financing risk drops.Lenders to a behind-the-meter data-center project price the gas-supply risk into their cost of capital. Once Energy Transfer has done the deal next door, that risk is materially lower for the next project in the corridor. Cynthia Thompson told this same Commissioners Court that the abatement was required to secure CloudBurst’s investment-bank financing — her statement made the financing sensitivity to a single deal variable explicit. Adjacency moves the same variable for Palomino Alpha.
3. The regulatory template exists.Cloudburst’s commercial structure — long-term firm gas, behind-the-meter generation, pipeline anchor — becomes a usable template for the second project to draft against.

What the original Development Agreement actually said about power.

The original Palomino Alpha Development Agreement — signed by Guadalupe County and Palomino Alpha, LLC on April 15, 2025 — locked the project to a specific electricity-delivery path. From Section 3.06 of that original agreement:

“Electricity service shall be provided by the Lower Colorado River Authority wholesale, and Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative retail.”

Page 8 of the original Palomino Alpha Development Agreement (April 15, 2025) — Section 3.06 commits the project to LCRA wholesale + GVEC retail. View full PDF

“Shall be provided” is mandatory language — not a description of one option. In this corridor, “LCRA wholesale” functionally means through the LCRA “Zorn Site” substation: the only LCRA wholesale interconnection point a project on the Palomino property could realistically reach. Nothing in the original agreement permits on-site generation, behind-the-meter power, or any alternative power source.

In other words: as of April 15, 2025, Palomino Alpha was contractually committed to taking grid power through the same substation every other ERCOT-queued data-center project in the state was waiting on. That is the commitment the February 24, 2026 First Amendment had to unwind.

Then, in late 2025, Palomino does exactly that

Records produced under the Texas Public Information Act show that, in late October 2025, Palomino Alpha’s tax-abatement consultant identified ERCOT’s process as the source of project delay, and began drafting expansion language to be presented to a sitting Commissioner. The drafted message framed the planned resize from 360 MW to over 1 GW as necessary to develop the project to its full potential.

Within weeks, the same consultant circulated the exact text that would become Section 3.08 — Power Generation Facilities. The new section grants Palomino Alpha the right to design, install, operate, expand and replace on-site:

• Natural-gas-fired electric generation units — the same fuel source as Cloudburst’s behind-the-meter plant.
• Fuel supply lines and connections — the physical pathway to tap a natural-gas pipeline. The only natural-gas pipeline corridor named in either project’s public documents is Energy Transfer’s.
• On-site electric substations, switchyards, transformers — the equipment that lets a data center step gas-fired generation up to data-center voltages without going through ERCOT.
• Battery and energy-storage systems and any utility extensions or easements necessary — the supporting infrastructure that completes a behind-the-meter campus.

The proposed delivery method documented in the same records: bring the whole package — expanded reinvestment zone, amended development agreement, amended tax abatement — to the Commissioners Court in a single public hearing, preceded by a nonpublic briefing of one Commissioner. That is exactly the sequence the Court adopted on February 24, 2026.

On December 11, 2025 — three days after Tom Dubel’s confirmed one-on-one meeting with Commissioner Wolverton, and five days before the December 16, 2025 Executive Session where Dubel addressed the Court in full — Dubel emailed County Attorney Steven Tays asking that the tax-abatement timeline be pushed forward by one year, and attributed the change explicitly to ERCOT:

“I would like to request to move them all 1 Year forward as a result of the changes caused by the Ercot delay. I think it will wise to adjust now while we are doing all else, rather than later. Again, due to Ercot, they have essentially delayed us 1 year.”

Tom Dubel email to County Attorney Steven Tays, December 11, 2025 — the “due to Ercot, they have essentially delayed us 1 year” framing that became the County’s public justification for moving every milestone in the tax abatement schedule back one year. View full PDF

The December 11 email is the County’s paper trail for the timeline pushback that appears on the face of the First Amendment to the Tax Abatement Agreement adopted ten weeks later. The framing in Dubel’s own words — that ERCOT was the cause and that adjusting the schedule was a strategic choice to make “while we are doing all else” — sits behind the public-facing rationale that the amendment was simply a response to grid delays beyond Palomino’s control.

Section 3.08 is the legal mechanism that released Palomino from the grid-only commitment in Section 3.06.

The First Amendment did not modify or repeal Section 3.06. It added Section 3.08 alongside it, and inserted a conflict clause stating that “in the event of conflict, the contents of this First Amendment shall prevail.”

In legal effect: the original grid-only commitment still sits on the page, but Section 3.08 supersedes it. The Court’s February 24, 2026 vote is what gave Palomino the legal pathway to mirror Cloudburst’s behind-the-meter strategy on Cloudburst’s pipeline.

Why this matters for the Kutscher family

The Kutscher family land is under an option agreement with Palomino Alpha.

That means the Kutscher family is not just adjacent to the project. They are contractually positioned to convert their land into Palomino Alpha’s footprint if and when the project advances. Their financial outcome on the land is therefore directly tied to whether Palomino Alpha actually gets built — which is the same outcome the County Judge has been negotiating around from a personal email account since August 2024.

Every step that de-risks Palomino Alpha makes the Kutscher family option more valuable. The Cloudburst — Energy Transfer deal in February 2025 was the single largest such step in this corridor: it proved the behind-the-meter model commercially, on the exact pipeline Palomino would need to tap, at a scale (1.2 GW) close to the upsize Palomino was already privately planning. The February 24, 2026 amendment then gave Palomino the express legal right to use that model.

