Dear Coalition supporters,
If you feel like this is a game of high stakes whack-a-mole, you are correct.
Not ONLY is the Planning Office, at the direction of the Board of Supervisors, considering data center proliferation throughout the Occoquan Watershed AND adjacent to National Parks, we are ALSO faced with data center development outside the official data center overlay district on the edge of the Town of Haymarket.
All of this coming from the adopted philosophy of data centers everywhere and anywhere in the Gainesville District, as well as along Vint Hill Road in the Brentsville District. This is the WORST groundhog day movie ever!
There are THREE massive data center complexes targeted for the intersection of 55/Catharpin!
The first data center campus was approved by the Board a few months ago, in spite of the Coalition’s very clear warning. The second data center campus has been moved on to the Board of Supervisors after the Planning Commission refused to vote either up, or down. Commissioner Rick Berry described his concern about this second proposal very eloquently:
On Monday, the county’s deputy planning director, Meika Daus, said the proposal, dubbed the I-66 and U.S. 29 Technology Park, will move forward on a technicality.
“Since the Planning Commission did not provide an action within its required timeframe, the proposal can move forward to a public hearing with the Board of County Supervisors with a statutory recommendation of approval from the Planning Commission pursuant to applicable provisions in the Zoning Ordinance and Virginia state code,” she said.
Berry asked the rest of the commissioners to deny the proposal on the basis that the consultant the Board of Supervisors hired in May to study areas targeted for data center development had not yet finished its work.
“I do not think we should rush a decision without the benefits of any conclusions from this study, especially when we are considering a project that’s close to 3 million square feet,” he said. “We need to let the study play out, so we can learn not just where the data centers may be built, but how they are built and how they may impact the county for the next 25, 50 or 75 years.”
The third data center proposal is coming before the Planning Commission this Wednesday, November 3 at 7:00 pm at the McCoart Building.
In the past several weeks, with an unexpected and abrupt immediate resignation, we have lost our new Planning Director. Our experienced Planning Commissioner Chair has stepped down, and we will be losing our County Executive in December to retirement.
Who is in charge with any institutional knowledge?
The three applications being proposed outside the overlay district, on 55/catharpin, total 4.6 MILLION sq. ft. of proposed data center development. To put that into perspective, the Amazon Campus, 2 miles down the road on the other side of Haymarket, includes 3 buildings built out at 450,000 sq. ft. The amount of electricity needed just for the Amazon complex required a double 230kv transmission line and one substation.
You do the math. The newly created industrial intersection is TEN TIMES the expected size of the Amazon Haymarket Campus.
In February of 2020 the Coalition met with Dominion Energy to discuss these new applications. Here are the facts:
There will be a new transmission line needed. There will be at least 2 substations required, if not 3, for their power demands.
What makes these proposals worse is the fact that, with the Amazon Haymarket extension cord, the County and Planning Office had no idea what that meant to the community, or the chaos that would ensue.
But now they know.
We expect them to look at this impending community crisis in the face, and say NO, we will not repeat those same mistakes.
Tell the Commissioners, Staff, and Board of Supervisors that the game is up. The truth cannot be ignored. Stop choosing developers and land speculators over the quality of life of the citizens that live here.
Register here, by 5 PM tomorrow Tuesday, to speak remotely during the 7 PM Wednesday Public Hearing on the John Marshall Commons Tech Park data center complex, if you can’t show up in person at the McCoart Building.
For reference sake, below is a screen shot of the map presented by Dominion Energy in that Feb. 2020 zoom call. The three green dots are the proposed data center complex sites. The line with the star on it is a mock up of the randomly sited new transmission line.
Additional information:
Math for Dummies, Err, The Economic Development and Planning Departments