Jackson County, AL Zoning: No Ordinance, and a Coal Plant Turned Data Center

Jackson County's zoning code has always been an empty placeholder -- the county has no zoning ordinance and does not require building permits outside Scottsboro, Bridgeport, Stevenson, or its other towns. That absence of a zoning process is part of the real story behind one of the county's largest land-use transformations: Google's conversion of a retired TVA coal-fired power plant into a data center, with no zoning hearing required to build it.

This page covers what's specific to Jackson County. For the general explanation, see the national guide.

No zoning ordinance, confirmed directly

Jackson County's zoning article in the Code of Alabama (Title 45, Chapter 36, Article 26) carries Section 45-36-260 marked "Reserved" -- the same empty-placeholder pattern found across most Alabama counties without a specific legislative local act granting zoning authority. The county's own site confirms this directly rather than leaving it to inference: Jackson County currently has no zoning ordinance and does not require a building permit for unincorporated land, except where a parcel falls inside the jurisdiction of a municipality (Scottsboro, Bridgeport, Stevenson, and the county's smaller towns each maintain their own separate zoning and permitting). For an unincorporated Jackson County parcel, that means no zoning district, no use classification, and no building-permit review from the county itself applies by default -- confirm directly with the Jackson County Commission whether that has changed, and separately confirm municipal boundaries before assuming a specific parcel is unincorporated.

That absence of a zoning or building-permit gate is not just a technicality for small residential or agricultural parcels -- it is also the regulatory backdrop against which the county's single largest recent industrial land-use conversion took place, described below.

A retired coal plant becomes a Google data center, with no zoning hearing in the way

In 2016, Google announced it would build a data center -- at the time, only the 14th in its global network -- on land adjoining the Tennessee Valley Authority's Widows Creek Fossil Plant near Stevenson, in northern Jackson County. TVA had decommissioned the roughly 60-year-old coal-fired plant in 2015, and Google's decision to build on a 320-to-360-acre site next to the retired plant, rather than on undeveloped land, was explicitly framed around repurposing existing industrial infrastructure and the site's access to TVA's transmission grid. Google's initial investment was reported at $600 million, with construction beginning in 2018 and the facility creating an initial 75 to 100 jobs; Google's own data center locations page lists Jackson County, Alabama as an active site, operating on renewable energy since coming online. This was a genuine industrial mega-project sited on unincorporated Jackson County land, and because the county has no zoning ordinance, it proceeded without a zoning-district determination or a board-of-adjustment variance process of the kind a project this size would trigger in almost any zoned U.S. county.

This is not a closed, historical story. Search-indexed coverage of a Google announcement dated June 2026 describes a further $1.5 billion investment planned for 2026 and 2027 to expand the Jackson County data center campus -- on top of the original 2016-2018 investment -- with Google's own materials describing community-fund and infrastructure commitments tied to the expansion. This session's network access to Google's own blog post announcing that expansion was blocked by this research environment's egress proxy, so the $1.5 billion figure and its exact scope should be treated as a search-indexed summary rather than an independently verified read of Google's primary announcement -- confirm the current scope and timeline directly with Google's public affairs team or the Jackson County Commission before relying on it for a specific decision.

What this means for land near the Widows Creek site, and elsewhere in the county

For a buyer evaluating land near Stevenson or the broader Widows Creek/Nickajack area, the practical takeaway is twofold. First, a project of Google's scale can arrive in Jackson County without the zoning-hearing paper trail (staff reports, public notice of a rezoning request, a board-of-adjustment record) that a buyer might expect to search for in a zoned county -- so don't assume the absence of a zoning case file means no major industrial development is planned or underway nearby; check directly with the county and with TVA, which still owns or has an interest in adjoining transmission and former plant infrastructure. Second, a large, continuing employer and taxpayer of this scale can measurably affect local infrastructure, workforce housing demand, and land values in the surrounding area even without a formal land-use planning process driving that change -- worth factoring into a purchase decision the same way a buyer would weigh a new zoned industrial park in another state.

Everywhere else in the county, the underlying rule stays simple: no zoning ordinance, no building-permit requirement outside a municipality, and (per the county's own current septic and general land-use guidance) county-level land-use control running through narrower mechanisms rather than a comprehensive zoning code. If a specific unincorporated parcel is being marketed with a reference to an existing industrial, commercial, or planned-development approval, ask the Jackson County Commission directly what process (if any) actually governed that approval, since it will not be a standard zoning case in the way it would be almost anywhere else.

Zoning in Jackson County, Alabama: No Ordinance, and What Filled the Gap

No zoning ordinance, confirmed directly

A retired coal plant becomes a Google data center, with no zoning hearing in the way

What this means for land near the Widows Creek site, and elsewhere in the county

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