What the Engelke FOIA file then adds — in CloudBurst’s own words — is that this commercial precedent was itself contingent on the County approving CloudBurst’s tax abatement. On April 20, 2026, the day before the Commissioners Court vote on CloudBurst’s Development Agreement, CloudBurst’s Chief Operating Officer Alex Gerber sent Commissioner Engelke a point-by-point reply to a Hays County resident’s concerns. One of the resident’s questions was whether CloudBurst had actually placed orders for the turbines and fuel cells that the construction timeline required. Gerber’s answer, in writing, was a single sentence:

“Our power partner has secured the long lead time items contingent on the Tax abatement and financing.”

Alex Gerber (CloudBurst COO & CTO) email to Commissioner Drew Engelke, April 20, 2026 — the day before the Commissioners Court vote on CloudBurst’s Development Agreement. Page 4 of 5. The full email responds to a Hays County resident’s line-item concerns and was forwarded to the Court. View full PDF

The dependency chain that Gerber’s sentence makes explicit is the same chain the Commissioners Court was being asked to approve, in the same week, for two different projects:

• The County approves CloudBurst’s tax abatement & Development Agreement. That clears the financing contingency on CloudBurst’s long-lead-time power-generation equipment.
• CloudBurst’s power partner secures the turbines and fuel cells. The Energy Transfer / Oasis Pipeline gas-supply contract from February 2025 becomes deliverable to a real, committed campus.
• The corridor’s behind-the-meter natural gas model is no longer hypothetical. The same pipeline corridor that Palomino’s amended Section 3.08 authorizes Palomino to tap is now anchored by a contracted BTM plant.
• Palomino Alpha’s own BTM path is materially de-risked. Pipeline capacity, financing precedent, vendor ecosystem, and the regulatory template all sit on top of work CloudBurst has done.
• Palomino Alpha is more likely to get built — and Judge Kutscher to financially benefit, if CloudBurst is also approved. The option agreement’s value moves with Palomino’s probability of completion.

The clustering dynamic underlying steps three and four — data centers locating near established power, fiber, and regulatory infrastructure created by earlier projects — is well documented in peer-reviewed research. See Tommy Pan Fang & Shane Greenstein, “Where the Cloud Rests: The Economic Geography of Data Centers,” Strategy Science 10(4): 404–420 (2025), finding that data-center clusters form around existing network backbones and energy economics rather than labor pools (Rice University summary). The Ashburn, Virginia “Data Center Alley” is the canonical example: one project’s power and fiber footprint becomes the next project’s site-selection rationale.

Each step in that chain was visible to the Commissioners Court because Gerber’s email was sent to a sitting Commissioner. The line linking the tax abatement vote to the equipment contract was made explicit, in writing, in a document that became part of the Court’s record one day before the vote.

The chain, on the public record:

• June 2024: Yarrington Land, with Kimley Horn as its engineer of record, holds a pre-development meeting with Guadalupe County — five months before the reinvestment zone is voted on and two months before the Cirrus back-channel opens. The June meeting is documented in a later Oct. 23, 2024 email from Yarrington’s Robby Friddle to Commissioner Drew Engelke asking to move up a follow-up pre-dev meeting: “We (Yarrington Land) had an initial pre-dev meeting back in June with the county, but now that our engineering team (Kimley Horn) has a developed site plan and other applications in process, they/we feel like it’s a good time to have another pre-dev meeting.” The same October thread also shows Judge Kutscher personally giving Friddle Engelke’s phone number: “Mr. Kutscher gave me your number in order to see if there was any way we could get our county pre-development meeting moved up.” View Oct 23, 2024 email
• August 2024:Cirrus Advisors — a tax-abatement specialist — opens a back-channel with the County Judge whose family land is in the project footprint.
• December 2024:The reinvestment zone and original tax abatement are approved, with the Judge abstaining.
• February 2025:Cloudburst publicly de-risks behind-the-meter natural-gas power generation in this exact corridor.
• Late 2025:Palomino’s consultant attributes ERCOT delays as the project bottleneck and drafts the language that becomes Section 3.08, planning to brief one Commissioner privately first.
• February 2026:The Court approves the expansion, the amended Development Agreement (with Section 3.08), and the amended Tax Abatement — in a single public hearing.

None of the steps above prove a deal between the two companies. They prove something narrower and more important: that Palomino Alpha’s ability to scale to 1 GW+ depends on a commercial and regulatory pattern Cloudburst established in this corridor a year earlier — and that the County Judge, whose family land sits under option to Palomino Alpha, has been involved in the negotiation of every step of that pattern from his personal email account.

Common thread — the consulting engineer question.

Cloudburst’s consulting civil engineer of record is Zach Steele, PE, of Manhard Consulting. Steele has also worked as the consulting civil engineer of record for Matt Hainline and Robby Friddle of Yarrington Land on a separate 460-acre residential and mixed-use project called Palamino Ridge, located in the New Braunfels ETJ. Yarrington Land is the same land representative that appears on the Palomino Alpha side: Matt Hainline’s Austin address is the signatory address for Palomino Alpha, LLC in the executed Development Agreement.

Palamino Ridge — the December 12, 2024 pre-development thank-you.

The day after the Palamino Ridge pre-development meeting at the Guadalupe County Development Center in Seguin, Steele emailed the invite list to thank everyone for their time. Matt Hainline and Robby Friddle of Yarrington Land are on the recipient list, alongside George Gunnoe (a third Yarrington Land contact), Commissioner Drew Engelke, and nine Guadalupe County pre-development staff.

Zach Steele (Manhard Consulting) to Meagan Rochester and the Palamino Ridge pre-development invite list, December 12, 2024 — the day after the December 11, 2024 pre-development meeting. Matt Hainline (Matt@yarringtonland.com) and Robby Friddle (robby@yarringtonland.com) of Yarrington Land are on the recipient list. View full PDF

CloudBurst / Crystal Clear SUD — the July 18, 2025 corridor question.

