Buying Land in Hood County, Texas

A named exception to Texas's no-zoning rule -- built around one lake

The state hub notes that Texas Local Government Code Chapter 231 carves out a short list of named exceptions to the rule that counties can't zone -- Hood County is one of them. Subchapter K, added by the Legislature in 1999, declares all of unincorporated Hood County a "watershed" whose water quality and quantity the Commissioners Court is responsible for protecting, specifically because it feeds Lake Granbury and the Brazos River, and it authorizes the county to adopt development regulations and establish development districts to do that. That's real, current, checkable authority -- not a hypothetical -- and it sits well outside what a typical rural Texas county can do under the state's general no-zoning baseline. See the standalone zoning page for how this authority actually gets used and what it has (and hasn't) meant for a recent, high-profile test.

That authority just got tested by a wave of data center proposals

In early 2026, seven large data center concept plans arrived in Hood County at roughly the same time -- an eighth was annexed into the City of Granbury before submitting plans of its own -- most of them omitting basic water- and power-use estimates, and one, a 2,100-acre project referred to locally as "Comanche Circle," proposing its own on-site water treatment and power generation. Given the county's Subchapter K watershed-protection mandate, this looked like exactly the situation that authority was written for. Instead, the Commissioners Court twice voted down a proposed countywide development moratorium -- on February 10 and again on February 25, 2026 -- and the second time asked the Texas Attorney General for a formal opinion on whether the county has the legal authority to pause development at all; county legal counsel's own read, given publicly at the time, was no.

CORRECTED 2026-09: on the specific Comanche Circle project, the Commissioners Court did use its concept-plan review authority in January 2026, granting conditional approval that required the developer to complete traffic-impact and water-use studies before proceeding further. That leverage did not hold, though: after the developer threatened legal action (citing a neighboring county's roughly $100 million lawsuit exposure over a similar data-center moratorium challenge), the Commissioners Court voted 3-1 in June 2026 to approve the project without those conditions. The project has since moved to the site-development-plan stage, with construction targeted by the end of 2026 and operation planned for 2028.

For a buyer, the practical upshot is that Hood County's Subchapter K watershed authority and its demonstrated willingness to hold firm on conditions against a specific large development are two different things: the county used its concept-plan leverage once, then gave it up when the developer pushed back. Confirm directly with the county whether any adopted development-district regulations apply to a specific parcel, and separately ask about the status of any other pending large industrial or data center project nearby, since the underlying moratorium-authority question the county put to the Attorney General remains unresolved even though Comanche Circle itself has moved forward. See the standalone zoning page for the full timeline.

Groundwater and septic: a shared four-county district, and the county runs its own septic program

Hood County's groundwater is regulated by the Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District, whose jurisdiction also covers Wise, Parker, and Montague Counties -- confirm current well-permit and spacing rules directly with the district before counting on a specific yield. Separately, Hood County is a confirmed TCEQ authorized agent for on-site sewage facilities: its Environmental Health Department processes OSSF permits and inspections directly and publishes its own lists of licensed installers and certified maintenance providers, rather than routing applications through a TCEQ regional office.