Roughly seven months later, on July 18, 2025 at 8:15 AM, Steele emailed Raelynn Cruz of Crystal Clear Special Utility District as CloudBurst’s civil engineer of record, with Alex Gerber and Cynthia Thompson of CloudBurst copied. The email lays out three questions Steele wants CCSUD to answer. The third question is the one that matters here:

“3. Is there any process for cost sharing on the public improvements with other developments along the corridor?”

Zach Steele (Manhard Consulting, representing CloudBurst) to Raelynn Cruz (Crystal Clear SUD), July 18, 2025 at 8:15 AM. Alex Gerber (COO/CTO) and Cynthia Thompson (Chairperson) of CloudBurst are CC’d, along with three Manhard colleagues, Douglas Jelinek and Paula Price of Batir Architecture, Tyndall Overby of Evolve, and Stephanie Olson-Haseloff and Regina Franke of CCSUD. View full PDF

Set side by side, these two emails put the same person — Zach Steele of Manhard Consulting — on both sides of the Cloudburst / Palomino Alpha corridor: as the consulting engineer to Yarrington Land, whose principal Matt Hainline is the signatory for Palomino Alpha; and, seven months later, as the consulting engineer to CloudBurst, asking Crystal Clear SUD whether there is a formal mechanism to share the cost of public water improvements “with other developments along the corridor.”

The public record does not identify which other developments Steele had in mind. The record does not prove Steele is coordinating between the two data-center projects. What the record does show is that (a) the same consulting engineer sits inside two different developer teams doing entitlement work in the same water district, (b) that engineer has an active professional relationship with Palomino Alpha’s land representative on a separate project, and (c) that engineer, working for CloudBurst, has formally asked the water district about corridor cost-sharing.

Whether the “other developments along the corridor” that Steele was asking about include Palomino Alpha is a question the paper trail permits — and, we would suggest, invites — but does not yet answer.

The Buffer Zone Controversy

At the February 24, 2026 Commissioners Court meeting, several commissioners and Tom Dubel (Cirrus Advisors, representing Palomino Alpha) repeatedly described the additional acreage in the First Amendment as a "buffer" for noise and light pollution around the proposed data center.

A close reading of the First Amendment and of the original April 15, 2025 Development Agreement — the only documents that govern what the additional acreage is and isn’t obligated to do — finds no buffer language at all:

1. No buffer, noise, or light-pollution language.Neither the First Amendment nor the original Development Agreement contains a buffer designation, a decibel limit, hours-of-operation restriction, sound-attenuation requirement, lumen cap, shielded-fixture requirement, or any other nuisance protection for adjoining property. Section 3.08, the only substantive new section added by the Amendment, deals exclusively with the right to build on-site power generation — not with buffers.
2. No setback requirements.There are no setbacks specified in the Amendment, in Article III (Applicable Development Regulations) of the original agreement, or anywhere else in the agreement text. Section 3.02 goes further, expressly overriding the County’s land-development regulations to the extent they would conflict with the agreement: “All of County’s laws, ordinances, manuals, and administrative rules, including but not limited to all land development regulations … are hereby superseded and replaced to the extent that they conflict with the criteria in this Agreement or otherwise prohibit or limit development allowed by this Agreement.”
3. No cap on the project’s capacity or footprint.The 360 MW figure does not appear in either agreement. The only megawatt figure in any related document is the 200 MW minimum in the Tax Abatement Agreement — a floor, not a ceiling. Section 3.08 of the Amendment grants the right to “expand … one or more on-site electric power generation facilities” “without limitation” as to the categories of equipment, and Article V (Additional Land) allows the project footprint itself to grow further by addendum approved by the Commissioners Court.

In short: nothing in the Amendment legally obligates Palomino Alpha to use the additional acreage as a buffer for noise or light, to leave specific setbacks, or to cap its size or power demand at 360 MW. A future buffer, setback, or capacity cap would have to be added by a further amendment, a separately recorded restrictive covenant, or a board order. None of those appear on the record reviewed here.

The development agreement — and what the amendment added

Guadalupe County and Palomino Alpha, LLC signed the original Development Agreement on April 15, 2025. The First Amendment — executed effective February 24, 2026 — does two substantive things:

1. Re-states the property as 940 acresThe recitals were updated to describe the assemblage as “an approximately 940-acre tract located on the west side of State Highway 123,” aligned with the Reinvestment Zone expansion order adopted the same day.
2. Adds Article III, Section 3.08 — Power Generation FacilitiesGrants Palomino the right (but not the obligation) to design, construct, install, operate, expand and replace on-site electric generation and related energy infrastructure on the Property, including:
   • Natural-gas-fired electric generation units

   • Fuel supply lines and connections

   • Electric substations, switchyards and transformers

   • Battery and energy-storage systems

   • Control buildings, cooling systems and support structures

   • Any utility extensions or easements needed to serve them

   This brings Palomino into the same on-site-gas-plant posture Cloudburst already occupies.

Water Usage

Palomino Alpha is seeking water service from Crystal Clear Special Utility District (CCSUD). The public number the project has put on paper is a floor, not a ceiling: the developer’s own preliminary calculations, submitted to CCSUD, describe a minimum average demand of 0.5 million gallons per day (500,000 GPD), and Yarrington Land’s Robby Friddle told CCSUD in February 2025 that Palomino Alpha expected to eventually be asking for at least 1.5 million gallons per day (1.5 MGD). The applicant’s own engineer of record has acknowledged, in writing to CCSUD, that the actual end-user demand can scale to “very extreme” levels — a possibility the engineer said would “need to be discussed at that time.”

The FOIA record from CCSUD also shows that Judge Kyle Kutscher was directly involved in discussions with CCSUD and Palomino Alpha about the water feasibility study in the days the application was being submitted. Two emails in the CCSUD production make this explicit.

March 3, 2025 — Robby Friddle (Yarrington Land) to Raelynn Cruz (CCSUD Easement Coordinator):

“I wanted to update you on the status of our new feasibility application. Our engineering group at Kimley Horn is still going through the calculations for the LUE’s we’ll need and hopefully they can get this over this afternoon or in the morning. I know you have been in contact with Judge Kutscher over this, and have received our application fee that we dropped off on Friday. I just wanted to let you know that the application is on the way as soon as they can get the numbers finalized.”

March 4, 2025, 12:51 PM — Raelynn Cruz (CCSUD) to Matthew Jenkins (Kimley-Horn, Palomino Alpha’s civil engineer):

“Matthew, Thank you, Matthew. I had a call with Mr. Kutscher earlier and we did confirm the details. This study is for the same property, I am going to submit this study to coattail off the original memo, and once the revised memo is sent back, you will then confirm what memo you would like to choose in order to move forward with executing an WNSSA.”

Crystal Clear Special Utility District Public Information Act production — email chain, February 28 through March 4, 2025 — between Raelynn Cruz (CCSUD Easement Coordinator), Robby Friddle (Yarrington Land), Matt Hainline (Yarrington Land / Palomino Alpha, LLC signatory), Matthew Jenkins and Matt Lissak (Kimley-Horn, Palomino Alpha’s civil engineer), and Stephanie Olson-Haseloff (CCSUD). View full PDF

The paper trail does not disclose the substance of the phone communication between Judge Kutscher and CCSUD staff. What the emails establish, on their face, is that the phone communication took place and that both the water utility and Palomino Alpha’s land representative understood Kutscher to be part of the feasibility-study conversation.

The engineer’s own words: “very extreme water demands”

The public framing of Palomino Alpha’s water demand has, from the start, been keyed to a “minimum” figure. What Palomino Alpha’s own civil engineering firm told CCSUD, on the record, is that the actual eventual demand is open-ended and can scale substantially higher.

On October 16, 2024, Nicole Stevenson of M&S Engineering — the engineering firm CCSUD retains to review non-standard service applications — wrote to the Palomino Alpha team asking why the application appeared to be sized against a minimum requirement rather than a worst-case scenario. Her framing was direct:

“When we start these studies we will typically do them on a worst case scenario and it seems like the application was more geared towards a minimum requirement. We want to make sure any upgrades we propose in the study will suffice no matter the end user.”

Later that afternoon, CJ Ponton, P.E., of Kimley-Horn — Palomino Alpha’s own civil engineer of record — wrote back with an answer that, read against the “minimum” posture of the application, is significant on its own terms:

“It’s effectively impossible to do this based on a worst case scenario. End users can scale up to very extreme water demands and that needs to be discussed at that time. The common practice now with this use type is to steer towards a minimum use so they (end-users) can have a level of comfort that the development can be served with an air cooled system (i.e. low water demands that align with typical industrial) or make a decision to pursue a water cooled system which would scale up to a larger demand.”

Palomino Alpha Datacenter — Feasibility Study Service Application email chain, October 16 – November 12, 2024. Between Matt Lissak (Kimley-Horn), CJ Ponton (Kimley-Horn), Matthew Jenkins (Kimley-Horn), Nicole Stevenson (M&S Engineering, CCSUD’s reviewing engineer), Raelynn Cruz (CCSUD), and Stephanie Olson-Haseloff (CCSUD). View full PDF

What the two emails together establish, in plain language: the Palomino Alpha application to CCSUD was intentionally sized to a floor, not a ceiling. The end user — the tenant or tenants Palomino Alpha would ultimately host — can scale to demands the applicant’s own engineer characterizes as “very extreme.”

The “MINIMUM 0.5 MGD” footnote in Palomino Alpha’s own preliminary calcs

A year after the Ponton email, on November 13, 2025, Palomino Alpha’s engineering team submitted a Preliminary Water Demand Calculations sheet to CCSUD. The document lays out the LUE (Living Unit Equivalent) request for the four phases of the project through 2032 — 75 LUEs in 2029, then 225 LUEs each in 2030, 2031, and 2032, for a total of 750 LUEs. Immediately below the LUE table, the sheet includes a footnote in the developer’s own words:

“The LUE Quantity used above has been calculated based on a known ‘end-user’ requiring a MINIMUM average demand of 0.500 MGD. This LUE Quantity 3.5 people per LUE with an average daily demand of 200 gal/person/day. While this is a conservative approach, this is consistent with City of Austin Utilities Criteria Manual, Section 2.9.”

The word MINIMUM is capitalized in the original. The demand numbers rolled out further down the same sheet make the ceiling explicit: average daily demand of 525,000 gallons/day, peak daily demand of 1,391,250 gallons/day, and peak hour demand of 2,362,500 gallons/day. And these are the numbers built around a floor of 500,000 GPD — the floor the engineer said, thirteen months earlier, was “the common practice” because “end users can scale up to very extreme water demands.”

Palomino Alpha Datacenter — Preliminary Water Demand Calculations, submitted to CCSUD on November 13, 2025. The footnote directly under the LUE table states that the calculation is based on a known end-user requiring a MINIMUM average demand of 0.500 MGD. View full PDF

Taken together, the record from CCSUD’s own files shows three things about Palomino Alpha’s water demand as of late 2025. It was sized to a minimum, by the developer’s own admission in a document submitted to the public utility. The engineer of record acknowledged, in writing to that same utility, that the actual end-user demand could scale up to “very extreme” levels.

Source documents

Primary-source records are linked below. They open in a new tab.

Overview

This page reads from a Texas Public Information Act production responsive to a request for emails to and from Commissioner Drew Engelke concerning Palomino Alpha.

Read in sequence, it tells a single coherent story. By the time Palomino Alpha first appeared on a public Commissioners Court agenda, the project had already been negotiated, scheduled, and statutorily cleared through a parallel back-channel that included three of the five members of the Commissioners Court, the County’s own attorney, and the applicant’s tax-abatement consultant. The same procedural template was then offered, in writing, to CloudBurst.

June 2024 — the earliest documented County contact

The Cirrus Advisors back-channel documented below is not the first developer-side contact on the Palomino Alpha footprint. Yarrington Land — with Kimley Horn as its engineer of record — sat down with Guadalupe County staff for a pre-development meeting in June 2024, five months before the reinvestment zone came to a vote and two months before Tom Dubel of Cirrus first emailed Judge Kutscher’s personal Yahoo account.

The June meeting is documented in a later thread. On October 22, 2024, Yarrington’s Robby Friddle emailed Commissioner Drew Engelke asking for help moving up a follow-up pre-development meeting. Friddle’s note is unambiguous about who put him in touch with Engelke:

“Mr. Kutscher gave me your number in order to see if there was any way we could get our county pre-development meeting moved up from November 13th.”

When Engelke asked for more detail the following morning, Friddle replied at 12:01 PM CDT with the June reference:

“We (Yarrington Land) had an initial pre-dev meeting back in June with the county, but now that our engineering team (Kimley Horn) has a developed site plan and other applications in process, they/we feel like it’s a good time to have another pre-dev meeting so that more fruitful conversations can be had. We are just seeing if there is a way to get it moved up from 11/13.”

Two things move on this evidence. First, the earliest documented developer-side County contact on the Palomino Alpha footprint is now June 2024, not August 2024 — and it went through the County’s regular pre-development pipeline, not a Judge’s personal Yahoo. Second, by October 22, 2024, Judge Kutscher was personally giving the developer’s land representative Commissioner Engelke’s direct phone number in order to accelerate the applicant’s meeting schedule — six weeks before the reinvestment zone was approved with the Judge’s abstention on the record. View Oct 22–23, 2024 Friddle↔Engelke email thread

August to October 2024 — three commissioners, separately

The Combined Communications production already on this site established the first back-channel: Cirrus Advisors’ Tom Dubel began corresponding with Judge Kyle Kutscher’s personal Yahoo account on August 16, 2024, set up two private Microsoft Teams meetings later that month, and ultimately delivered the formal Palomino Alpha application on October 8, 2024 — together with a metes-and-bounds description of the four Kutscher family parcels.

This new production establishes a second back-channel running in parallel. On September 10, 2024, Dubel emailed Commissioner Drew Engelke for the first time. The opening line is the tell:

“Following up on the text I missed, what times work for you Thursday or Friday of this week?”

View Sept 10, 2024 email

The text-message channel between Cirrus and Engelke predates the email record. Engelke accepted a meeting invite the same day (“EXTERNAL Project Discussion”), and a private virtual meeting between Dubel, Palomino owner Todd Workman (FacilityCapEx), and Engelke followed on September 12, 2024. A second meeting (“Regroup with Commissioner Engelke”) was scheduled for September 19, 2024.

By October 15, 2024, Dubel was physically present in Guadalupe County for an in-person meeting with a third commissioner. His “Thank you” email that night reads:

“Thanks very much for your time today, I know you had a busy agenda and I appreciate the opportunity to talk with the group. Per Commissioner Carpenter, he will be out point of contact for our next submission. We plan on submitting a package to you no later than Monday in order to keep the process moving forward… I enjoyed my day in Guadalupe County.”

View Oct 15, 2024 email

Commissioner Michael Carpenter (Pct 3, the seat now held by Jim Wolverton) was designated as the applicant’s new point of contact. No public agenda item, public hearing, or public posting referenced the project at any time during these eight weeks.

October 29, 2024 — Executive Session, with the applicant in the room

Two weeks after the in-person Carpenter meeting, Dubel addressed the full Commissioners Court in Executive Session. His follow-up email to County Attorney Steven Tays the next morning is unambiguous:

“Great to meet you yesterday in executive session. I wanted to follow up to schedule a call with you (virtual teams) to go over next steps in this process so I can layout what I spoke with the Commissioners about and see what you need from me to begin, etc. We will share project details, our ask, timeline, etc. Additionally, I am getting a few answers the Commissioners asked about in the interim.”

Texas Government Code §551.087 permits closed-session economic-development negotiations. What it does not permit is deliberation on a matter outside an open meeting. The October 29, 2024 session reads, in Dubel’s own account, as a substantive Q&A in which the applicant pitched the project and the Commissioners asked questions Dubel later promised to answer in writing. The Commissioners Court’s October 29, 2024 minutes (PDF) contain no mention of Palomino Alpha by name; the only line under which this discussion could have been noticed was a generic §551.087 executive-session item.

October 31, 2024 — Engelke says one thing, the file then shows another

Two days later, Engelke wrote Dubel something that, on its face, sounds like a refusal to participate in the back-channel:

“From this point forward I suggest that you communicate with Steven Tays on this…. I will not meet with you outside of Executive session, so the other members of Commissioners Court are present. I thought we gave you good direction on this and to get with Steven Tays to work on the 312…”

View Oct 31, 2024 email

The rest of the file is what makes that line worth quoting. Between the date of that email and February 2026, the FOIA production records 43 separate dated email contacts between Cirrus and Engelke, including the late-October 2025 drafting of the Section 3.08 language and the December 2025 Executive Session coordination described below. Engelke’s October 31 statement appears in the record; the conduct that followed does not match it.

November 7–15, 2024 — the applicant writes the County’s calendar and resolves the Kutscher conflict in three hours

On November 7, 2024, Dubel sent Tays a fully drafted three-option public-hearing schedule, complete with notice deadlines and Commissioners Court dates:

“Three possible dates: Public Notice November 11th… Commissioner Court November 19th. OR Public Notice November 25th… Commissioner Court December 3rd. OR Public Notice December 9th… Commissioner Court December 17th.”

The County’s procedural calendar for the public process was written by the applicant.

On November 14, 2024 at 10:57 a.m., Tays wrote Cirrus back identifying a statutory problem:

“Texas Tax Code §312.402(d) states, ‘property that is located in a reinvestment zone designated by a county under this subchapter and that is owned or leased by a person who is a member of the commissioners court may not be subject to a tax abatement agreement.’ … I believe the conflict of interest portion of the tax code below has to be resolved first.”

He attached Texas Attorney General Opinion GA-0600, which deals with this exact fact pattern.

At 1:18 p.m. the same day — three hours later — Cirrus Senior Manager Tammy Bialek replied with a workaround. The reply contains no statutory citation beyond Tays’s own, no AG opinion, and no independent legal analysis:

“We appreciate your concern about the conflict of interest. Please note that the Judge has already excused himself from opining and voting on the tax abatement. The disqualification of a tax abatement agreement under subsection (d) expressly applies to ‘property… owned or leased by a person who is a member of the commissioners court.’ … The real property improvements that will be subject to the abatement will be owned solely by Palomino Alpha. The Judge has no ownership or interest in any real property improvements that will be subject to the abatement. It appears that this does not create a conflict of interest under Texas Tax Code §312.402(d).”

View Nov 14, 2024 thread

The plain statutory text bars the abatement when the property in the zone is owned by a commissioner. Bialek’s reply reads §312.402(d) as if it bars the abatement only when the abatement-eligible improvements are commissioner-owned — narrowing the statute to a question no one had asked. Tays accepted that reading. The next morning he confirmed the public notice would post the same day: “All good. It will be posted this afternoon.”

The Kutscher family parcels — inside Palomino Alpha Reinvestment Zone #1 from day one — were cleared as a conflict-of-interest issue in a three-hour exchange between the County’s lawyer and the applicant’s tax consultant, in writing.

November 26 to December 17, 2024 — the County Attorney announces, in writing, exactly how the December 17 vote will be choreographed

Between the November 14, 2024 statutory dance and the December 17, 2024 abatement vote, the FOIA file contains a sequence of emails between County Attorney Steven Tays and Cirrus Advisors that read together as a single document. They describe a deliberate plan to use the Commissioners Court’s Executive Sessions to do the substantive work on the abatement, while leaving the public meeting record as the ratification step.

The pattern is visible from the first email of the thread. On November 26, 2024 at 10:46 a.m. — seven days before the December 3, 2024 public hearing on the Reinvestment Zone designation — Tom Dubel wrote both Steven Tays and Commissioner Drew Engelke:

“Commissioner Engelke and Steven, Just a quick note to say I am looking forward to seeing you next Tuesday for the Reinvestment Zone approval and to wish you both a Happy Thanksgiving!”

View Nov 26 – Dec 12, 2024 thread

Dubel did not say “the Reinvestment Zone hearing” or “the consideration of the Reinvestment Zone” or “the vote on the Reinvestment Zone.” He wrote “the Reinvestment Zone approval.” A week before the public hearing, the applicant’s tax-abatement consultant treated the outcome as a known quantity, in writing, to the County Attorney and to a sitting commissioner. Texas Tax Code §312.201 requires that the designation of a reinvestment zone follow a public hearing at which interested persons are entitled to speak and present evidence. The premise of that hearing is that the decision has not yet been made.

That afternoon at 2:54 p.m., Tays replied:

“Please send me a draft tax abatement agreement. I will be meeting with the commissioners in executive session on Tuesday to discuss the terms of the agreement. Following Tuesday’s Court (12/3), we will not have CC until December 17th, which means that next week is the only time to discuss prior to the date of action.”

The December 3, 2024 Commissioners Court meeting was the publicly noticed hearing on the designation of Palomino Alpha Reinvestment Zone #1. Tays’s email reveals that the terms of the tax abatement agreement were going to be deliberated in Executive Session during that same December 3 meeting — under the same agenda item that purported to be about creating the zone.

On December 2, 2024, Tays confirmed: “I am working on this agreement for discussion with the Commissioners during executive session tomorrow.”

On December 9, 2024 — six days after the December 3 Executive Session — Tays acknowledged, in writing to Cirrus, that the agreement’s timeline provisions had been dictated by the commissioners during that closed-door discussion:

“The timeline originally placed in our version of the agreement was done so at the direction given to me by the Commissioners. For draft purposes, it will remain with the timeline included in the draft I sent out Friday. I have noted your requested timeline, and it will be for the commissioners to decide on the 17th.”

A substantive contract term — the construction timeline that drives the abatement schedule — had been settled, by direction of the commissioners, in a meeting noticed for a different purpose, and only the final-form approval was being deferred to the public December 17 meeting.

Texas Government Code §551.087 permits closed-session deliberations about economic-development negotiations — about whether to extend incentives, about what a developer is offering. It does not permit the Court to negotiate the final terms of an agreement, settle “any final details and or changes,” and then exit to a perfunctory public vote. That is deliberation, and deliberation is what the Open Meetings Act requires in open session. Tays’s December 12, 2024 email describes the latter, not the former. The minutes of the December 17, 2024 meeting then record exactly what he predicted.

One further detail from this thread bears noting. The December 6, 2024 draft agreement Tays sent to Cirrus contained no minimum-investment figure and no list of the “kind, number, and location” of proposed improvements — both of which are required by Texas Tax Code §312.205(a). Tays caught it himself in his December 2 email: “I cannot find the kind and number of the proposed improvements listed anywhere in the agreement.” The minimum-investment number that ended up in the executed agreement — $400 million — was added between December 2 and December 17, 2024. The record is silent on who set that number, but the December 9 email confirms the timeline terms were “at the direction given to me by the Commissioners,” with the Executive Session as the venue.

December 4–16, 2025 — brief one Commissioner one-on-one, then “brief the Court in full in Executive Session”

A year later, the same pattern repeats around the upsize from 360 MW to 1 GW+. The Commissioner who would be the subject of the one-on-one briefing had just been seated.

On December 4, 2025 — two days after the appointment — Dubel emailed Engelke:

“Thinking out loud here, would it be appropriate to come to the December 16th Court meeting’s executive session and brief the Court on our updates?”

View Dec 4, 2025 thread

Engelke’s reply the same afternoon, copying Tays:

“I think we need to meet with Commissioner Wolverton to discuss this project in detail first.... If we can achieve this prior to the December 16 CC meeting and Mr. Tays has all the information needed, then I do not see why a discussion with the CC in Executive Session would be an issue.”

On December 5, Dubel:

“if we can brief Commissioner Wolverton next Tuesday (open all day) or Wednesday (9am start), I think I can be prepared to brief the Court in full in Executive Session on December 16th.”

View Dec 5, 2025 email

The plan was executed. On December 8, 2025, Dubel confirmed: “I have scheduled a meeting for tomorrow morning with Commissioner Wolverton, so we should be in good shape.” The same afternoon, Tays added the agenda slot:

“I have added an executive session agenda item for you to address the court.”

View Dec 8, 2025 thread

What this records is a one-on-one private briefing of one commissioner, scheduled in writing and confirmed in writing, expressly so that “the Court in full” can then be briefed in Executive Session — with the County Attorney himself opening the Executive Session agenda item for the applicant to address. The substantive deliberation on the upsize, on the timeline pushback, and on the Section 3.08 power-generation language all happened before any of it appeared on a public agenda.

March 31, 2026 — the same playbook applied to CloudBurst

On March 30, 2026, CloudBurst Co-Founder and Executive Chair Cynthia Thompson emailed Commissioner Engelke about a scheduling concern with the April 7 public hearing on CloudBurst’s Development Agreement. Engelke’s reply the next morning, in writing:

“My recommendation is to bring the proposed development agreement to the Commissioners Court in Executive Session for discussion on April 7th.... and not place on the CC agenda until 4/21 for discussion/consideration.”

View Mar 31, 2026 email

A sitting commissioner coached an applicant, in writing, to hold substantive discussion in Executive Session on the noticed date and postpone public-agenda placement by two weeks. The April 7 Commissioners Court meeting did not take public action on the CloudBurst Development Agreement. The April 21 meeting did. The procedural sequence in between matches Engelke’s email exactly.

April 14, 2026 — the County Attorney acknowledges, in writing, that the procedure raises Open Meetings Act concerns

The day before Cynthia Thompson’s individual emails to three commissioners, the County Attorney sent his own email about the same pending CloudBurst Development Agreement. It is the most explicit OMA-awareness moment in the entire file.

On April 14, 2026 at 3:58 p.m., Steven Tays emailed Cynthia Thompson, Michael Camden (CloudBurst’s tax-abatement consultant at Ryan, LLC), and Court Administrative Assistant Taylor Rogers, attaching a red-lined version of CloudBurst’s Development Agreement seven days before the public vote:

“I have attached a red-lined version of the agreement. Please review and let me know if you have any questions regarding any of the changes. To avoid any open meetings violations and still get this information out as quickly as possible, I BCC all members of the Commissioners Court on this email.”

— Steven Tays, Commissioners Court General Counsel & Assistant County Attorney, to Cynthia Thompson, Michael Camden, and Taylor Rogers, with all five members of the Commissioners Court BCC’d. April 14, 2026. View email

This is the County’s own attorney, in writing, naming “open meetings violations” as the risk he was actively managing — while sending substantive deliberative material (a red-lined draft of an agreement scheduled for vote in seven days) to every member of the Commissioners Court at the same moment.

Does the BCC tactic actually avoid Open Meetings Act concerns? The Texas Attorney General has not opined that BCC’ing a quorum of a governmental body about a matter pending before the body cures an OMA problem. The Act defines a “meeting” as a deliberation between a quorum, or between a quorum and another person, concerning public business (Tex. Govt. Code §551.001(4)). “Deliberation” under the Act includes verbal exchanges, but the AG’s line of opinions on serial communications — Op. JC-0307 (2000), KP-0019 (2015), and related guidance — treats substantive electronic communication to a quorum about a pending matter as potentially within the Act when it tends to harmonize positions or facilitate non-public deliberation. Whether the addressing line says “To,” “Cc,” or “Bcc” goes to whether the recipients can see each other; it does not change the underlying fact that a quorum was simultaneously briefed on substantive material outside an open meeting.

The structural problem the BCC tactic does not solve: if any commissioner reads the redlined agreement, forms a position based on what Tays sent, and arrives at the April 21 public meeting with a view already shaped by a communication that was sent to a quorum simultaneously, the requirement that deliberation occur in open meeting has been functionally compromised. The Act’s purpose is to ensure the public can observe the formation of the position, not just the casting of the vote.

What the April 14 email does establish, beyond dispute, is that the County Attorney was aware OMA concerns existed around how the CloudBurst Development Agreement was being moved through the Court. He named the risk in writing, in a sentence that is now part of the public record. And the conduct of the days that immediately followed — Cynthia Thompson’s individual emails to three commissioners within ten minutes of each other on April 15, Commissioner Wolverton’s one-on-one meetings with Kutscher, Germann, and Ott across April 20–21, and the same Court’s vote to approve on April 21 — all occurred against the backdrop of that acknowledged risk.

April 15, 2026 — three commissioners, three messages, ten minutes

The same morning, between 11:46 and 11:56 a.m. UTC, Thompson sent three nearly-identical individual emails:

11:46 UTC — Thompson to Commissioner Jacqueline Ott (Pct 1). View email

“Good morning Commissioner Ott, I am reaching out to see if you have any questions about the draft development agreement…”

11:52 UTC — Thompson to Commissioner Jim Wolverton (Pct 3). View email

“Good morning Commissioner Wolverton, I wanted to reach out and let you know that I’m am available at any time on my cell, 713-443-7170 or by email to answer any questions or discuss any concerns you may have about the development agreement…”

11:56 UTC — Thompson to Commissioner Stephen Germann (Pct 4). View email

“Good morning Commissioner Germann, I wanted to let you know that I am available at any time to discuss any questions or concerns you may have about the development agreement or project.”

Each closes with the same line: “Look forward to seeing you on Tuesday.” Combined with Thompson’s separate ongoing contacts with Engelke and Kutscher across late March and April, every member of the Commissioners Court was being individually engaged by the applicant about the same matter — in writing, within hours of each other, outside any public meeting. Whether this rises to a violation of Texas Government Code §551.143 (the conspiracy-to-circumvent-OMA provision) depends on what each commissioner did with the contact. The serial-briefings pattern alone meets the threshold for serious inquiry under the line of Texas Attorney General opinions on walking quorums.

April 20–21, 2026 — a walking quorum, in writing, before the meeting

The day before the April 21, 2026 Commissioners Court vote on CloudBurst’s Development Agreement, Cynthia Thompson emailed Commissioner Drew Engelke and CloudBurst COO Alex Gerber. Buried inside the email is the most direct walking-quorum evidence in the entire file. The quote is Thompson’s, recounting a phone conversation she had had with Commissioner Jim Wolverton earlier that day:

The same email shows Commissioner Jacqueline Ott responding directly to Thompson at 1:45 p.m.:

“I can talk this afternoon if you’d like. I will be moving from place to place but if you text my work cell I will call you. 830-401-9375.”

Under Texas Government Code §551.143, knowingly meeting in numbers less than a quorum “for the purpose of secret deliberations” in violation of the Open Meetings Act is criminalized. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals limited §551.143’s criminal application on vagueness grounds in State v. Doyal (2019), but civil voidability of the resulting action under §551.141 remains squarely available — and the unusual feature of this record is that the commissioner’s coordination intent was put in writing by the developer before the meetings even took place.

April 21, 2026 — and after the vote, a question about whether to “withhold” from a Public Information Act request

Less than 24 hours after the CloudBurst Development Agreement vote, a concerned Guadalupe County citizen submitted a Public Information Act request at 7:51 a.m. on April 21, 2026, asking for Commissioner Engelke’s communications with Palomino Alpha, LLC, Yarrington Land Holdings, LLC, and/or Matt Hainline from October 2024 to present.

The internal County response is its own document.

At 9:26 a.m., Assistant County Attorney — Civil Division Patton Zárate wrote to Engelke (cc’ing County Counsel Steven Tays):

“… do you have anything responsive to the request and, if so, is there anything that you want to withhold? If we disclose, we should ask the requestor to agree to the redaction of the email addresses used to communicate with you.”

View Apr 21, 2026 email

At 12:57 p.m., after a brief side-thread identifying who the staff CC’d on the request was, Zárate followed up:

“Taylor doesn’t need to answer individually. I would say that the entity responsible would be Commissioner Engelke’s Office. Do we want to withhold or release? Judge Kutscher has received an identical request.”

At 2:49 p.m., Engelke replied:

“I would like to visit with you on this at some point this week… What is your availability the remainder of the week?”

View Apr 21, 2026 Engelke reply

A sitting commissioner declined, in writing, to put his answer about what to withhold from a Public Information Act request into email — and asked to discuss it in person instead.

The structural concern is what the in-person meeting Engelke proposed was for. The PIA exists precisely so that decisions like “what to release” are made under a written, reviewable process. Moving that decision into an undocumented conversation defeats the design of the statute. And the Zárate email itself confirms that Judge Kutscher received an identical request — meaning the same calculation about what to release or withhold was, at minimum, contemplated for two members of the Commissioners Court simultaneously.

What the cumulative pattern shows

Three commissioners were in documented private contact with the applicant’s tax-abatement specialist eight weeks before Palomino Alpha appeared on a public agenda. The applicant addressed the full Commissioners Court in Executive Session two weeks before Resolution 11122024-7E was adopted publicly. The applicant drafted the County’s three-option public-hearing schedule. The applicant’s senior manager wrote the §312.402(d) conflict-of-interest analysis the County’s attorney then accepted in writing. The County’s own attorney announced, in writing five days in advance, that the December 17 abatement vote would be choreographed as an Executive Session deliberation followed by a public ratification — and the minutes record exactly that sequence. A year later, a one-on-one briefing of a fourth commissioner was scheduled in writing so that “the Court in full” could be briefed in Executive Session. The County Attorney opened the Executive Session agenda slot for the applicant. The same procedural template was then offered, in writing, to CloudBurst — and the CloudBurst Executive Chair contacted every member of the Commissioners Court individually within a single 10-minute window the day before the matter went to public deliberation.

None of these are inferences. Each is a dated document in the file. What the documents do not tell us — what the public record cannot tell us — is what was said in the private meetings, on the personal-phone text channels, or in the Executive Sessions themselves. What the documents tell us is that, by the time any of this reached the public meeting, it had already been resolved.